This volume contains a selection of contributions presented at the WEHIA02 (Workshop on Economies with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents), which was held at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Physics of Trieste, Italy, on May 29- 31, under the auspices of Exystence, Complex System network of excellence . WEHIA02 is the 7th edition of a workshop, which was held for the first time at the University of Ancona, Italy, on 1996 (1), as a one-week series of seminars for the Italian PhD program . Ancona hosted the event in the years 1997 and 1998 (2), before it moved to Genoa 1999 (3), Marseille...

In logistics systems, the issue of planning stability has attracted increased attention and interest. This analysis investigates the influence of different kind of inventory control rules on the stability of material planning systems under stochastic demand in a rolling horizon environment.

Increasing customer needs, the globalization of markets and the evolution of e-commerce add to the complexity of logistic processes. In today's business, it is well understood that an effective management of logistic processes is impossible without the use of computer-based tools and quantitative methods. This book presents in a systematic way quantitative approaches to distribution logistics and supply chain management. The main orientation of the book is towards practical problem solving, and numerous case studies and practical applications are presented. The topics covered include: supply...

Policy evaluation and programme choice are important tools for informed decision-making, for the administration of active labour market programmes, training programmes, tuition subsidies, rehabilitation programmes etc. Whereas the evaluation of programmes and policies is mainly concerned with an overall assessment of impact, benefits and costs, programme choice considers an optimal allocation of individuals to the programmes. This book surveys potential evaluation strategies for policies with multiple programmes and discusses evaluation and treatment choice in a coherent framework....

Environmental Kuznets Curves - one of the most controversial issues of current environmental economics - suggest that economic growth may lead to environmental quality improvements. Why and under which circumstances this may be so, are the questions addressed in this book. The approach taken is formal, using techniques of static and dynamic optimisation. In addition, the main assumptions, arguments and conclusions are also presented in a non-formel way.

In principle, money illusion could explain the inertial adjustment of prices after changes of monetary policy. Hence, money illusion could provide an explanation of monetary non-neutrality. However, this explanation has been thoroughly discredited in modern economics. As a consequence, economists have ever since the 1970s searched for alternative explanations for nominal rigidity. These explanations are all based on the assumption of fully rational economic agents, holding rational expectations. This book argues that money illusion has been prematurely dismissed as an explanation of monetary...

The introduction of the thesis consists of four parts: first, we motivate our chosen macroeconomic setting by looking at some real world phenomena. For a better understanding of these phenomena, we argue that the mutual dynamic interactions between flScal policy and financial markets need to be closely examined in a macroeconomic framework. Second, we review different strands of the economic literature in order to show that most of the literature has so far exclusively concentrated either on fmancial market dynamics or on flScal policy issues. We conclude that a more integrated model setting...

This text presents approaches for safety stock determination in manufacturing and logistics networks. The approach presented in this book follows a material flow philosophy that allows for several extensions of the basic models and so offers a wide applicability within decision support systems.

This text constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Algebraic Development Techniques, WADT'99, held in Toulouse, France in September 1999. The 23 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 workshop presentations. The papers address the following topics: algebraic specification and other specification formalisms; test and validation; concurrent processes applications; logic and validation; combining formalisms; subsorts and partiality; structuring; rewriting; co-algebras...

This book, based on the author's Ph.D. thesis, was selected during the 1995 GI Doctoral Dissertation Competition as the winning thesis in the foundations-of-informatics track.
Securing integrity for digital communications in the age of global electronic information exchange and electronic commerce is vital to democratic societies and a central technical challenge for cryptologists. As core contribution to advancing the state of the art, the author develops the new class of digital fail-stop signatures. This monograph is self-contained regarding the historical background and cryptographic...