An EOQ model for salesmen’s initiatives, stock and price sensitive demand of similar products - A dynamical system

The paper deals with an inventory model to determine the retailer’s optimal order quantity for similar products. It is assumed that the amount of display space is limited and the demand of the products depends on the display stock level where more stock of one product makes a negative impression of the another product. Besides it, the demand rate is also dependent on selling price and salesmen’s initiatives. Also, the replenishment rate depends on the level of stock of the items. The objective of the model is to maximize the profit function, including the effect of inflation and time value of money by Pontryagin’s Maximal Principles. The stability analysis of the concerned dynamical system has been done analytically.     

Buying on margin,selling short in an agent-based market model

Credit trading, or leverage trading, which includes buying on margin and selling short, plays an important role in financial markets, where agents tend to increase their leverages for increased profits. This paper presents an agent-based asset market model to study the effect of the permissive leverage level on traders’ wealth and overall market indicators. In this model, heterogeneous agents can assume fundamental value-converging expectations or trend-persistence expectations, and their effective demands of assets depend both on demand willingness and wealth constraints, where leverage can relieve the wealth constraints to some extent. The asset market price is determined by a market maker, who watches the market excess demand, and is influenced by noise factors. By simulations, we examine market results for different leverage ratios. At the individual level, we focus on how the leverage ratio influences agents’ wealth accumulation. At the market level, we focus on how the leverage ratio influences changes in the asset price, volatility, and trading volume. Qualitatively, our model provides some meaningful results supported by empirical facts. More importantly, we find a continuous phase transition as we increase the leverage threshold, which may provide a further prospective of credit trading.     

pH-Sensitive microgels functionalized with folic acid

One of the most promising strategies in anticancer therapies is the targeted delivery through malignancy-associated cellular markers. The design of new synthetic devices with enhanced stimuli-responsive sensitivity and targeting ligands is a promising field for the development of cancer-specific delivery systems. One of the pathways to achieve this aim is the chemical functionalization of nanodevices such as microgels. The p-nitrophenyl acrylate (NPA) is an active ester molecule with a group that can be easily cleavaged by the nucleophilic attack of species such as amines. This modification consists of an easy chemical reaction that leads to several types of functionalized microgels, which are originally made up of NPA as one of their constituent monomers.

Here is reported the chemical functionalization of NPA-based microgels by incorporating pH-sensitive functional groups and folic acid as a tumor targeting ligand into the same initial polymer network. For this purpose, microgels of p-nitrophenyl acrylate (NPA)-co-methacrylamide (MeAM) synthesized by precipitation polymerization, were modified with two different pyridine derivatives: 2-aminomethylpyridine (2-AMP) and 2-aminopyridine (2-AP), thus pH-sensitive microgels with acid pH swelling capacity were obtained. The equilibrium swelling behaviour was studied as a function of pH, ionic strength, copolymer composition and type of pyridine derivative. In addition, the microgels were derivatized with ethylene diamine, to obtain amino-functionalized microgels to which the folic acid was subsequently attached as the targeting ligand. As final step, pH-sensitive groups and folic acid were equimolarly attached to the polymer chains to obtain the fully functionalized microgels.     

An optimal sequential procedure for a multiple selling problem with independent observations

We consider a sequential problem of selling K identical assets over the finite time horizon with a fixed number of offers per time period and no recall of past offers. The objective is to find an optimal sequential procedure which maximizes the total expected revenue. In this paper, we derive an effective number of stoppings for an optimal sequential procedure for the selling problem with independent observations.     

Games with finite resources

Games with Finite Resources as defined by Gale (1957) are two-person zero-sum N-stage games in which each player has N resources and may use each resource once and only once in the N stages. Gale's theorem on these games is generalized in several directions. First the payoff is allowed to be any symmetric function of the stage payoffs. Second, the players are allowed some latitude in choosing which game is being played. Applications are given to some open questions in the area of Inspection Games. Finally the payoff is allowed to be random, thus incorporating a result of Ross (1972) on Goofspiel. Application is made to a game-theoretic version of the Generalized House Selling Problem. Received August 1999/revised version March 2000