This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India which were under direct British colonial rule with areas which were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas which experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centers and roads in the post-colonial period. I find evidence ...

We consider collaborative graph exploration with a set of k agents. All agents start at a common vertex of an initially unknown graph and need to collectively visit all other vertices. We assume agents are deterministic, vertices are distinguishable, moves are simultaneous, and we allow agents to communicate globally. For this setting, we give the first non-trivial lower bounds that bridge the ...

Given n potential oil locations, where each has oil at a certain depth, we seek good trade-offs between the number of oil sources found and the total amount of drilling performed. The cost of exploring a location is proportional to the depth to which it is drilled. The algorithm has no clue about the depths of the oil sources at the different locations or even if there are any. Abstraction of t...

faults in computer networks may result in millions of dollars in cost. faults in a network need to be localized and repaired to keep the health of the network. fault management systems are used to keep today’s complex networks running without significant cost, either by using active techniques or passive techniques. in this paper, we propose a novel approach based on imperialist competitive alg...

Algorithms for the group testing problem when there is no a priori information on the number of defective items are considered. The efficiency criterion used is the competitive ratio, which is the ratio of the number of tests required by an algorithm when there is no a priori information on the number of defective items, to the number of tests required by an optimal algorithm when the number of...

We study an online model for the maximum k-vertex-coverage problem, where given a graph G = (V,E) and an integer k, we ask for a subset A ⊆ V , such that |A| = k and the number of edges covered by A is maximized. In our model, at each step i, a new vertex vi is revealed, and we have to decide whether we will keep it or discard it. At any time of the process, only k vertices can be kept in memor...

We consider online competitive algorithms for the problem of collecting weighted items froma dynamic set S, when items are added to or deleted from S over time. The objective isto maximize the total weight of collected items. We study the general version, as well asvariants with various restrictions, including the following: the uniform case, when all itemshave the same weight, ...