Firms that design mechanical and electromechanical products confront a variety of difficult issues in their prototyping activities. For a given part, how can a choice among fabrication technologies be made? Where should investments in new prototyping technology be focused? How can new and existing prototyping technologies he evaluated? Our primary goal has been to develop a systematic method of...

Bargaining for retail goods is common in developing countries, but rare in the developed world. The welfare implications of this difference are theoretically ambiguous—if bargaining is a low cost form of price discrimination, it may lead to greater trade and welfare and even approximate the optimal incentive compatible outcome. However, if bargaining imposes large utility costs on market partic...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy in an economy where …rms use external funds to …nance operational costs. It is shown that direct and indirect cost channels for monetary policy arise when …rms can default on borrowed funds. The direct cost channel calls for milder contractions in the face of in‡ationary pressures. The indirect cost channel, on the other hand, encourages policy conserv...

Given n uniformly and independently distributed points in a ball of unit volume in dimension d, it is well established that the length of several combinatorial optimization problems (including the minimum spanning tree (MST), the minimum matching (M), the traveling salesman problem (TSP), etc.) on these n points is asymptotic to P(d) n(d-1)/d, where the constant B(d) depends on the dimension d ...

Background: Clinical evaluation of hospitalized patients with acute altered mental status (AMS) is a common task of interns, regardless ofmedical specialty. The effectiveness ofmedical education to ensure competence in this area is unknown. Objective: To measure competency of new interns in the evaluation and management of AMS using an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Methods: ...

1 Please address all the correspondence to this author. 50 Memorial Drive. E53-347. Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: (617) 253-0468 ABSTRACT This paper describes a method that allows us to enhance our understanding of the difference between designing modular systems and integrative systems. Modular systems are those whose interfaces are well defined and shared with only a few other systems. Integrative...

Protein profiling has revealed the presence of glacontryphan-M, a peptide toxin identified only in the sea snail genus Conus, in the wings of Hebomoia glaucippe (HG). The wings and body of HG were homogenized and the proteins were extracted and analyzed by 2D gel electrophoresis with subsequent in-gel digestion. Posttranslational protein modifications were detected and analyzed by nano-LC-MS/MS...

We propose methods for robust discrete optimization in which the objective function has cost components that are subject to independent and bounded perturbations. Motivated by risk management practice, we approximate the problem of optimization of VaR, a widely used downside risk measure by introducing four approximating models that origininate in robust optimization. We show that all four mode...

Bargaining for retail goods is common in developing countries, but rare in the developed world. The welfare implications of this di erence are theoretically ambiguous if bargaining is a low cost form of price discrimination, it may lead to greater trade and welfare and even approximate the optimal incentive compatible outcome. However, if bargaining imposes large utility costs on the participan...

This paper proposes a new method to measure and monitor the risk in a banking system. Standard tools that regulators require banks to use for their internal risk management are applied at the level of the banking system to measure the risk of a regulator’s portfolio of banks. Using a sample of European banks from 1997 until 2003, we estimate the dynamics and correlations between bank asset port...