This study reports the effects of rebate rules on voluntary contributions to a threshold public good. Rebate rules specify how excess contributions, over the threshold amount are distributed. We examine three rebate rules experimentally: a no rebate policy where excess contributions are discarded, a proportional rebate policy where excess contributions are rebated proportionally to an individua...

This paper proposes an opportunistic maintenance policy for the multi-unit series production system. This proposed maintenance policy is on the basis of the failure rate analysis, which is more realistic than age-based or time-based opportunistic replacement models. When a system halts for performing preventive maintenance or opportunistic maintenance, the alternative decision of replacement an...

background: acupuncture is an indispensable part of traditional chinese medicine for relief of pain. the purpose of this study was the immediate & latent of low power laser ga-al-as irradiation applied to acupuncture points on experimental pain threshold. methods: this quasi-experimental study was conducted on seventy adult women ranging from 20 to 40 years old assigned randomly into two groups...

It is known that a threshold policy (or trunk reservation policy) is optimal for Erlang’s loss system under certain assumptions. In this paper we examine the robustness of this policy under departures from the standard assumption of exponential service times (call holding times) and give examples where the optimal policy has a generalized trunk reservation form.

Future sensor networks would comprise sensing devices with energy-harvesting capabilities from renewable energy sources, such as solar power. This paper focuses on design of efficient algorithms for multi-sensor activation to optimise overall event detection probability in presence of uncertainties in event and recharge processes. We formulate the dynamic multisensor activation question in a st...

This paper investigates the optimal threshold value of failure rates for leased products with a Weibull lifetime distribution. Within a lease period, any product failure is rectified by minimal repairs and the lessor may incur a penalty when the time required to perform a minimal repair exceeds a reasonable time limit. To reduce product failures, additional preventive maintenance actions are ca...

We study the tradeoff between efficiency and service quality in tandem systems. We reward efficiency by assuming that a revenue is earned each time a job is completed, and we penalize poor service quality by incorporating positive holding costs. We study the dynamic assignment of servers to tasks with the objective of maximizing the long-run average profit. For systems of arbitrary size, genera...

Determining how monetary policy makers react to changes in key economic variables has been of major interest to monetary economists. Estimates of monetary policy rules (reaction functions) are a widely used method for doing this. Behavior differs under different policy regimes, as in rule-based systems or chronic inflation. In practice, estimates of instrument rules have been used to descri...

In this paper, the single machine replacement problem is being modeled into the frameworks of stochastic dynamic programming and control threshold policy, where some properties of the optimal values of the control thresholds are derived. Using these properties and by minimizing a cost function, the optimal values of two control thresholds for the time between productions of two successive nonco...