the study sought to determine whether pastoralists have resorted to sale of livestock as a form of insurance against commercialization of cattle rustling in which well structured and managed cartels have organised more intense and frequent cattle raids on pastoralist, and how their decisions have affected their herd size. the study was conducted among the pastoral baringo community of kenya. a ...

Online auctions have become a popular and effective tool for Internet-based E-markets. We investigate problems and models of optimal adaptive automated bidding in an environment of concurrent online auctions, where multiple auctions for identical items are running simultaneously. We develop new models for a firm where its item valuation derives from the sale of the acquired items via their dema...

We investigate the problem of optimal bidding for a firm that in each period procures items to meet a random demand by participating in a finite sequence of auctions. We develop a new model for a firm where its item valuation derives from the sale of the acquired items via their demand distribution, sale price, acquisition cost, salvage value and lost sales. We establish monotonicity properties...

This paper addresses the problem of determining the sale price and the production quantity under supply uncertainty. The problem is commonly observed in the agricultural industry. We consider a firm that initially leases farm space in order to grow fruit. The realized amount of fruit supply fluctuates due to weather conditions, diseases, etc. At the end of the growing season, the firm makes two...

In today’s business transactions, it is frequently observed that a customer is allowed some grace period (permissible delay in payment) before settling the account with the supplier or producer. This policy is advantageous both for the supplier and customer since supplier attracts more customers and customer does not have to pay any interest during this fixed period either. In this paper, the r...

This paper describes a stochastic inventory model where the control review system is periodic; demand contains auto-correlated components; and categorized as a lost sale case. The authors propose a simulationbased optimization based on using a combination of simulated annealing, pattern search, and ranking and selection methods to search and approximate solutions to this problem. Simulated anne...