This article examines "consistent" conjectural variations in an oligopoly model with a homogeneous product. A conjectural variation is consistent if it is equivalent to the optimal response of the otherfirms at the equilibrium defined by that conjecture. When the number of firms is fixed, we find that competitive behavior is consistent when marginal costs are constant, but that when marginal co...

This paper proposes a novel method to schedule parallel execution of planning and action. The method is for a class of planning problems which are hierarchically decomposed into two subproblems: (1) determining the next subgoal and (2) determining and executing an action sequence to achieve the subgoal. In this problem class, the upper-level planning process can be viewed as a process of gradua...

Potentially eventually positive (PEP) sign patterns were introduced in “Sign patterns 1 that allow eventual positivity,” Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra, 19 (2010): 108–120, where it 2 was noted that A is PEP if its positive part is primitive, and an example was given of a 3× 3 PEP 3 sign pattern with reducible positive part. We extend these results by constructing n × n PEP sign 4 pattern...

Education and training are essential elements of co-operative practice embodied within the co-operative principles. A problem common to many types of co-operative is that the level of commitment shown towards education and training can be weak at best, and often diminishes as they become more established and as the size of the membership and scale of operations grow. This leads to many difficul...

Recent work by Erik Volz [7] has shown how to calculate the growth and eventual decay of an SIR epidemic on a static network, assuming infection and recovery each happen at constant rates. In this note we offer an alternate derivation which arrives at a simpler — though equivalent — system. This new derivation is more closely connected to the underlying physical processes. We further show that ...

Deploying dynamically evolvable software applications is a common practice nowadays. This is typically achieved by means of mechanisms capable of adapting the system components to the modifications required by the external environment. Correctness and evolvability are closely related concerns: components might evolve along time, possibly in reaction to errors, but it is most desirable that the ...

We present a new approach, certified program models, to establish correctness of distributed protocols. We propose modeling protocols as programs in standard languages like C, where the program simulates the processes in the distributed system as well as the nondeterminism, the communication, the delays, the failures, and the concurrency in the system. The program model allows us to test the pr...

Many reliable distributed services rely on an eventual leader election to coordinate actions. The eventual leader detector has been proposed as a way to implement such an abstraction. It ensures that, eventually, each process in the system will be provided by an unique leader, elected among the set of correct processes in spite of crashes and uncertainties. A number of eventual leader election ...

Shiu derives two formulas for calculating the probability of eventual ruin in a collective risk model. This paper implements one of the formulas by incorporating an algorithm to reduce round-off error due to convolution. It gives the results of the programs for some claim distributions. The usefulness of these two formulas is also discussed.

Sign patterns that require exponential nonnegativity are characterized. A set of conditions necessary for a sign pattern to require eventual exponential nonnegativity are established. It is shown that these conditions are also sufficient for an upper triangular sign pattern to require eventual exponential nonnegativity and it is conjectured that these conditions are both necessary and sufficien...