Suchergebnisse

In this paper we study marriage formation through a two-sided secretary problem approach. We consider individuals with nontransferable utility and two different dimensions of heterogeneity, a characteristic evaluated according to the idiosyncratic preferences of potential partners, and an universally-rankable characteristic. There are two possible states of the world, one in which people meet their partner randomly, and one in which the meeting occurs between individuals with similar characteristics. We show that individuals with higher universal characteristic tend to be more picky in their marriage hunting. This does not necessarily mean that they marry later than other individuals, since the higher expected quality of their potential partners in the assortative meeting state can make them marry earlier than individuals with a lower universal characteristic.

AbstractIn this paper we address the problem of how to decide when to terminate the testing/modification process and to release the software during the development phase. We present a Bayesian decision theoretic approach by formulating the optimal release problem as a sequential decision problem. By using a non‐Gaussian Kalman filter type model, proposed by Chen and Singpurwalla (1994), to track software reliability, we are able to obtain tractable expressions for inference and determine a one‐stage look ahead stopping rule under reasonable conditions and a class of loss functions. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003

AbstractThis paper explores a multi-player game of optimal stopping over a finite time horizon. A player wins by retaining a higher value than her competitors do, from a series of independent draws. In our game, a cutoff strategy is optimal, we derive its form, and we show that there is a unique Bayesian Nash Equilibrium in symmetric cutoff strategies. We establish results concerning the cutoff value in its limit and expose techniques, in particular, use of the Budan-Fourier Theorem, that may be useful in other similar problems.

We formulate and analyze an optimal stopping problem concerning a terrorist who is attempting to drive a nuclear or radiological weapon toward a target in a city center. In our model, the terrorist needs to travel through a two‐dimensional lattice containing imperfect radiation sensors at some of the nodes, and decides at each node whether to detonate the bomb or proceed. We consider five different scenarios containing various informational structures and two different sensor array topologies: the sensors are placed randomly or they form an outer wall around the periphery of the city. We find that sensors can act as a deterrent in some cases, and that the government prefers the outer wall topology unless the sensors have a very low detection probability and the budget is tight (so that they are sparsely deployed).