In several disciplines, as diverse as shape analysis, location theory, quality control, archaeology, and psychometrics, it can be of interest to fit a circle through a set of points. We use the result that it suffices to locate a center for which the variance of the distances from the center to...

Railway operations are disrupted frequently, e.g. the Dutch railway network experiences about three large disruptions per day on average. In such a disrupted situation railway operators need to quickly adjust their resource schedules. Nowadays, the timetable, the rolling stock and the crew...

Basic innovations are often believed to be the drivers of economic growth. It has been widely documented that economic growth follows cyclical patterns of varying length. In this paper we examine if such patterns are also present in basic innovations. For an annual time series of count data...

This article investigates whether changes in oceanographic conditions can be filtered out to measure their effect of the overall safety level of ships. The article is based on a unique dataset of 3.2 million observations from 20,729 individual vessels for the time period 1979 to 2007 in the...

In this paper we study the retirement saving problem from the point of view of a plan sponsor, who makes contribution payments for the future retirement of an employee. The plan sponsor considers the employee's labor income as investment-benchmark in order to ensure the continuation of...

Under mild conditions on the distribution functionF, we analyze the asymptotic behavior in expectation of the smallest order statistic, both for the case thatF is defined on (–, +) and for the case thatF is defined on (0, ). These results yield asymptotic estimates of the expected optiml...

This paper examines the algorithms proposed in the literature for finding good critical level policies in the (S-1,S) lost sales inventory model with multiple demand classes. Our main result is that we establish guaranteed optimality for two of these algorithms. This result is extended to...

We present a new approximation algorithm for the two-dimensional bin-packing problem. The algorithm is based on two one-dimensional bin-packing algorithms. Since the algorithm is of next-fit type it can also be used for those cases where the output is required to be on-line (e. g. if we open an...

In the distributive sorting method of Dobosiewicz, both the interval between the minimum and the median of the numbers to be sorted and the interval between the median and the maximum are partitioned inton/2 subintervals of equal length; the procedure is then applied recursively on each...

We establish the relationships between certain Bayesian and classical approaches to instrumental variable regression. We determine the form of priors that lead to posteriors for structural parameters that have similar properties as classical 2SLS and LIML and in doing so provide some new insight...