Consumption and Saving Behavior of Older and Younger Baby Boomers in Korea

The 1998 Korean Survey of Family Income and Expenditures was used to examine the overall consumption and saving behavior of Korean baby boomers and compared the differences in consumption and saving behavior between older and younger boomers. The t -test results indicated that the younger boomers allocated a significantly higher percentage of their expenditures on food away from home, household appliances, transportation and communication than did the older boomers, whereas the older boomers spent higher amounts and allocated larger budget shares on their children's education than did the younger boomers. The results of Ordinary Least-Squares (OLS) regression analysis showed that, holding other factors constant, older boomers not only spent significantly more in the total consumption expenditures and education expenditures, but older boomers also saved significantly less than did younger boomers.     

Computation of percentage points

In this note, it is proved that in computing percentage points of a distribution, Halley's method yields convergent solutions under most conditions, and we demonstrate the efficiency of the method with some examples.     

Fairness Among Servers When Capacity Decisions Are Endogenous

We look at a simple service system with two servers serving arriving jobs (single class). Our interest is in examining the effect of routing policies on servers when they care about fairness among themselves, and when they can endogenously choose capacities in response to the routing policy. Therefore, we study the two‐server game where the servers’ objective functions have a term explicitly modeling fairness. Moreover, we focus on four commonly seen policies that are from one general class. Theoretical results concerning the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium are proved for some policies. Further managerial insights are given based on simulation studies on servers’ equilibrium/off‐equilibrium behaviors and the resulting system efficiency performance under different policies.     

Maximum penalized likelihood estimation of mixed proportional hazard models

Unobservable individual effects in models of duration will cause estimation bias that include the structural parameters as well as the duration dependence. The maximum penalized likelihood estimator is examined as an estimator for the survivor model with heterogeneity. Proofs of the existence and uniqueness of the maximum penalized likelihood estimator in duration model with general forms of unobserved heterogeneity are provided. Some small sample evidence on the behavior of the maximum penalized likelihood estimator is given. The maximum penalized likelihood estimator is shown to be computationally feasible and to provide reasonable estimates in most cases.     

Inspecting a Vital Component Needed upon Emergency

We consider a stochastically failing component that will be needed at a random future time when an emergency occurs. If the component is not operational at that time, the system incurs a large penalty, which we want to avoid through inspections and replacements. We propose a model and solution algorithm for finding an inspection policy that minimizes the infinite horizon discounted expected penalty, replacement, and inspection costs. We also discuss structural properties of the solution, as well as insights based on numerical results.     

Contents to Volume 15, 2002

Volume Contents

Contents to Volume 15, 2002     

Weighting variables in K-means clustering

The aim of this study is to assign weights w ₁, …, w _m to m clustering variables Z ₁, …, Z _m , so that k groups were uncovered to reveal more meaningful within-group coherence. We propose a new criterion to be minimized, which is the sum of the weighted within-cluster sums of squares and the penalty for the heterogeneity in variable weights w ₁, …, w _m . We will present the computing algorithm for such k-means clustering, a working procedure to determine a suitable value of penalty constant and numerical examples, among which one is simulated and the other two are real.     

Nonparametric estimation of a log-variance function in scale-space

In a nonparametric regression setting, we consider the kernel estimation of the logarithm of the error variance function, which might be assumed to be homogeneous or heterogeneous. The objective of the present study is to discover important features in the variation of the data at multiple locations and scales based on a nonparametric kernel smoothing technique. Traditional kernel approaches estimate the function by selecting an optimal bandwidth, but it often turns out to be unsatisfying in practice. In this paper, we develop a SiZer (SIgnificant ZERo crossings of derivatives) tool based on a scale-space approach that provides a more flexible way of finding meaningful features in the variation. The proposed approach utilizes local polynomial estimators of a log-variance function using a wide range of bandwidths. We derive the theoretical quantile of confidence intervals in SiZer inference and also study the asymptotic properties of the proposed approach in scale-space. A numerical study via simulated and real examples demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed SiZer tool.     

Visualization of multidimensional data using modifications of the Grand Tour

Current implementations of Asimov's Grand Tour (for example in XLISP-STAT by Tierney, 1990, or in XGobi by Buja et al., 1996) do not remember the path of projections and show only the current state during the touring process. We propose a modification of the Grand Tour, named Tracking Grand Tour (TGT), that shows the trace of the touring process as small 'comet trails' of the projected points. The usefulness of the TGT is demonstrated with a simulated and a real data set.     

Detection of a change point with local polynomial fits for the random design case

Regression functions may have a change or discontinuity point in the ν th derivative function at an unknown location. This paper considers a method of estimating the location and the jump size of the change point based on the local polynomial fits with one‐sided kernels when the design points are random. It shows that the estimator of the location of the change point achieves the rate n^?1/(2ν+1) when ν is even. On the other hand, when ν is odd, it converges faster than the rate n^?1/(2ν+1) due to a property of one‐sided kernels. Computer simulation demonstrates the improved performance of the method over the existing ones.