Within the independent private-values paradigm, we derive the data-generating process of the winning bid for the last unit sold at multi-unit, sequential English auctions when bidder valuations are draws from different distributions; i.e., in the presence of asymmetries. When the identity of the...

A number of combinatorial problems of interest to computational economists, such as some two-sided matching problems, belong to the complexity class NP. The best known solutions to these problems require exponential computation time in the size of the input, and are intractable in practice...

In many dynamic programming problems, a mix of state variables exists - some exhibiting stochastic cycles and others having deterministic cycles. We derive a formula for the value function in infinite-horizon, stationary, Markovian decision problems by exploiting a special partitioned-circulant...

We construct a model of rent-maximizing behaviour by a single seller of timber in the absence of a formal market, deriving the stochastic implications of rent maximization for timber prices (stumpage rates) when other input and output (lumber) prices are random. Subsequently, we examine the...

Governments often sell the right to harvest timber on public land. If timber is of heterogeneous quality and timber pri ces reflect this heterogeneity, then charging a fixed stumpage rate per cubic meter of timber harvested independent of timber quality can induce the economically inefficient...

Previous researchers have modelled the decision to accept a donor organ for transplantation as a Markov decision problem, the solution to which is often a control-limit optimal policy: accept any organ whose match quality exceeds some health-dependent threshold; otherwise, wait for another. When...

Previous researchers have modelled the decision to accept a donor organ for transplantation as a Markov decision problem, the solution to which is often a control-limit optimal policy: accept any organ whose match quality exceeds some health-dependent threshold; otherwise, wait for another. When...

We construct a stochastic dynamic programming model as the basis of an empirical framework within which to examine the effects of different sequences of work and rest on the daily productivity of workers who planted trees in the province of British Columbia, Canada, comparing the intertemporal...

Using a clock model of a multi-unit, oral, ascending-price auction, within the commonvalue paradigm, we analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the transaction price as the number of bidders gets large. We find that even though the transaction price is determined by a (potentially small) fraction of...