Decision Making & Negotiations

I construct an intertemporal model in which investors trade shares of a firm. All trading is done through competitive market makers. After the initial period and before the end of the planning horizon, information is asymmetrically distributed among traders, and the prices for investors who buy shares are higher than for those who sell shares. The presence of this deviation from the Walrasian paradigm notwithstanding, dividend policy does not affect the initial period's share price or shareholders' welfare. This result is robust to various extensions of the model.

Our cities are on the move again. Pioneering observers of the urban landscape Bernard Frieden and Lynn Sagalyn delve into the inner workings of the new public entrepreneurship and public private partnerships that have revitalized the downtowns of such cities as Boston, San Diego, Seattle, St. Paul, and Pasadena. They bring a unique combination of political and economic expertise to their analysis of this hot new marketplace, depicting a generation of mayors and administrators who differ in style from their predecessors and who have a more informed relationship with developers.

We consider a single-server queueing system with Poisson arrivals and general service times. While the server is up, it is subject to breakdowns according to a Poisson process. When the server breaks down, we may either repair the server immediately or postpone the repair until some future point in time. The operating costs to the system include customer holding costs, repair costs and running costs. The objective is to find a corrective maintenance policy which minimizes the long-run average operating costs of the system. The problem is formulated as a semi-Markov decision process.

This paper is motivated by two facts: failure of log-linear empirical exchange rate models of the 1970's and the observed variability of risk premiums in the forward market. Rational maximizing models predict that changes in conditional variances of monetary policies, government spendings, and income growths affect risk premiums and induce conditional volatility of exchange rates.

This paper describes efforts to validate a multiple car dispatch queueing (MCD) model of police patrol operations using New York City data. The MCD model was designed for use in a computer system that has been disseminated to many police departments in the U.S. to help planners allocate patrol cars among precincts. It has also been used to evalute specific changes in patrol policy in New York. We define validation as a series of hierarchical procedures ranging from tests of mathematical correctness to evaluations of model robustness.