Suchergebnisse

Front Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Executive Summary -- Abbreviations -- Chapter 1 Context -- Introduction -- Notes -- Chapter 2 Legal and Regulatory Framework Governing Market Competition -- Introduction -- The Romanian Competition Law -- The State Aid Law -- The Unfair Competition Law -- Sector-Specific Legal Framework Governing Competition: The Railways Legislation Package -- Telecommunications: Broadband Infrastructure -- Electronic Communications -- Competitive Processes Associated with Public Procurement -- Notes -- Chapter 3 Operational Framework -- Introduction -- Rules, Structure, Staffing, and Strategy -- Governance and Board Operations -- Information Technology Environment -- Notes -- Chapter 4 Enforcing Competition Law -- Preventing Anticompetitive Mergers -- Fighting Exclusionary Business Practices -- Ensuring Access to File and Confidentiality -- Fostering Deterrence: Fines, Leniency, and Cease and Desist -- Minimizing Competition Distortions Associated with Granting State Aid -- Capacity Building for Staff and Board Members -- Notes -- Chapter 5 Creating a Competition Culture -- Introduction -- Challenges -- Collaboration with Regulators -- Notes -- Appendix A RAS Experts -- Appendix B RAS Deliverables -- Bibliography -- Boxes -- ES.1 Application of RAS Results -- 1.1 Restrictiveness of Product Market Regulations in Romania -- 3.1 Basic IT Principles -- 4.1 Proposed Step-by-step Methodology to Calculate Fines -- 4.2 Snapshot of Selected Capacity Building Workshops -- 5.1 Snapshot of Competition Advocacy Events -- Figures -- B1.1.1 Product Market Regulation: Romania Compared with EU Countries -- B1.1.2 PMR for State Control of Economic Activity, EU Countries -- B1.1.3 PMR for Government Involvement in Infrastructure, EU Countries -- B1.1.4 PMR for Barriers to Trade and Investment, EU Countries.

It is commonly assumed that hip-hop was born when street gangs in the Bronx, New York, channeled their energy from violence and crime to music and artistic expression. I critically interrogate this dominant narrative through an examination of the influential book Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade (hereafter "YYY"). Drawing from the original interview transcripts used for YYY, I compare the gang-origin narrative espoused in the book with the primary accounts of early hip-hop practitioners featured within it. Special attention is given to the divergences between the two sources, demonstrating how the claim that hip-hop came from gangs is unsubstantiated by relevant interviewee accounts. I discuss how the prevalence of this false narrative in studies of hip-hop history overall is part of a broader historic pattern of associating working class African American culture with criminality.

L'objet de l'article est l'étude qualitative d'une équation différentielle du deuxième ordre, décrivant le processus thermique transitoire d'un grand nombre d'appareils électrothermiques qui possèdent un schéma substituant thermique contenant une source de flux thermique, deux capacités et trois résistances thermiques. Les zones des solutions stables autour des points fixes de l'équation sont trouvées. L'application des résultats obtenus est illustrée par un exemple concernant l'utilisation d'un nouvel élément de chauffage, qui a une caractéristique de relais de la résistance spécifique électrique dépendant de la température.
Vu les résultats obtenus, des études semblables sont à effectuer pour tout autre élément de chauffage.

AbstractWe investigate the problem of screening a large population for an infectious disease (i.e., classifying subjects as positive or negative) using group testing while considering important test and population‐level characteristics. Group testing, in which multiple samples are pooled together into a master sample and tested simultaneously, has the potential to significantly expand screening efforts, and, owing to the COVID‐19 pandemic, the topic has seen a surge of interest recently. In this paper, we construct optimal group testing designs that consider a heterogeneous population (i.e., with subject‐specific risk), imperfect tests, and while also modeling the dilution effect of grouping (a phenomenon in which the test accuracy of the master sample is affected by the concentration of the virus in the pool), which is often ignored in the literature. We conduct an exhaustive analysis under both a general dilution function and a specific (yet still calibratable) form of the dilution function. Our analytical results of the resulting challenging optimization problems unveil key structural properties that hold in an optimal solution, which we utilize to construct efficient solution schemes. We complement the analysis with two case studies, one on the screening of blood for the Hepatitis B Virus and the other on the screening of subjects for COVID‐19. Our results reveal significant benefits over current practices, individual testing, as well as prior studies that ignore the dilution effect. Such results underscore the importance of incorporating both test and population‐level characteristics into the modeling framework.

AbstractWe study the problem of designing vaccine distribution strategies that maximally mitigate the negative impact of an infectious disease outbreak. This is achieved through a multiperiod optimization‐based framework that embeds important subject‐specific risk and contact information into the decision‐making process. By analyzing the structure of the resulting optimization problem, we identify key structural properties which we use to construct a globally convergent solution scheme (suitable for smaller problem instances) and two, more scalable, heuristic schemes. We demonstrate the benefits of the considered framework through a case study on COVID‐19 in Texas. Our results highlight the importance of considering risk and contact information as doing so substantially reduces the total expected number of fatalities over conventional compartmental‐based approaches. These findings indicate that customization can have a significant benefit, particularly for community‐scale planning.

Résumé Cet article cherche à évaluer la manière dont les ménages réagissent dans leur plan de consommation aux variations de la dette publique et du niveau des impôts auxquels ils sont soumis. Les résultats obtenus à partir de variables trimestrielles sur les pays du G7 au cours des dernières décennies montrent, à l'instar de Dalamagas [1993], que plus le ratio dette/PIB est important, moins l'illusion de la dette et l'illusion fiscale sont fortes. Une illustration est donnée pour la France et l'Italie.

The report examines recent trends in Croatia's in trade, productivity, innovation performance and policy governance framework, to help identify priorities for the development of the country's Smart Specialization Strategy, which is an ex-ante conditionality for access to the EU's Structural and Investment Funds over the 2014-20 programming period.

AbstractWe study the problem of designing optimal targeted mass screening of non‐uniform populations. Mass screening is an essential tool that is widely utilized in a variety of settings, for example, preventing infertility through screening programs for sexually transmitted diseases, ensuring a safe blood supply for transfusion, and mitigating the transmission of infectious diseases. The objective of mass screening is to maximize the overall classification accuracy under limited budget. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a proactive optimization‐based framework that factors in population heterogeneity, limited budget, different testing schemes, the availability of multiple assays, and imperfect assays. By analyzing the resulting optimization problem, we take advantage of the structure of the problem as a multi‐dimensional fractional knapsack problem and identify an efficient globally convergent threshold‐style solution scheme that fully characterizes an optimal solution across the entire budget spectrum. Using real‐world data, we conduct a geographic‐based nationwide case study on targeted COVID‐19 screening in the United States. Our results reveal that the identified screening strategies substantially outperform conventional practices by significantly lowering misclassifications while utilizing the same amount of budget. Moreover, our results provide valuable managerial insights with regard to the distribution of testing schemes, assays, and budget across different geographic regions.