My interest in microsimulation started to develop when I was exposed to the works of Guy Orcutt and his associates on microsimulation of households in the USA, and those of Gunnar Eliasson and his associates on simulatio~ of Swedish firms. Their approaches promised the exciting possibility to represent an by simulating the behaviour of individual microeconomic entire economic system units on a computer. The construction of a large scale microsimulation model seemed to be a worthwhile adventure which could yield much more detailed results than existing models. It was also evident that...

The main objective of this volume is to provide a presentation and discussion of recent developments in optimization and related fields. Equal emphasis is given to theoretical and practical fields. Topics covered include optimization and variational inequalities and control theory.

This volume gives an overview of new theoretical approaches on computer-aided methods for strategic and operational planning in public mass transit. The important steps of the complete process on planning and operational control are also presented here.

This book was born out of a five-years research at Sonderforschungsbe reich 303 by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitiit Bonn and was approved as my doctoral thesis by the Rechts-und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultiit in December 1994. It was my former colleague Wolfgang Peters who had drawn my atten tion to overlapping-generations models and to problems of intergenerational efficiency and distribution. The subtle connection between the latter two has been fascinating me from the very beginning: redistribution of the results of free trade can...

A selection of research work in the design and implementation of dynamic marketing strategies in a competitive environment. The work covers areas such as advertising, promotion, pricing, new product diffusion, channel conflict and co-operation.

The history of many sciences is characterized by an almost continuous emer- gence of new theories. From a normative point of view, the survival of a new theory should mainly be determined by its ability to explain a new body of facts which the existing theories are unable to explain. If in addition the new theory is able to explain all the results obtained by the existing theories and if it can point out why these theories fail to explain certain facts, it should become the dominant theory. Otherwise, it might coexist with other theories for some time. Hence, a new theory ought to be judged...

What are the random-like phenomena that can be found everywhere in real-life world? When carrying out a random sampling survey on the traffic situation, we often obtain some descriptive results such as approximately expedite, a little crowded and so on, therefore, the average level should be regarded as the random fuzzy phenomenon, which is one of the random-like phenomena. Decision makers usually need to make the decision for these problems with random-like phenomena. Which model should be constructed for them? How should we handle these models to find the optimal strategy? How can we apply...

Economists can rarely perform controlled experiments to generate data. Existing information in the form of real-life observations simply has to be utilized in the best possible way. Given this, it is advantageous to make use of the increasing availability and accessibility of combinations of time-series and cross-sectional data in the estimation of economic models. But such data call for a new methodology of estimation and hence for the development of new econometric models. This book proposes one such new model which introduces error components in a system of simultaneous equations to take...

This book describes some models from the theory of investment which are mainly characterized by three features. Firstly, the decision-maker acts in a dynamic environment. Secondly, the distributions of the random variables are only incompletely known at the beginning of the planning process. This is termed as decision-making under conditions of uncer tainty. Thirdly, in large parts of the work we restrict the analysis to binary decision models. In a binary model, the decision-maker must choose one of two actions. For example, one decision means to undertake the invest .ment project in a...

Improvements in the performance of a freight transport system can be achieved either through technological innovation or by using advanced planning tools. This volume includes contributions on planning which cover the following topics: - analysis of current trends in developed countries, - demand analysis and forecasting, - flows simulation and prediction, - shipment and delivery problems, - regulation problems, - investment evaluation. Papers consider such applications as warehouse location, crude oil transportation, newspaper distribution, the trucking industry, rail planning and seaport...