BACKGROUND Recent studies show that transfusing older blood may lead to increased mortality. This raises the issue of whether transfusing fresher blood can be achieved without jeopardizing blood availability. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS We propose a simple family of policies that is defined by a single threshold: rather than transfusing the oldest available blood that is younger than 42 days, we...

Sensor network has occupied an important space in current research. Small size of the sensor nodes put constraint on the hardware capabilities and battery supported on it. In this paper we have discussed threshold policy for selecting a particular state of sensor node with fixed threshold policy. Threshold policies are needed whenever to choose the better one between two or many possibilities. ...

A network of social sensors estimate an unknown state of nature by performing Bayesian Social Learning, and myopically optimize individual reward functions. The decisions of the social sensors contain quantized information about the underlying state. How should a fusion center dynamically incentivize the social sensors for acquiring the information about the underlying state? This paper present...

In this paper we study the preemptive assignment of a single server to two queues. Customers arrive at both queues according to Poisson processes, and all service times are exponential, but with rates depending on the queues. The costs to be minimized consist of both holding costs and switching costs. The limiting behavior of the switching curve is studied, resulting in a good threshold policy....

We address the problem of designing optimal bu er management policies in shared memory switches when packets already accepted in the switch can be dropped pushed out Our goal is to maximize the overall throughput or equivalently to minimize the overall loss probability in the system For a system with two output ports we prove that the optimal policy is of push out with threshold type POT The sa...

In this article we study the implication of thresholds in preferences. To model this we extend the basic model of John and Pecchenino (1994) by allowing the current level of environmental quality to have a discrete impact on how an agent trades off future consumption and environmental quality. In other words, we endogenize the semi-elasticity of utility based on a step function. We motivate the...

The enhanced abilities of online retailers to learn about their customers’ shopping behavior have increased fears of dynamic pricing, a practice in which a seller sets prices based on the estimated buyer’s willingness-to-pay. However, among online retailers, a deviation from a one-price-for-all policy is the exception. When price discrimination is observed, it is often in the context of custome...

A version of the classical secretary problem is studied, in which one is interested in selecting one of the b best out of a group of n differently ranked persons who are presented one by one in a random order. It is assumed that b ≥ 1 is a preassigned number. It is known, already for a long time, that for the optimal policy one needs to compute b position thresholds, for instance via backwards ...