We study multiple-unit asymmetric procurement auctions wherein sellers from two classes draw costs from different distributions. When sellers are asymmetric, a cost-minimizing buyer discriminates among classes of sellers to enhance competition [1]. Establishing a quota—a limit on the number of offers that can be accepted from any one class—discriminates simply and effectively. The quota increas...

Price-Discrimination bucket pricing (PDBP) is a unique price format that usually involves monthly subscription fees and instantaneous quotas. We propose an empirical model in which consumers make dynamic purchase decisions under consumption uncertainty, accounting for the constraints imposed by the instantaneous quota. Applying the model to an online DVD rental data, we find that (1) consumers ...

The Droop quota is traditionally rounded up to the next integer. It has been pointed out by Lundell and Hill that this can have negative consequences. We give two further examples of such consequences, showing that rounding the Droop quota can cause violations of monotonicity and proportionality. This supports the conclusion by Lundell and Hill that it is better to use the exact Droop quota wit...

In weighted voting games, each agent has a weight, and a coalition of players is deemed to be winning if its weight meets or exceeds the given quota. An agent’s power in such games is usually measured by her Shapley value, which depends both on the agent’s weight and the quota. [Zuckerman et al., 2008] show that one can alter a player’s power significantly by modifying the quota, and investigat...

The most general version of the Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem (PCTSP) was first introduced by Balas [8]. In this problem, a salesman has to collect a certain amount of prizes (the quota) by visiting cities. A known prize can be collected in every city. Furthermore, by not visiting a city, the salesman incurs a pecuniary penalty. The goal is to minimize the total travel distance pl...

South Korea presently uses an arbitrary sampling method to monitor the prevalence of Clonorchis sinensis infection in the endemic areas of the country. However, the present method is not standardized and focuses primarily on individuals who reside nearest to the mainstream river. We propose a new sampling method that combines cluster sampling with proportionate quota sampling to ensure that the...

INTRODUCTION Given the shortage of physicians, particularly in rural areas, the Japanese government has rapidly expanded the number of medical school students by adding chiikiwaku (regional quotas) since 2008. Quota entrants now account for 17% of all medical school entrants. Quota entrants are usually local high school graduates who receive a scholarship from the prefecture government. In exch...

The dangers of smoking during pregnancy are widely established. The Health of the Nation set the following target: “In addition to the overall reduction in [smoking] prevalence, at least a third of women smokers to stop smoking at the start of their pregnancy by the year 2000.” As part of a smoking and pregnancy initiative, the Health Education Authority for England carried out a series of annu...

In this paper, two families of merging operators are considered: quota operators and Gmin operators. Quota operators rely on a simple idea: any possible world is viewed as a model of the result of the merging when it satisfies “sufficiently many” bases from the given profile (a multi-set of bases). Different interpretations of the “sufficiently many” give rise to specific operators. Each Gmin o...