The question addressed is how the strategic choice of flexible manufacturing technologies intensifies and interacts with competition among firms. We focus on the manufacturing flexibility that allows a firm to produce its outputs at shorter expected delivery time. We find that increasing the number of firms will decrease firms’ incentive to acquire more flexible manufacturing technologies. r 20...

When agents have conflicting preferences over a set of alternatives and they want to make a joint decision, a natural way to do so is by voting. How to design and analyze desirable voting rules has been studied by economists for centuries. In recent decades, technological advances, especially those in internet economy, have introduced many new applications for voting theory. For example, we can...

In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in which minority party supporters sometimes vote ideologically (for their party) and sometimes strategically (against the party they like the least). The competit...

We model a player’s decision as a choice set and analyze equilibria in which each player’s choice set is a best response to the other players’ sets. We formalize the notion of best response by an abstract “choice structure,” which captures iteratively undominated strategies (for several definitions of dominance), rationalizability, and a number of formulations of choice sets. We investigate pro...

The scale of the required changes is huge, and time is limited if we are to avoid the most severe effects of climate change. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road transport, several fuels and electricity originating from renewable energy sources have been proposed, all of them in different stages of development and with various and shifting environmental impacts. This thesis aims at incr...

The commoditization of low-cost hardware has enabled even modest-sized laboratories and research projects to own their own “supercomputers.” We argue that this local solution undermines rather than amplifies the research potential of scholars. CIOs, provosts, and research technologists should consider carefully an overall strategy to provision sustainable cyberinfrastructure in support of resea...

in recent decades, necessity to protect environment has been a serious concern for all people and international communities. in appropriate development of human economic activities, subsistence dependence of the growing world population on nature decreases the natural diversity of ecosystems and habitats day by day and provides additional constraints for life and survival of wildlife. as a resu...