Suchergebnisse

This paper analyzes how imperfections of property rights affect allocation of assets and welfare, using micro-survey data from Bulgaria. Co-ownership of assets is widespread in many countries due to inheritance. Central and Eastern Europe offers an interesting natural experiment to assess the effects of such rights imperfections because of the asset restitution process in the 1990s. Bulgaria is particularly interesting because of the prominence of the co-ownership problem (about half of all land plots are co-owned), because of the strong fragmentation of land, and because of legislation providing an instrument to separate out chosen (endogenous) versus forced (exogenous) firms of co-ownership. We find that land in co-ownership is much more likely to be used by less efficient firm organizations or to be left abandoned, and that it leads to significant welfare losses.

Scheduling and resource allocation to optimize performance criteria in multi-cluster heterogeneous environments is known as an NP-hard problem, not only for the resource heterogeneity, but also for the possibility of applying co-allocation to take advantage of idle resources across clusters. A common practice is to use basic heuristics to attempt to optimize some performance criteria by treating the jobs in the waiting queue individually. More recent works proposed new optimization strategies based on Linear Programming techniques dealing with the scheduling of multiple jobs simultaneously. However, the time cost of these techniques makes them impractical for large-scale environments. Population-based meta-heuristics have proved their effectiveness for finding the optimal schedules in large-scale distributed environments with high resource diversification and large numbers of jobs in the batches. The algorithm proposed in the present work packages the jobs in the batch to obtain better optimization opportunities. It includes a multi-objective function to optimize not only the Makespan of the batches but also the Flowtime, thus ensuring a certain level of QoS from the users' point of view. The algorithm also incorporates heterogeneity and bandwidth awareness issues, and is useful for scheduling jobs in large-scale heterogeneous environments. The proposed meta-heuristic was evaluated with a real workload trace. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, providing solutions that improve the performance with respect to other well-known techniques in the literature. ; This work was supported by the Government of Spain under contract TIN2011-28689-C02-02 and the CUR of DIUE of GENCAT and the European Social Fund.

The Maori tribe of New Zealand and the tribes of western Washington are both subject to quota systems as a result of their treaty rights to fish. While New Zealand's quota system was legislatively imposed, western Washington's was judicially imposed. Nevertheless, the two quota systems are quite similar in that both permit approximately half the allowable catch of fish each year to go to the tribes. However, that amount does not adequately represent what the tribes are entitled to based on their treaty rights. Colonization, over-fishing, and resource deterioration have decreased the amount of fish available to the fishing population as a whole (including commercial fishermen), making it impossible for the tribes to rely on their traditional livelihood. While both tribes have been somewhat involved in co-management plans with their governments, these co-management plans are insufficient. New Zealand and the United States desperately need to adopt legislation setting forth more extensive co-management plans wherein the co-managers are required to cooperate with one another and are prohibited from making unilateral decisions. Such legislation would lead to an improved environment with more available fish to sustain the livelihoods of the tribes as well as that of the commercial fisherman.

Some basics -- Trees -- Cycles -- General networks -- Allocation in decentralized networks -- Efficient implementation