on the price of anarchy in a single server queue with heterogeneous service valuations induced by travel costs abstract this work presents a strategic observable model where customer heterogeneity is induced by the customers locations and travel costs the arrival of customers with distances less than x is assumed to be poisson with rate equal to the integral from 0 to x of a nonnegative intensity function h in a loss system m g 1 1 we define the threshold nash equilibrium strategy xe and the socially optimal threshold strategy x we investigate the dependence of the price of anarchy poa on the parameter xe and the intensity function for example if the potential arrival rate is bounded then poa is bounded and converges to 1 when xe goes to infinity on the other hand if the potential arrival rate is unbounded we prove that x xe always goes to 0 when xe goes to infinity and yet in some cases poa is bounded and even converges to 1 if h converges to a positive constant then poa converges to 2 if h increases then the limit of poa is at least 2 whereas if h decreases then poa is bounded and the limit of poa is at most 2 in a system with a queue we prove that poa may be unbounded already in the simplest case of uniform arrival

effects of food prices and consumer income on nutrient availability economic factors such as food prices and consumer income affect food choices with consequences for the availability of nutrients a new research model is developed to estimate how the availability of 28 nutrients would change as consumers alter their food purchases in response to changes in food prices and income through the interdependent food demand relationships

the school lunch program and nutrient intake a switching regression analysis the nutrient impact of the school lunch program is examined using the basic sample of the national food consumption survey the results clearly indicate the program s substantial positive effect on nutrient consumption by both low income and high income children moreover the nutrient impact of school lunch participation is shown to be greater for low income children

limits to economic growth as shown by a computable general equilibrium model abstract economic growth is distinguished from commercial growth and is defined in this article as the growth of the value a society puts in monetary terms on all commercial and non commercial goods and values it possesses during a certain period a computable general equilibrium model is used to show the impact of changes in the endowments preferences and production possibilities on economic income which in the model comprises all wealth besides land with its natural resources and labor energy is the key endowment to drive an economy the model leads in an intuitive way to the following conclusions 1 societies should start to use appropriate indicators for true economic growth rather than just for commercial growth as measured by gross national product 2 all types of economic growth are limited no matter if based on endowment growth production efficiency growth or changes in preferences 3 economic growth should be oriented more towards increasing production efficiency and less towards using more natural resources 4 human population growth puts at risk the possibilities for average economic growth per person 5 we should get better prepared to use solar energy in the future 6 besides economic growth there exists pure utility growth which is not measurable in monetary terms it includes much of scientific progress in the long run and is of great importance even though it cannot be included in an indicator of economic growth

socioeconomic factors affecting dietary status an appraisal this paper is to identify selected studies which have contributed to the present knowledge on socioeconomic characteristics of households and dietary status studies of the socioeconomic factors influencing dietary status have undergone significant change in recent years because of developments in statistics and household decision theory in the latter case households utilize various inputs for example food as purchased and the labor of household members to produce diets with varying features including nutrient compositions as indicated by the work of basiotis et al 1983 blanciforti green and lane davis et al 1982b sanderson and sexauer this framework provides a systematic rationale for the incorporation of socioeconomic variables into integrated statistical analyses of food consumption and dietary status more specifically the scope of traditional consumer demand theory has been significantly increased by household economic decision theory in addition permitting explicit incorporation of socioeconomic variables in engel and full demand systems this theory makes a plausible linkage between food intake and dietary status since household economics merely extends rather than refutes the intrinsic utility maximization properties of traditional demand theory the engel and demand systems relationships postulated linking socioeconomic characteristics food expenditure and dietary status are admitted by the theory stigler and b cker as will be demonstrated research results are accumulating on household size household income and expenditure nutrient levels in household food supplies and individual diets efficiency of food use away from home food consumption and use of convenience foods however studies of the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics of households and or individuals and nutrient availability and or dietary intake levels have produced varyingly conclusive results among other factors these varying results can be attributed to a different measures of diet quality and b differences in individual food intake versus food disappearance data further diet quality has been assessed directly units of nutrients available or consumed as well as indirectly expenditure levels on food the dietary components studied most frequently are food energy protein calcium iron vitamins a and c riboflavin thiamin and niacin however recently studies have given less attention to thiamin riboflavin niacin and vitamin c and instead have investigated vitamin b6 and magnesium in the near future this list of target dietary components will probably include cholesterol sodium dietary fiber zinc and copper this extension will occur for two reasons a consumer interest in these dietary components and b availability of survey data on these dietary components e g the u s department of agriculture s usda 1985 continuing survey of food intake by individuals and the 1987 88 nationwide food consumption sur

nutrient availability food costs and food stamps nutrient consumption patterns of low income households were analyzed using data from the special low income component of the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey a system of simultaneous equations for estimating food cost and diet component availability levels in home food supply was applied the derived reduced form showed that food stamp program participation had a positive impact on diet component availability levels impacts of other socioeconomic variables examined for diet component availability were generally larger than those for program participation and income diet component availability levels were relatively constant across households with different income and food stamp program bonus levels

nutrient demand and the allocation of time evidence from guam this paper presents an econometric study of nutrient intake in guam which explicitly accounts for household time allocation and household capital variables the empirical framework is based on a household production model of nutrient consumption food expenditure and the allocation of time between labour leisure and food preparation activities the study finds evidence that 1 capital and wage variables have significant impacts on households nutrient demands 2 income wage and educational status have very different effects on the nutrient choices of low calorie households than on the nutrient choices of high calorie households and 3 a family s participation in the food stamp programme leads to higher levels of food expenditure but this impact is attributable to the purchase of more costly taste characteristics in food rather than to the purchase of more nutritious foods

nutrient elasticities in a complete food demand system this study explores the linkage of the determinants of food choice with consumer nutrient availability by developing a procedure to measure changes in nutrient availability as the demand for food items change it uses demand elasticities from traditional demand analysis to estimate elasticities of changes in the nutritional content of consumer diets the procedure is applied to estimate nutrient elasticities for fifteen nutrients in response to changes in thirty five food prices and per capita income

cost allocation and opportunity costs one explanation for the widespread use of allocated fixed costs is that they can serve as a proxy for difficult to calculate opportunity costs this explanation is pursued by modeling a service department as an m m s s queueing system two main results are that the expected value of opportunity costs equals both the incremental productivity of capacity and the optimal transfer price when the cost of capacity is of the form cs as and is close to one we show that allocated fixed costs are a good proxy for average opportunity costs however if there are great economies of scale is close to zero then a method which charges users only for the variable costs of the service department is recommended finally the economic efficiency of transfer prices based on either variable cost or full cost is compared with optimal transfer pricing policies

achieving a secure energy future environmental and economic issues abstract energy economics and the environment are interdependent land water atmospheric and biological resources are being degraded by current high energy consumption u s energy consumption is the highest in the world and the u s department of energy reports that the united states has only about 10 years of known and potentially discoverable oil reserves the u s should reduce its energy consumption by one half to help restore the quality of the environment while improving the american standard of living by strengthening the economy and increasing the number of jobs because of the interdependence of energy economics and the environment energy efficiency and transition to renewable energy sources are critical an estimated 40 of current energy consumption could be produced employing solar energy technologies but would require about 20 of total u s land area therefore the development of solar energy technologies to substitute for fossil energy is projected to compete for land required for agriculture and forestry as well as have other environmental impacts

minimal and maximal product differentiation in hotelling s duopoly abstract hotelling s 1929 model of duopolistic competition is re examined a family of utility functions is used which has as a special case hotelling s original utility function in a two stage location price game it is shown that an equilibrium exists when the curvature of the utility functions in the space of characteristics is sufficiently high the subgame perfect equilibrium never exhibits minimum product differentiation on the other hand not all equilibria are at maximal product differentiation

is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect evidence from a school feeding programme are public transfers targeted toward children neutralised by the household as the theory of altruism implies or is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect whereby such transfers stick to the child this paper studies the impact of a school feeding programme on child caloric intake in the philippines using a quasi experimental methodology the empirical results confirm an intrahousehold flypaper effect indeed they indicate virtually no intrahousehold reallocation of calories in response to the feeding programme in poorer households however children s gains from the programme appear to be taxed more heavily

the demand for selected nutrients by greek households an empirical analysis with quantile regressions the article uses information from the 1993 1994 household consumption survey and the semiparametric quantile regression approach to analyze the demand for three macronutrients carbohydrates proteins and fats and three micronutrients minerals vitamins and cholesterol in greece according to the empirical results the age of the household head the degree of urbanization the percentage of food expenditure devoted to food away from home and the per capita consumption expenditure affect the intakes of nutrients across all the five quantiles considered the impact however of the household head s gender and the impact of his her educational achievement are located only at the lower and the higher quantiles respectively the expenditure elasticities are substantially lower than unity suggesting inelastic responses of nutrient intakes to per capita consumption expenditure

dietary fiber intake away from home and at home in the united states abstract this paper examines the impact of socio economic and demographic factors on individual intake of dietary fiber in both the away from home and at home markets empirical results generally indicated that height region sex diet status household size age and income significantly affect dietary fiber intake away from home on the other hand weight urbanization region race ethnicity sex diet status household size day of consumption age and income significantly affect dietary fiber intake at home knowledge of the influence of sociodemographic factors provides food policy makers with information necessary for the design and implementation of nutrition programs dealing with dietary fiber intake

existing food policies and their relationship to hunger and nutrition the federal government subsidizes either partially or fully 95 million meals each day through the food assistance programs u s department of agriculture usda 1984 despite the scope and cost of the food assistance programs table 1 recent studies have concluded that the incidence of hunger in the united states is increasing porter and washington chou 1 although there is general agreement that hunger reemerged in the united states during the 1980s there is much controversy regarding the extent of hunger the physician task force on hunger in america estimated that 20 million americans suffer from hunger at least some time each month but the president s task force on food assistance indicated that it is currently impossible to estimate the extent of hunger because of the absence of reliable data the objectives of this paper are twofold a to review current food programs and policies and their objectives relative to existing nutritional and hunger problems and b to appraise the existing food assistance programs based on their stated objectives this discussion is not intended to be a thorough discourse on key elements of food policy but is designed to highlight developments in food policy relating to the food assistance programs nutrition and hunger recent developments in food assistance programs

investigating sensitivity and the impact of information on pricing decisions in an m m 1 queueing model we consider a model for optimal pricing for a job shop the problem is formulated as a single server queueing model where an arriving customer enters the system if his reward drawn from a stochastic variable exceeds the sum of the price charge of his job plus the expected waiting costs the optimal price is found with respect to profit optimization and welfare optimization two models are formulated the first model called ninf contains only steady state queue information the other model called ql contains more detailed information because here an arriving customer is informed about the number of customers already in the system the main interpretation of the models is how complex an information system should the job shop provide to its customers we show that for both criteria functions it pays off except for a special case to use the more detailed information system in the paper we also investigate how sensitive the pricing decision and its outcome on the criteria functions are on the variance of the reward distribution which in the paper is assumed to be uniformly distributed concerning welfare optimization we show that a decreased variance always results in a decreased welfare contribution while concerning profit optimization a decreased variance can result in both a decreased as well as an increased profit contribution

food expenditures and household demographic composition in the us a demand systems approach food expenditures and subsistence quantities of poverty status and non poverty status us households are analysed within a linear expenditure system that postulates subsistence quantities to be linear combinations of demographic variables using the us bureau of labor statistics 1992 consumer expenditure survey and detailed monthly consumer price indices this article obtains expenditure elasticities own price elasticities and subsistence quantities for each income group across nine broadly aggregated food commodity groups elasticity estimates and subsistence quantity estimates differ across income groups supporting the premise that policies targeted at specific income groups should be based on the target group s elasticity estimates rather than average population elasticities parameter estimates are then used to simulate how subsistence quantities and own price elasticities can be expected to vary according to the demographic composition of the household within a specific income group

estimation of complete demand systems from household budget data the linear and quadratic expenditure systems in this paper we explore two issues in empirical demand analysis the estimation of complete systems of demand equations using household budget data section i and the incorporation of demographic characteristics into such systems section ii although there are numerous studies which use time series data to estimate complete demand systems and many which estimate engel curves from household budget data there are virtually none which combine budget data from different periods to estimate complete systems since each budget study corresponds to a single price situation one might conjecture that estimation of complete systems would not be possible unless budget studies were available from a large number of periods this is incorrect in section i we argue that interesting complete demand systems can be estimated from a small number of budget studies despite the limited price variability represented in such data to demonstrate this we use budget study data for two periods to estimate a pair of related demand systems the familiar linear expenditure system les and a quadratic expenditure system qes a generalization of les in which the demand equations are quadratic in total expenditure the inclusion of demographic variables in the analysis of household consumption patterns is desirable because there are likely to be systematic differences in the consumption behavior of households with different demographic characteristics but the effects of demographic characteristics have seldom been studied within the framework of complete demand systems in section ii we propose translating as a general method for incorporating demographic variables into complete systems of demand equations this method has not previously been discussed as a general technique for bringing demographic variables into demand systems although it has been employed in several studies to improve the estimates of the les and the qes presented in section i we reestimate these two systems using translating to incorporate family size

the impact of food stamps on food expenditures rejection of the traditional model for food stamp recipients whose normal food purchases exceed their coupon allotment the traditional economic model predicts that the impact of food stamps on food spending will be the same as for an equal cash transfer the tobit analysis in this study indicates that for these recipients food stamps have a substantially greater impact on at home food expenditures than an equal amount of cash income these results reject the traditional model several possible explanations of this behavior are discussed

dietary effects of the food stamp program based on data from the 1979 80 survey of food consumption in low income households this paper estimates the effects of changes in cash income and the food stamp benefit on household nutrient availability while controlling for two potential sources of selection bias the major finding of the empirical analysis is that the estimated dietary effects of changes in food stamp benefits are considerably larger than those resulting from changes in cash income with estimates of the ratios of the mpc for the food stamp benefit to the cash income mpc ranging from three to seven across nutrients no significant evidence of selection bias was found and the estimated dietary effects of food stamp benefits from the selection bias models are similar to those from the basic model estimated by ordinary least squares regression