Strategy

Our cities are on the move again. Pioneering observers of the urban landscape Bernard Frieden and Lynn Sagalyn delve into the inner workings of the new public entrepreneurship and public private partnerships that have revitalized the downtowns of such cities as Boston, San Diego, Seattle, St. Paul, and Pasadena. They bring a unique combination of political and economic expertise to their analysis of this hot new marketplace, depicting a generation of mayors and administrators who differ in style from their predecessors and who have a more informed relationship with developers.

We consider a single-server queueing system with Poisson arrivals and general service times. While the server is up, it is subject to breakdowns according to a Poisson process. When the server breaks down, we may either repair the server immediately or postpone the repair until some future point in time. The operating costs to the system include customer holding costs, repair costs and running costs. The objective is to find a corrective maintenance policy which minimizes the long-run average operating costs of the system. The problem is formulated as a semi-Markov decision process.

This paper is motivated by two facts: failure of log-linear empirical exchange rate models of the 1970's and the observed variability of risk premiums in the forward market. Rational maximizing models predict that changes in conditional variances of monetary policies, government spendings, and income growths affect risk premiums and induce conditional volatility of exchange rates.

In this article we construct a model in which a consumer's utility depends on the consumption history. We describe a general equilibrium framework similar to Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985a). A simple example is then solved in closed form in this general equilibrium setting to rationalize the observed stickiness of the consumption series relative to the fluctuations in stock market wealth. The sample paths of consumption generated from this model imply lower variability in consumption growth rates compared to those generated by models with separable utility functions.

The financial payback to the City of Boston from the development of Faneuil Hall Marketplace provides a starting point for analyzing the benefits of public-private downtown project development deals.

A bilateral moral-hazard problem provides a rationale for "up-or-out" employment contracts. The employer sets a wage higher than opportunity cost to induce the worker to invest in firm-specific capital. If the individual does not make the grade, it is in the firm's interest ex post to fire him. Had the initial arrangement not included provisions for firing individuals, the firm would underreport the value of the employee, wrecking the incentive scheme. The basic model permits both firm and worker to be risk neutral.

This paper considers an M/G/c queueing system serving a finite number (J) of distinct customer classes. Performance of the system, as measured by the vector of steady-state expected waiting times of the customer classes (the performance vector), may be controlled by adopting an appropriate priority discipline.