Many pre-hispanic languages in Mexico, including the Zapotec language, are faced with the real possibility of extinction in the near future. There are many reasons for this, such as the younger indigenous populations who prefer to speak Spanish instead and a dwindling number of older native speakers. This means that often there is a loss of information about the language's correct pronunciation...

Many of the social policy challenges facing the modern welfare state are long-term in nature, particularly the threats to future fiscal sustainability caused by population ageing. In such an environment, dynamic population microsimulation models provide one of the most useful available modelling tools for projecting the likely future distributional consequences of possible policy changes. Howev...

Recombination plays an important role in shaping the genetic variations present in current-day populations. We consider populations evolved from a small number of founders, where each individual’s genomic sequence is composed of segments from the founders. We study the problem of segmenting the genotype sequences into the minimum number of segments attributable to the founder sequences. The min...

In this paper, we investigate the impact on aggregate regional utility as a result of both exogenous growth and endogenous growth in a spatial system. We will first analyze the case of two closed regions, followed by the case of two open regions. The main instrument used in our approach to study the changes in collective regional welfare is Dynamic Programming. The traditional exogenous Solow g...

We study simulations of populations of agents participating in sequences of overlapping English auctions, using three different bidding algorithms. We measure various parameters of the agents’ success, to determine qualities of the underlying bidding algorithms. In particular, we show that a Dynamic Programming approach, in which beliefs regarding the opposition the agent is likely to face are ...

A major limitation in applying the tools of dynamic programming to many economic problems has been the lack of a general theory for the case where returns are unbounded. Except for a few special cases where closed form solutions are available (linear-quadratic models and the log-Cobb Douglas growth model being the leading examples), recursive methods have not been useful. Here we establish that...