Drum–Buffer–Rope is a theory of constraints production planning methodology that operates by developing a schedule for the system’s first bottleneck. The first bottleneck is the bottleneck with the highest utilization. In the theory of constraints, any job that is not processed at the first bottleneck is referred to as a free good. Free goods do not use capacity at the first bottleneck, so very...

We study the impact of restrictions on trade in used goods between countries in the presence of a monopolistic seller that sells in two different national markets. Contrasting with the non-durable good case, free trade in used goods may be optimal for the firm. We provide a characterization of how movements towards trade liberalization, when implemented with a quota, will affect equilibrium out...

Various types of ‘bubbles’, e.g. stock market, housing, dot.com, high-tech, historically, are commonlyobserved phenomena in complex systems. Yet, their emergence often surprises people who remain unaware of history or their systemic roots. Bubbles are often considered to be simply the product of unwise speculative investments or social mania. Alternatively, conventional economic theories often ...

We study the envy-free allocation of indivisible goods between two players. Our novel setting includes an option to sell each good for a fraction of the minimum value any player has for the good. To rigorously quantify the efficiency gain from selling, we reason about the price of envy-freeness of allocations of sellable goods — the ratio between the maximum social welfare and the social welfar...

We prove existence of envy-free allocations in markets with heterogenous indivisible goods and money, when a given quantity is supplied from each of the goods and agents have unit demands. We depart from most of the previous literature by allowing agents’ preferences over the goods to depend on the entire vector of prices. Our proof uses Shapley’s K-K-M-S theorem and Hall’s marriage lemma. We t...

Traditional incentive-compatible auctions for selling multiple goods to unconstrained and budgeted bidders can discriminate between bidders by selling identical goods at different prices. For this reason, A recent study by Feldman et al. dropped incentive compatibility and turned the attention to revenue maximizing envy-free item-pricing allocations for budgeted bidders. Envy-free allocations w...

Free sampling of information goods has become a common business practice in expectation of reducing consumers’ uncertainty of product quality and helping product diffusion, yet receiving limited investigation of how consumers process free sampling and online word-of-mouth (WOM) and its consequences on retail sales. In this research, we examine the impact of free sampling of information goods on...

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