This paper studies asymmetric first-price menu auctions in the procurement environment where the buyer does not commit to a decision rule and asymmetric sellers have interdependent costs and statistically affiliated signals. Sellers compete in bidding a menu of contracts, where a contract specifies a vector of characteristics and a payment required from the buyer for delivering these characteri...

Due to noisy motor commands and imprecise and ambiguous sensory information, there is often substantial uncertainty about the relative location between our body and objects in the environment. Little is known about how well people manage and compensate for this uncertainty in purposive movement tasks like grasping. Grasping objects requires reach trajectories to generate object-fingers contacts...

The IPCC has stressed the importance of producing unbiased estimates of the uncertainty in indirect aerosol forcing, in order to give policy makers as well as research managers an understanding of the most important aspects of climate change that require refinement. In this study, we use 3-D meteorological fields together with a radiative 5 transfer model to examine the spatially-resolved uncer...

We show that a rst order problem can approximate solutions of a robust optimization problem when the uncertainty set is scaled, and explore further properties of this rst order problem.

Calculation of the viewshed from a digital elevation model (OEM) is a common capability of a GIS packages. Two mistaken assumptions are made, however: first, that the OEM is accurate, and second that the viewshed is a Boolean phenomenon. The inaccuracy of the OEM data is acknowledged in reporting of the root-mean-squared error. The mistake of the Boolean viewshed is recognizable in the real-wor...

We present a new approach for solving first-order Markov decision processes combining first-order state abstraction and heuristic search. In contrast to existing systems, which start with propositionalizing the decision process and then perform state abstraction on its propositionalized version we apply state abstraction directly on the decision process avoiding propositionalization. Secondly, ...

We analyze multi-period harvest problems for a renewable resource under biological uncertainty when harvesting is size-dependant. First, we show that the decision to harvest can be modeled as a real option and we derive analytical expressions for the value of the resource stock and the mean time between harvests, with and without uncertainty. We then illustrate numerically how uncertainty affec...

Compared to center-based hemodialysis (HD), peritoneal dialysis (PD) has many advantages among which cost effectiveness and comfort of patients are the most important ones. On the other hand the number of PD patients is so small and even decreasing worldwide due to difficulties of this mode of dialysis. Therefore to encourage dialysis patients to choose PD, health system must provide a proper s...

Effective project management requires reliable knowledge of cash required in different stages of project life cycle. Getting this knowledge is highly dependent on sophisticated consideration of project environment. Nature of projects and their environments are associated with uncertain conditions. In this paper, a new project cash flow assessment method based on project scheduling is proposed t...

In this paper the fuzzy structural reliability index was determined through modeling epistemic uncertainty arising from ambiguity in statistical parameters of random variables. The First Order Reliability Method (FORM) has been used and a robust genetic algorithm in the alpha level optimization method has been proposed for the determination of the fuzzy reliability index. The sensitivity level ...