No part of this journal may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, except for noncommercial, educational use including classroom teaching purposes. Product or company names used in this journal are for identification purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI Global of...

In this paper we describe the distribution problems faced by one of the largest retailers in the distribution and sale of fast moving consumer goods in the U.K. The paper describes an initial solution method, which is then improved by a novel form of simulated annealing. A computational experiment for the improvement algorithm has been also carried out in order to illustrate the flexibility of ...

This paper argues that the interaction between inequality and the demand patterns for goods is a potential source of persistent inequality. Income distribution, in the presence of non-homothetic preferences, affects the demand for goods and, due to differences in factor intensities across sectors, it alters the return to factors of production and the initial distribution of income. Low inequali...