This article first constructs a theoretical model of land use by swidden cultivators when these cultivators can choose whether to grow a cash crop or a food/subsistence crop. Second, it studies the land quality accumulation decision faced by shifting cultivators and, in the process, it shows how...

Herding is an integral part of ranch operations in contemporary times. An aspect of herding that has received scant attention in the literature concerns the pros and cons of searching for livestock animals that have wandered away from a pasture and are hence missing from this pasture. Under what...

Recently, Batabyal proposed an unconventional population control policy that is sensitive to the cultural desire for male progeny in many Asian nations. Although the proposed policy is culturally sensitive, a potential problem with this policy is that the aggregate size of the national...

It is now common for parents and relatives of an individual seeking to have an arranged marriage to set up one or more meetings between this individual and prospective spouses. As a result of these meetings, prospective spouses get exposed to this marrying individual. Even though this exposure...

Regulations specify the maximum amount of waste that can be stored on site by a waste generating firm. When this regulatory threshold is reached, a polluting firm must move its on site waste to an off site recipient. In this setting, we analyse two questions in a stochastic framework from the...

Recently, Batabyal and Yoo (2004) have used a queuing model with two types of citizens (high and low opportunity cost of time) to compute mean wait times in queue for the so called non-preemptive corruption regime. The purpose of this note is to extend the Batabyal and Yoo (2004) analysis....

A long-standing question in range management concerns the relative importance of the stocking rate versus the length of time during which animals graze a particular rangeland. Recently, Batabyal and co-workers provided a theoretical answer to this question. Given the importance of this question...

In a recent paper, Batabyal (Theory and Decision, 1997) has analysed the decision making process in arranged marriages. In particular, Batabyal shows that a marrying agent's optimal policy depends only on the nature of the current marriage proposal, independent of whether there is recall of...

The sizeable literature on extinction in economics has paid scant attention to the problem of constructing measures of species extinction. Moreover, this literature has not studied the question of species extinction in stochastic systems that are jointly determined. Consequently, the objective...

Batabyal and Beladi (2004) have used a game model to study trade in a renewable resource between a single buyer and a single seller. The buyer uses a unit tariff to obliquely encourage conservation of the renewable resource and the entire harvest from the resource is exported to the importing...