KNOWING THE RIGHT PERSON IN THE RIGHT PLACE: POLITICAL CONNECTIONS AND RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

We use a political economy model of Schumpeterian growth with entry to investigate how an incumbent politician can strategically use the level of red tape to acquire incumbency advantage. By setting sufficiently high red tape, the politician induces the incumbent firm in the intermediate sector to invest in political connections, which are valued also by voters, who recognize that bureaucratic costs can be reduced by connected firms. Within this framework, we study the Markov perfect equilibria of an infinitely repeated game among politicians, firms, and voters, and show that all equilibria are characterized by investments in political connections and the re‐election of the incumbent politician. Political connections may prevent entry of advanced competitors and cause the economy to lag behind the technological frontier. Our model provides a possible explanation for the persistence of inefficient democracies and political barriers to technology development, where these reflect shared rather than conflicting interests.     

On beta type-1 distributed random points in an n-ball

This article considers the problem of finding the exact density of the r-content of the simplicial convex hull of r+1 independent points in Rⁿ ” Consider r+1 independent and identically distributed points in a unit n–ball such that p of them are in the interior and r+l?p of them are on the surface of the unit n-ball., Consider the case when each point is type-1 beta distributed,, These points determine almost surely via their convex hull a unique r-simplex in Rⁿ Ihe problem of getting the exact density of the r-content of this random r-simplex is transformed into a problem in multivariate statistical analysis connected with the distribution theory of test statistics., Thus various representations for the exact density are given in this article.     

Exact algorithms for scheduling programs with shared tasks

We study a scheduling problem where the jobs we have to perform are composed of one or more tasks. If two jobs sharing a non-empty subset of tasks are scheduled on the same machine, then these shared tasks have to be performed only once. This kind of problem is known in the literature under the names of VM-PACKING or PAGINATION. Our objective is to schedule a set of these objects on two parallel identical machines, with the aim of minimizing the makespan. This problem is NP-complete as an extension of the PARTITION problem. In this paper we present three exact algorithms with worst-case time-complexity guarantees, by exploring different branching techniques. Our first algorithm focuses on the relation between jobs sharing one or more symbols in common, whereas the two other algorithms branches on the shared symbols.