This paper models a name-your-own-price (NYOP) retailer who allows buyers to initiate their retail interactions by describing a product and submitting a binding bid for it. The buyers have an outside option to buy the same good for a commonly known posted price that also acts as an informative upper bound on the cost the NYOP retailer faces. We conceptualize a selling strategy of such an NYOP r...

In this paper, we consider the inverse spanning tree problem. Given an undi0 Ž 0 0 . rected graph G s N , A with n nodes, m arcs, an arc cost vector c, and a spanning tree T 0, the inverse spanning tree problem is to perturb the arc cost vector c to a vector d so that T 0 is a minimum spanning tree with respect to the < < < < cost vector d and the cost of perturbation given by d y c s Ý d y c i...

In this study production, reproduction, population, management and economic parameters resulted from recording of 7 flocks with size 57 to 400 and 721 heads of camels in a cycle of reproduction, during three years from 2011 to 2013 were used to find out of the economic values of important traits in one hump camel in desert areas rearing system. The economic traits that appeared in profit equati...

A prevalence threshold to define rare diseases is needed for orphan drug designation. Here, we propose a bottom-up approach to defining rare diseases for China, based on the minimum number of patients needed for the industry to make a reasonable profit on a new drug. To obtain this patient population size, we considered three factors: (1) the industry research and development cost per new drug;...

The paper aims to examine the determinants of profit performance of financial holding companies (FHCs) using panel data for the period 2001–9. The effects of bankspecific ownership structure and dualcore strategy are examined. Our findings show that (1) business diversification, a lower financial cost, a higher liquidity ratio, larger assets, and lower debt ratios can improve the profit perform...

This paper introduces a novel simultaneous optimization and heat integration approach, which can be used directly with the rigorous models in process simulators. In this approach, the overall process is optimized utilizing external derivative-free optimizers, which interact directly with the process simulation. The heat integration subproblem is formulated as an LP model and solved simultaneous...