Information and preference reversals in lotteries

Several approaches have been proposed for evaluating information in expected utility theory. Among the most popular approaches are the expected utility increase, the selling price and the buying price. While the expected utility increase and the selling price always agree in ranking information alternatives, Hazen and Sounderpandian [11] have demonstrated that the buying price may not always agree with the other two. That is, in some cases, where the expected utility increase would value information A more highly than information B, the buying price may reverse these preferences. In this paper, we discuss the conditions under which all these approaches agree in a generic decision environment where the decision maker may choose to acquire arbitrary information bundles.     

Interoutput times in processor sharing queues with feedback

While properties of the flows in isolated processor sharing queues are well understood, little is known about the flows in networks with processor sharing nodes. This paper analyzes the internal traffic processes in processor sharing queues with instantaneous Bernoulli feedback. The internal traffic does not inherit the insensitivity to the shape of the service requirement distribution from the external traffic. The interoutput time distribution is studied in the single server and infinite server processor sharing queues. For the systems we study, we show that when service requirement distributions with the same means are convexly ordered, so are interoutput time distributions.This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant ECS-8501217 and by the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts under Faculty Research Grant 1-03205.