Extended Abstract Electronic exchanges have enhanced the viability of secondary markets including markets for used books. Online used book markets offer a wider selection, lower search costs, and significantly lower prices than do physical used bookstores. The increased viability of online used book markets has caused concern among groups such as the Book Publishers Association and Author's Gui...

How are resources allocated across different R&D areas? We show that under a plausible set of assumptions, the competitive market allocates excessive innovative efforts into high returns areas, meaning those with higher private (and social) payoffs. The underlying source of market failure is the absence of property rights on problems to be solved, which are the source of R&D value. The competit...

UNLABELLED Macroautophagy (autophagy hereafter) recycles intracellular components to sustain mitochondrial metabolism that promotes the growth, stress tolerance, and malignancy of lung cancers, suggesting that autophagy inhibition may have antitumor activity. To assess the functional significance of autophagy in both normal and tumor tissue, we conditionally deleted the essential autophagy gene...

Cluster-wise linear regression (CLR), a clustering problem intertwined with regression, is to find clusters of entities such that the overall sum of squared errors from regressions performed over these clusters is minimized, where each cluster may have different variances. We generalize the CLR problem by allowing each entity to have more than one observation, and refer to it as generalized CLR...

This dissertation considers two research problems that Information Technology (IT) service firms and IT-intensive products manufacturers face in the digital economy. The first essay deals with the yield management for IT service firms. Given a fixed capacity of the IT workforce within a firm, the nature of IT projects, the demand uncertainty, and the growing competition among IT vendors, IT ser...

W analyze the optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through adjustments of tactical variables such as price or the number of ads a product carries, we allow the incumbent to consider changes in its business model. We consider four alternative business models: a subscription-based model; an ad-sponsored model; a mi...

Social insect colonies are characterized by an efficient division of labor, allowing high-value individuals (i.e., reproductives and brood) to be sheltered from tasks associated with increased risk pathogen exposure, such as foraging or corpse disposal. This social organization helps limit the transmission disease throughout colony. Further, can actively respond imminent threats altering their ...

This study evaluates the current collection and recycling of Waste Electrical Electronic Equipment (WEEE) in Italy by means analysis national regional data from EUROSTAT Italian WEEE Coordination Centre database, as well through qualitative interviews with key stakeholders management system Campania region (Southern Italy). Urban systems, among which metropolitan city Naples region, are main us...