We define what is a replacement policy for a system that fails randomly in time and its main characteristics. There are several parameters that drive the structure of the optimal policy. We provide a detailed discussion of the time horizon, objective functions, and failure time distributions as part of any replacement policy. 1 Definitions and main characteristics Our daily lives involve the ob...

We construct a simple model where political elites may block technological and institutional development, because of a “political replacement effect.” Innovations often erode elites’ incumbency advantage, increasing the likelihood that they will be replaced. Fearing replacement, political elites are unwilling to initiate change and may even block economic development. We show that the relations...

In cache-based side channel attacks, a spy that shares a cache with a victim probes cache locations to extract information on the victim’s access patterns. For example, in evict+reload, the spy repeatedly evicts and then reloads a probe address, checking if the victim has accessed the address in between the two operations. While there are many proposals to combat these cache attacks, they all h...

Several replacement policies for web caches have been proposed and studied extensively in the literature. Different replacement policies perform better in terms of (i) the number of objects found in the cache (cache hit), (ii) the network traffic avoided by fetching the referenced object from the cache, or (iii) the savings in response time. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient repl...