The presence of noise in compliance times may have a critical impact on the selection of new technological standards. A technically superior standard is not necessarily viable because an arbitrarily small amount of noise may render coordination on that standard impossible. The criterion for the...

A decision maker needs to schedule several activities that take uncertain time to complete and are only valuable together. Some activities are bound to be finished earlier than others, thus incurring waiting costs. We show how to schedule activities optimally, how to give independent agents...