We show that the presence of sufficiently significant switching costs, which are increasing in the degree of product differentiation, generates an equilibrium configuration with maximal differentiation within the framework of a Hotelling model with linear transportation costs. The equilibrium with maximal differentiation offers a formalization of the idea that competing firms have noncooperativ...

We study a homoclinic network associated to a non-resonant hyperbolic bifocus. It is proved that combining rotation with a non-degeneracy condition concerning the intersection of the twodimensional invariant manifolds of the equilibrium, switching behaviour is created: close to the network, there are trajectories that visit the neighbourhood of the bifocus following connections in any prescribe...

Sensitivity analysis of a power system against overvoltage was performed. The analysis took into account the origin of the overvoltage, the grounding resistance magnitude and overvoltage injection point. The IEEE 13 bus test feeder system was implemented in EMTP-ATP and lightning and switching overvoltages were applied. Three cases were evaluated: the first one, applying lightning overvoltage a...

This paper describes work which is being undertaken to develop a low bit-rate switchable video codec for videophone type applications. It describes improvements to the tracking of important facial features, such as the eyes, the nose and the lips in head and shoulder video sequences. Results of investigations into a reference set updating strategy for PCA based tracking are presented. These sho...

This paper represents one of the first analyses of exchange rate pass-through in a dynamic context. It explores the impact of exchange rate fluctuations in a duopoly where firms interact over an indefinite period of time. In these circumstances there exists an incentive for the duopolists to tacitly collude. The paper investigates the manner in which exchange rate changes influence the inherent...

Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014a and 2014b) study value-added (VA) measures of teacher effectiveness. Exploiting teacher switches as a sort of quasi-experiment, the first paper investigates potential bias from student sorting to teachers, and concludes that any such bias is negligible. The second paper finds that VA scores are useful proxies for teachers’ effects on students’ long-run outco...

Almost all known results on difference sets need severe restrictions on the parameters. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an asymptotic nonexistence result free from any assumptions on the parameters. The only assumption we make is that the underlying group is dihedral. Difference sets originally mainly were studied in cyclic groups where they exist in abundance. For example, for any...

We propose and describe a novel video capturing system called Sat-Cam that can observe and record the users’ activity from effective viewpoints to negate the effects of unsteady mobile video cameras or switching between a large number of video cameras in a given environment. By using real-time imagery from multiple cameras, our system generates virtual views fixed in relation to the object. The...

A conceptual framework for analyzing the credit rationing and the link between credit access and profitability is developed. The empirical analysis using data from manufacturing firms in Bulgaria, provides direct estimates of credit rationing and its impact on profitability in transition economies. The results from the switching regression suggest that the presence of credit market constraints ...

A network of social sensors estimate an unknown state of nature by performing Bayesian Social Learning, and myopically optimize individual reward functions. The decisions of the social sensors contain quantized information about the underlying state. How should a fusion center dynamically incentivize the social sensors for acquiring the information about the underlying state? This paper present...