Economics is the study of the allocation of resources. Since Arrow's Fundamental Welfare Theorems, we know that competitive-markets achieve Pareto allocations when governments correct market failures. Thus, it has largely been the mission of economists to serve as 'Market Engineers': To identify and quantify market failures so the government can implement Pareto-improving policy (make everyone better without making anyone worse). Do Pareto- improving policies get implemented? How does policy become implemented? Achieving a Pareto efficient allocation of a nation's resources requires studying the implementation of policy, and therefore studying the allocation of political resources that influence policy. Policy implementation begins with the electoral process. In this dissertation, I use auction analysis, econometrics, and game theory to study political resource allocations in the electoral process. This dissertation consists of three research papers: Finance-Augmented Median-Voter Model, Vote Empirics, and Colonel Blotto Strategies. The Finance-Augmented Median-Voter Model postulates that candidates' campaign expenditures are bids in a first-price asymmetric all-pay auction in order to explain campaign expenditure behavior. Vote Empirics empirically analyzes the impacts of campaign expenditures, incumbency status, and district voter registration statistics on observed vote-share results from the 2004 congressional election. Colonel Blotto Strategies postulates that parties' campaign allocations across congressional districts may be a version of the classic Col Blotto game from Game Theory. While some equilibrium strategies and equilibrium payoffs have been identified, this paper completely characterizes players' optimal strategies. In total, this dissertation solves candidates' optimal campaign expenditure strategies when campaign expenditures are bids in an all-pay auction. The analysis demonstrates the need for understanding exactly the impacts of various factors, including strategic expenditures, on final vote results. The research uses econometric techniques to identify the effects. Last, the research derives the complete characterization of Col Blotto strategies. Discussed extensions provide testable predictions for cross-district Party contributions. I present this research not as a final statement to the literature, but in hopes that future research will continue its explanation of political resource allocation. An even greater hope is that in time this literature will be used to identify optimal "policy-influencing policies"; constitutional election policies that provide for the implementation of Pareto-improving government policies. / text

Vyriausybės programa- tai Vyriausybės veiklos pagrindas. Vyriausybė savo veiklos programoje įtvirtina esmines finansų politikos kryptis ir gaires, kuriomis vadovaujamasi įgyvendinant šalies finansų politiką. Tačiau tikėtina, kad egzistuoja prieštaravimas tarp Vyriausybių programose įtvirtintų finansinių nuostatų ir jų praktinio įgyvendinimo. Taigi, egzistuoja Vyriausybių programų finansinių nuostatų atitikimo jų įgyvendinimui praktikoje problema. Būtent tai paskatino šiame darbe tyrinėti Lietuvos Respublikos Vyriausybių programose įtvirtintas finansines nuostatas bei jų įgyvendinimą. Šio darbo tikslas yra nustatyti, kurios iš 1999-2006 metų Lietuvos Respublikos Vyriausybių program�� finansinės nuostatos bei kokia apimtimi buvo įgyvendintos praktikoje. Tyrimas atliktas naudojant dokumentų analizės, lyginimo bei statistinės analizės metodus. Atlikus tyrimą, paaiškėjo 1999-2006 metų LR Vyriausybių programose įtvirtintos finansinės nuostatos nebuvo pilnai įgyvendintos. / The Cabinet's policy serves as the grounds of the Cabinet's activity. The Cabinet fixes the essential directions and landmarks of the State's financial policy, which it refers to while implementing the financial policy of the country, in the program of its activity. However, it is likely that discrepancy between the financial provisions, fixed in the Cabinets' programs, and their practical implementation exists. Thus, the problem of conformity of the financial provisions, fixed in the Cabinets' programs, and of their practical implementation exists. It's particularly this circumstance, which prompted the author to investigate the financial provisions, fixed in the programs of the Cabinets of the Republic of Lithuania, and their implementation. The present thesis aimed at ascertaining which financial provisions, fixed in the programs of the Cabinets of the Republic of Lithuania within the years 1999-2006, and to which extent were implemented in practice. The investigation was carried out by analyzing the documents, by applying the comparative and the statistical analysis methods. After having carried out the investigation, it was revealed that the financial provisions, fixed in the programs of the Cabinets of the Republic of Lithuania within the years 1999-2006, were not implemented to the full extent.

Resource management is important for network design and deployment. Resource management and allocation have been studied under a wide variety of scenarios --- routing in wired networks, scheduling in cellular networks, multiplexing, switching, and channel access in opportunistic networks are but a few examples. In this dissertation, we revisit resource management in the context of routing and scheduling in multihop wireless networks and pricing in single resource systems. The first issue addressed is of delays in multihop wireless networks. The resource under contention is capacity which is allocated by a joint routing and scheduling algorithm. Delay in wireless networks is a key issue gaining interest with the growth of interactive applications and proliferation of wireless networks. We start with an investigation of the back-pressure algorithm (BPA), an algorithm that activates the schedule with the largest sum of link weights in a timeslot. Though the BPA is throughput-optimal, it has poor end-to-end delays. Our investigation identifies poor routing decisions at low loads as one cause for it. We improve the delay performance of max-weight algorithms by proposing a general framework for routing and scheduling algorithms that allow directing packets towards the sink node dynamically. For a stationary environment, we explicitly formulate delay minimization as a static problem while maintaining stability. We see similar improved delay performance with the advantage of reduced per time-slot complexity. Next, the issue of pricing for flow based models is studied. The increasing popularity of cloud computing and the ease of commerce over the Internet is making pricing a key issue requiring greater attention. Although pricing has been extensively studied in the context of maximizing revenue and fairness, we take a different perspective and investigate pricing with predictability. Prior work has studied resource allocations that link insensitivity and predictability. In this dissertation, we present a detailed analysis of pricing under insensitive allocations. We study three common pricing models --- fixed rate pricing, Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auctions, and congestion-based pricing, and provide the expected operator revenue and user payments under them. A pre-payment scheme is also proposed where users pay on arrival a fee for their estimated service costs. Such a mechanism is shown to have lower variability in payments under fixed rate pricing and VCG auctions while generating the same long-term revenue as in a post-payment scheme, where users pay the exact charge accrued during their sojourn. Our formulation and techniques further the understanding of pricing mechanisms and decision-making for the operator.

Thesis (Master').

Esse estudo tem como objetivo investigar o comportamento da oferta de trabalho dos cônjuges brasileiros e verificar o grau de adequação desse em relação a um modelo específico dentro da abordagem coletiva (\'collective models\'). O modelo coletivo de oferta de trabalho com fatores distributivos oferece uma estrutura teórica para interpretar o processo decisório intra-familiar e seus resultados, as alocações de consumo e oferta de trabalho das famílias, que são Pareto eficientes por hipótese. Fatores distributivos são variáveis que afetam a decisão sobre oferta de trabalho, mas não tem impactos sobre as preferências nem a restrição orçamentária das famílias. As informações relativas à amostra de famílias brasileiras foram obtidas a partir da PNAD e da Estatística de Registros Civis, ambas para o ano de 2004. Os resultados não rejeitam as restrições derivadas do modelo coletivo, tanto em sua forma geral quanto na versão restrita pela imposição de preferências egoístas. Além disso, as variáveis adotadas como fatores distributivos, sex-ratio e \'participação em divórcios\', influenciam, de forma significativa e condizente com a teoria, a oferta de trabalho de maridos e esposas. / This paper has as objective to investigate the Brazilian spouses\' labor supply behavior and to empirically check the adequacy of a specific collective model. The collective labor supply model with distribution factors offers a theoretical structure to interpret the intra-household decision process and its results, the families\' choices of consumption and labor supply, who are Pareto efficient. Distribution factors are variables that affect the labor supply decision, but do not have impacts on the preference relations nor the budget constraint of the families. The sample of Brazilian families had been gotten from the \"PNAD\" and \"Estatística de Registros Civis\", for the year of 2004. The results do not reject the restrictions derived from the collective model, neither in its general form nor in the egoisti preferences form. Moreover, distribution factors, sex-ratio and \'participação em divórcios\', are found to affect labor supply of husbands and wives in the directions predicted by the theory and to be statistically significant.

Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis considers whether donor countries that contribute with foreign aid to a recipientcountry also contribute with peacekeeping troops. The question is premised on the idea thatforeign aid serves as a proxy for national interest. Employing rigorous regression analysis witha high-dimensional fixed effects linear estimator, the study analyses a comprehensive datasetof country dyads that covers 30 year (1990-2019) and comprises 157 donor/origin countriesand 43 recipient/destination countries. I find a positive and significant relationship betweenforeign aid and troop, indicating that that sending foreign aid to a country is positivelyassociated with an increase in sending peacekeeping troops to that country.

No description available.

The work deals with allocations of financial resources redistributing by European Union Structural funds for the running program period 2007-2013. The theoretical part describes all funds in Czech Republic, creation of application and confirmation of the application. It tries to find the mistakes, which the applicants often do and it indicates, what is the best way to prevent them. The main thesis of Structural funds is balancing economical differences particulars regions. The work describes particular allocations for NUTS II regions and their actual level of money ran out. To adjust a difference between particular regions, the poorest region should get the most of financial resources. Conclusion of the work describes, the financial resources do not redistribute in a way to minimize the economic differences between the regions, and conversely it tends to their bigger differences.

Nous considérons dans cette thèse le problème dotpimisation dun schéma de codage/décodage JPEG et le post-traitement de réduction des effets de blocs dans les images codées par JPEG.<br />Nous proposons tout dabord le filtrage de Wiener comme optimisation du banc de filtres de synthèse pour une distorsion minimale et nous cherchons par la suite une quantifcation optimisée. Lalgorithme itératif A1 réalise une optimisation conjointe des quantificateurs et du banc de filtres de synthèse. Les résultats experimentaux sur quelques images montrent que le gain total en terme de PSNR peut atteindre 1,36dB et les améliorations visuelles confirment ces résultats.<br />Enfin, nous proposons une nouvelle technique de réduction des effets de blocs basée sur la minimisation de lénergie haute fréquence du bruit de quantification. Lévaluation de lalgorithme B1montre une diminution des effets de blocs, et de nombreuses illustrations permettent dappréhender visuellement les performances de cette méthode.