Considering several main types of dynamic contests (the race, the tug-of-war, elimination contests and iterated incumbency fights) we identify a common pattern: the discouragement effect. This effect explains why the sum of rentseeking efforts often falls considerably short of the prize that is...

The Capacitated Facility Location Problem (CFLP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem with applications in distribution and production planning. A variety of lower bounds based on Lagrangean relaxation and subgradient optimization has been proposed for this problem. However, in...

A batch sequencing model with sequence-dependent setup-times and -costs is used to compare modelling and solving with two different general solvers. "Conceptual models" are implemented in the constraint propagation / logic programming language CHARME and solved with the PROLOG inference engine....

Two phases can be distinguished in academic course scheduling: In phase one lectures have to be assigned to professors, whereas in phase two the lectures have to be scheduled. Here we assume that the lectures are already assigned to professors, i.e. the first phase has been done. For the second...

We consider an extension of the classical resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), which covers discrete resource-resource and time-resource tradeoffs. As a result a project scheduler is permitted to identify several alternatives or modes of accomplishment for each activity of...

The seminal paper by Salant, Switzer and Reynolds (1983) showed that merger in a standard Cournot framework with linear demand and linear costs is not profitable unless a large majority of the firms are involved in the merger. However, many strategic aspects matter for firm competition such as...

We characterize the equilibrium of the all-pay auction with general convex cost of effort and sequential effort choices. We consider a set of n players who are arbitrarily partitioned into a group of players who choose their efforts ?early? and a group of players who choose ?late?. Only the...

This paper addresses an airport gate assignment problem with multiple objectives. The objectives are to minimize the number of ungated flights and the total passenger walking distances or connection times as well as to maximize the total gate assignment preferences. The problem examined is an...