There is a fundamental incompatibility between efficiency, interim individual rationality, and budgetbalance in mechanism design, even for extremely simple settings. Yet it is possible to specify efficient mechanisms that satisfy participation and budgetbalance constraints in expectation, prior to types being realized. We do so here, in fact deriving mechanisms that are individually rational fo...

Simple stoichiometric models based on the principle that limiting elements are used with high efficiency have been unable to capture the apparently constant and low nitrogen gross growth efficiency that characterizes egg production in marine copepods. A new model of egg production is presented based on Dynamic Energy Budget theory. The model splits substrates between nitrogenous and non-nitroge...

The Faculty of Medicine of Dalhousie University (the Faculty) has applied a mission-based approach to the allocation of the academic budget since 1993. Over the ensuing decade, large shifts in budgets to academic departments have been effected, and two goals that required special emphasis-the successful implementation of a tutorial-based undergraduate medical curriculum and an increase in resea...

Title of Dissertation: OPTIMAL BUDGET-CONSTRAINED SAMPLE ALLOCATION FOR SELECTION DECISIONS WITH MULTIPLE UNCERTAIN ATTRIBUTES Dennis D. Leber, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professor Jeffrey W. Herrmann Department of Mechanical Engineering A decision-maker, when faced with a limited and fixed budget to collect data in support of a multiple attribute selection decision, m...

This paper presents two new procedures for ranking and selection (R&S) problems where the best system designs are selected from a set of competing ones based on multiple performance measures evaluated through stochastic simulation. In the procedures, the performance measures are aggregated with a multi-attribute utility function, and incomplete preference information regarding the weights that ...

We consider cooperative traveling salesman games with non-negative asymmetric costs satisfying the triangle inequality. We construct a stable cost allocation with budget balance guarantee equal to the Held-Karp integrality gap for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem, using the parsimonious property and a previously unknown connection to linear production games. We also show that our techn...

Mexican male sojourners make up a large, distinct consumer segment that has been present in the United States for decades, but have not been extensively studied from a business perspective with respect to their budget allocation decisions. The result is that this consumer segment may have been underserved due to a lack of understanding and research. This paper examines the budget allocation pro...

INTRODUCTION The objective of this study is to explore the associations between national tuberculosis program (NTP) budget allocation and tuberculosis related outcomes in the World Health Organization's 22 high burden countries from 2007-2009. METHODS This ecological study used mixed effects and generalized estimating equation models to identify independent associations between NTP budget all...

This chapter reviews the econometric methods that are used by health economists to model health care costs. These methods are used for prediction, projection and forecasting, in the context of risk adjustment, resource allocation, technology assessment and policy evaluation. The chapter reviews the literature on the comparative performance of the methods, especially in the context of forecastin...

We consider a ranking and selection problem with independent normal observations, and analyze the asymptotic sampling rates of expected improvement (EI) methods in this setting. Such methods often perform well in practice, but a tractable analysis of their convergence rates is difficult due to the nonlinearity and nonconvexity of the functions used in the EI calculations. We present new results...