Economics Insights @ CBS

Many queueing situations such as computer, communications and emergency systems have the feature that customers may require service from several servers at the same time. They may thus be delayed until the required number of servers is avialable and servers may be idle when customers are waiting. We consider general server-completion-time distributions and derive approximation methods for the computation of the steady-state distribution of the number of customers in queue as well as the moments of the waiting-time distribution. Extensive computational results are reported.

We develop two efficient procedures for generating cost allocation vectors in the core of a minimum cost spanning tree (m.c.s.t.) game. The first procedure requires O(n 2) elementary operations to obtain each additional point in the core, wheren is the number of users. The efficiency of the second procedure, which is a natural strengthening of the first procedure, stems from the special structure of minimum excess coalitions in the core of an m.c.s.t. game.

This paper attempts to contribute to two rapidly growing branches in economic theory: asset pricing and “overlapping generations” models. The model is formulated and it is shown that equilibrium prices exist, and some of their properties are discussed. Then the model is applied to an asymmetric information environment to see if randomness in the number of informed agents could confuse the uninformed. Surprisingly, it could not.

This paper presents a successive approximation method for solving systems of nested functional equations which arise, e.g., when considering Markov renewal programs in which policies that are maximal gain or optimal under more selective discount — and average overtaking optimality criteria are to be found. In particular, a successive approximation method is given to find the optimal bias vector and bias-optimal policies. Applications with respect to a number of additional stochastic control models are pointed out.