In a stochastic environment pooling naturally leads to economies of scale, but heterogeneity can also create variability. In this article, we investigate this trade-off in the case of a manufacturing environment. Pooling for queueing systems has been widely investigated while much less attention has been given to manufacturing systems where jobs are given a due date upon arrival. In such system...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Knowledge regarding genetic factors that influence pancreatic cancer risk is currently limited. To identify novel pancreatic cancer susceptibility loci, we conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study. METHODS The Affymetrix Genome-Wide Human SNP Array 6.0 and DNA pooling were used in the screening stage. Twenty-six single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were selected f...

We present a model where the enforcement of international risk sharing contracts is costly. With non diversifiable enforcement costs, welfare is not necessarily maximized for perfect worldwide risk sharing. Some groupings, or “pools” of countries can deliver higher welfare, with higher diversification gains net of enforcement costs. We construct an exhaustive list of such pools of countries. Fo...

This paper studies the effects of resource pooling on system performance in the presence of failures. The goal is to understand whether pooling increases efficiency and/or reduces risk. We consider four queueing systems with different degrees of pooling (one has no pooling, one has only queues pooled, one has queues and failures pooled, and one has servers pooled), estimate efficiency via the m...

there are fragmentations in iran’s health insurance system. multiple health insurance funds exist, without adequate provisions for transfer or redistribution of cross subsidy among them. multiple risk pools, including several private secondary insurance schemes, have resulted in a tiered health insurance system with inequitable benefit packages for different segments of the population. also fra...