A supplier of multicast information services will often be faced with the following problem: Broadcasting to the whole customer base (including non-paying customers) is cheaper than multicasting only to the paying customers. However, broadcasting discourages potential customers from paying. The...

Consider the class of discrete time, general state space Markov chains which satisfy a "uniform ergodicity under sampling" condition. There are many ways to quantify the notion of "mixing time", i.e., time to approach stationarity from a worst initial state. We prove results asserting...