If civil war is a contest for popular support, why would a government ever embark on a policy of disproportionate force and mass killing? The logic of civilian defection expects such an approach to easily backfire, as civilians respond to massive losses by opposing the side that inflicted them....

A seller sets up an advertising policy so as to maximize a flow of discounted utility over time in a scenario characterized by two essential issues. First, the seller is ignorant from the outset of the prospective customers' willingness to buy and runs a Bayesian learning process in parallel to...

We consider a two-stage serial supply chain with capacity limits, where each installation is operated by managers attempting to minimize their own costs. A multiple-period model is necessitated by the multiple stages, capacity limits, stochastic demand, and the explicit consideration of...

This paper develops tools for analyzing properties of stochastic objective functions which take the form (formula). The paper analyzes the relationship between properties of the primitive functions, such as utility functions u and probability distributions F, and properties of the stochastic...

Consider the set of probability measures on a product space with the property that all have the same marginal distributions on the coordinate spaces. This set may be viewed as a correspondence, when the marginal distributions are varied. Here, it is shown that this correspondence is continuous....

Acyclic digraphs arise in many natural and artificial processes. Among the broader set, dynamic citation networks represent a substantively important form of acyclic digraphs. For example, the study of such networks includes the spread of ideas through academic citations, the spread of...

There are fundamental differences between citation networks and other classes of graphs. In particular, given that citation networks are directed and acyclic, methods developed primarily for use with undirected social network data may face obstacles. This is particularly true for the dynamic...

We study investment and disinvestment decisions in situations where there is a time lag 0 from the time t when the decision is taken to the time when the decision is implemented. Applying the probabilistic approach to the combined entry and exit decisions under the Parisian implementation delay,...

We show that if performance measures in a stochastic scheduling problem satisfy a set of so-called partial conservation laws (PCL), which extend previously studied generalized conservation laws (GCL), then the problem is solved optimally by a priority-index policy for an appropriate range of...

We address the problem of scheduling a multiclass "M/M/m" queue with Bernoulli feedback on "m" parallel servers to minimize time-average linear holding costs. We analyze the performance of a heuristic priority-index rule, which extends Klimov's optimal solution to the single-server case: servers...