Economics Insights @ CBS

We consider a setting where a firm delegates an investment decision and, subsequently, a sales decision to a privately informed manager. For both decisions corporate income taxes have real effects. We show that compensating the manager based on pre-tax residual income can ensure after-tax NPV-maximization ("goal congruence") for each decision problem in isolation. However, this metric fails if both decisions are nontrivial, since it requires asset-specific hurdle rates and hence precludes asset aggregation.

This paper considers pricing and capacity sizing decisions, in a single-class Markovian model motivated by communication and information services. The service provider is assumed to operate a finite set of processing resources that can be shared among users; however, this shared mode of operation results in a service-rate degradation. Users, in turn, are sensitive to the delay implied by the potential degradation in service rate, and to the usage fee charged for accessing the system.

We consider a two-echelon distribution system in which a supplier distributes a product to N competing retailers. The demand rate of each retailer depends on all of the retailers' prices, or alternatively, the price each retailer can charge for its product depends on the sales volumes targeted by all of the retailers. The supplier replenishes his inventory through orders (purchases, production runs) from an outside source with ample supply. From there, the goods are transferred to the retailers.

The Pfaat protein family alignment annotation tool is a Java-based multiple sequence alignment editor and viewer designed for protein family analysis. The application merges display features such as dendrograms, secondary and tertiary protein structure with SRS retrieval, subgroup comparison, and extensive user-annotation capabilities.