This book presents a theoretical treatment of externalities (i.e. uncompensated interdependencies), public goods, and club goods. The new edition updates and expands the discussion of externalities and their implications, coverage of asymmetric information, underlying game-theoretic formulations, and intuitive and graphical presentations. Aimed at well-prepared undergraduates and graduate students making a serious foray into this branch of economics, the analysis should also interest professional economists wishing to survey recent advances in the field. No other single source for the range of materials explored is currently available. Topics investigated include Nash equilibrium, Lindahl equilibria, club theory, preference-revelation mechanism, Pigouvian taxes, the commons, Coase Theorem, and static and repeated games. The authors use mathematical techniques only as much as necessary to pursue the economic argument. They develop key principles of public economics that are useful for subfields such as public choice, labor economics, economic growth, international economics, environmental and natural resource economics, and industrial organization.
Sercan Demir, Mehmet Akif Gunduz, Fatih Cura
et al.
Environmental turbulence, which reflects the degree of complexity, volatility, and unpredictability of the external environment, impacts the performance of logistics service providers (LSPs) and has become vital for LSPs in recent years. Managers depend on logistics capabilities to hedge themselves against environmental turbulence. However, most managers are unaware of the relationship between logistics capabilities and different types of environmental turbulence. This study examines the association between logistics capabilities and environmental turbulence (market, competitive, technological, and regulatory) by adopting a hybrid Fuzzy CRITIC & Fuzzy TAOV method, a Multiple Criteria Decision Making setting. Analysis revealed that technological turbulence has the highest objective weight, followed by competitive, market, and regulatory turbulences. The most desired capabilities are flexibility and agility, followed by resilience, responsiveness, sustainability, robustness, and visibility in order to weather the storm of general environmental turbulence. More specifically, flexibility is essential for managing market turbulence. In response to competitive and regulatory volatility, managers must prioritize agility, while technological turbulence necessitates visibility. The proposed framework guides logistics managers in making strategic decisions regarding the relationship between logistics capabilities and environmental turbulence, and it qualifies as the first endeavor to examine the prominence of logistics capabilities with environmental turbulence.
Background: In many rural towns, especially in developing countries, the collapse or absence of formal public transport systems has led to the rise in informal mobility services. Informal transport serves as an innovative solution for mobility at the grassroots level and an entrepreneurial avenue that addresses the transport gap whilst providing income opportunities in economically disadvantaged areas.
Objectives: This study explores informal transport operators’ perspectives on how the informal transport mode Mushikashika supports local enterprises and provides everyday mobility in rural towns in Zimbabwe, whilst also examining gendered vulnerability.
Method: In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 21 informal transport operators to explore their experiences, challenges and perspectives within the transport sector.
Results: The findings show how informal transport adapts to evolving mobility needs, revealing its potential for grassroots innovation in underserved areas. Informal transport provides livelihoods for operators and sustains informal economies, such as street vending; however, it also exposes vulnerabilities, particularly for women who face safety risks and harassment in unregulated spaces.
Conclusion: This study highlights how informal transport systems can adopt local innovation, inclusive mobility and resilient economic activities in underserved areas. This study advocates recognising Mushikashika within the broader transport system in rural towns.
Contribution: This study contributes to debates on informal transport and everyday mobility provision in contexts where formal public transport is absent, using evidence from rural Zimbabwe. This study also contributes to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities).
Shipment of goods. Delivery of goods, Transportation and communications
The evolution of cooperation is a central enigma in evolutionary game theory. Traditionally, the combination of pairwise networks and repeated Public Goods Games with a single state fails to adequately describe realistic group interaction scenarios. On the one hand, pairwise networks lack clear group definitions. On the other hand, a participant's decision affects not only competitors' fitness but also the state of the surrounding environment. To address this problem, we propose a Public Goods Game with game transition mechanisms based on Uniform Random Hypergraphs. In our model, game groups formed by hyperedges transition between two types of games, one with abundant public resources and the other with scarce public resources. The transition probability is closely related to the strategies of players within the hyperedges. By developing a Monte Carlo simulation framework that incorporates payoff accumulation, strategy imitation, and game state transitions, we aim to reveal the coevolutionary patterns of strategies and game states in group interactions. Our study highlights a nonlinear relationship between defection sensitivity and cooperation frequency under game transitions, as well as the asymmetric effects of the two sensitivities in state-dependent transitions. These observations open new directions for how to approach social dilemmas.
Spatial public goods games model collective dilemmas where individual payoffs depend on population-level strategy configurations. Most existing studies rely on evolutionary update rules or value-based reinforcement learning methods. These approaches struggle to represent payoff coupling and non-stationarity in large interacting populations. This work introduces Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) into spatial public goods games for the first time. In these games, individual returns are intrinsically coupled through overlapping group interactions. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) treats agents as independent learners and ignores this coupling during value estimation. MAPPO addresses this limitation through a centralized critic that evaluates joint strategy configurations. To study neighborhood-level cooperation signals under this framework, we propose MAPPO with Local Cooperation Reward, termed MAPPO-LCR. The local cooperation reward aligns policy updates with surrounding cooperative density without altering the original game structure. MAPPO-LCR preserves decentralized execution while enabling population-level value estimation during training. Extensive simulations demonstrate stable cooperation emergence and reliable convergence across enhancement factors. Statistical analyses further confirm the learning advantage of MAPPO over PPO in spatial public goods games.
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible items and a desirable heterogeneous divisible good (i.e., cake) to agents with additive utilities. In our paper, each indivisible item can be a good that yields non-negative utilities to some agents and a chore that yields negative utilities to the other agents. Given a fixed set of divisible and indivisible resources, we investigate almost envy-free allocations, captured by the natural fairness concept of envy-freeness for mixed resources (EFM). It requires that an agent $i$ does not envy another agent $j$ if agent $j$'s bundle contains any piece of cake yielding positive utility to agent $i$ (i.e., envy-freeness), and agent $i$ is envy-free up to one item (EF1) towards agent $j$ otherwise. We prove that with indivisible items and a cake, an EFM allocation always exists for any number of agents with additive utilities.
When dividing items among agents, two of the most widely studied fairness notions are envy-freeness and proportionality. We consider a setting where $m$ chores are allocated to $n$ agents and the disutility of each chore for each agent is drawn from a probability distribution. We show that an envy-free allocation exists with high probability provided that $m \ge 2n$, and moreover, $m$ must be at least $n+Θ(n)$ in order for the existence to hold. On the other hand, we prove that a proportional allocation is likely to exist as long as $m = ω(1)$, and this threshold is asymptotically tight. Our results reveal a clear contrast with the allocation of goods, where a larger number of items is necessary to ensure existence for both notions.
Obstacles on railroads significantly increase the risk of traveling with a lot of train accidents caused by undetected obstacles. The obstacles disturb both the shipments of goods and the transportation of people leading to delays and damage which then result in substantial financial losses. Following natural disasters, manually locating and removing obstacles is not only time-consuming but also hazardous for the personnel involved. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an object detection system that can be implemented on an aerial drone to detect obstacles on the railway. This approach aims to enhance railway safety, reduce costs, and ensure the timely delivery of essential goods such as food and medical supplies during emergencies.
Oki Widhi Nugroho, R. H. A. Tanisri, A. V. Prasmoro
et al.
The metal manufacturing industry's supply chain faces problems with inaccurate sales demand analysis, with a 9% discrepancy between forecasted and actual demand. Production activity times are 23% inconsistent with established plans. Shipments of goods are inconsistent with sales orders, preventing the metal company from achieving its delivery targets. This study aims to analyze supply chain performance measurements and provide suggestions for improvements to the results of these measurements. This research method combines the Supply Chain Operation Reference (SCOR) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) methods. This study identified 17 selected performance indicators and prioritized attributes, namely reliability, responsiveness, and agility. The results of data processing through performance indicator weighting yielded a total SCM performance score of 90.90, with 5 performance indicators requiring improvement. Therefore, the proposed improvements focus more on these 5 dominant indicators. The contribution of this study to the analysis of SCOR and AHP performance measurements is that companies are expected to maximize their supply chains, thereby increasing industrial productivity and gaining a competitive advantage.
Ukrainian sunflower oil shipments in March 2024 amounted to 608 thousand tons - at the level of the previous two months and 16% more than last year. In total, for the first seven months of the 2024 season, Ukrainian companies exported 3.8 million tons of sunflower oil, compared to 3.2 million tons a year ago (+18.7%). One of the ways of transporting goods is delivery using logistics centers. The advantage of this option is that it is possible to reduce the stock of finished products of the enterprise - manufacturer by transporting all finished products to the center and with low transportation costs. The disadvantages of this option are the high direct costs that suppliers of goods bear to numerous consumers - customers of goods. On the basis of the developed experimental plan, painted according to the determined maximum and minimum values of the arguments, the linear influence of factors on the time of sunflower oil transportation was considered. The R-squared coefficient is one of the most effective estimates of the adequacy of the regression model. In the case of a linear model without an independent variable, the R2 coefficient = 0.993, in the case of a linear model with an independent variable, R2 = 0.991, which means that the linear model without an independent variable is more accurate. The results obtained indicate a more rational use of a linear model without an independent variable for determining the costs of road transportation of sunflower oil in the direction Odesa - Ivano-Frankivsk. As a result of the experiment, it was established that there is a functional relationship between the inputs of the system of road transportation of sunflower oil in the direction Odesa - Ivano-Frankivsk and the outputs. This confirms the correctness of the previous analysis and the choice of the type of regression model.
The article describes reasons for transition of small shipments from railway transport to automobile one and studies proposals to return highly-profitable shot lots back to the railway transport. Today we can observe a rise in the volume of shot lots and joint goods that are delivered by automobile transport. The authors analyzed global experience of transporting shot lots in mid-ton containers. Analysis of market of joint goods transporters showed that serious impact for choosing forwarder is exercised by speed of delivery. Study of existing technologies of goods transportation by speedy cargo trains was carried out, which showed the necessity to choose for shot lots transportation such technology, which could allow railway transport to compete with automobile one not only at long distances but at short legs as well. The authors proposed to use new intermodal transport cargo units: 5- and 10- foot mid-ton module and 10-and 20-foot pick-up body to transport shot lots. Issues of tariffing goods transportation in new intermodal transport units were analyzed and the use of through tariff rate was grounded.
The authors discuss the problems of functioning of soap factories in the conditions of the siege of Leningrad, representing the perfumery and cosmetics industry of the food industry. Attention is paid to the range of products manufactured by enterprises, the peculiarities of the raw material base. The conditions that provoked the decline in production, the deterioration of product quality and the narrowing of the range of manufactured goods have been studied. Attention is focused on the search for fat substitutes and the use of the company's equipment to open new areas of activity that take into account the circumstances of wartime. The interaction of the USSR Drug Food Industry and the special commission of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on food supply of Leningrad in connection with the supply of food raw materials and foodstuffs to the blockaded city is analyzed. The intention of the central government bodies to include household soap in shipments of food products to ensure timely card delivery to the population and replenishment of supplies has been revealed. And also to send railway trains with vegetable oil to Leningrad to create raw materials for soap-making enterprises. The article considers the practices of household detergents and attempts by the population to use soap as an exchange tool to expand the food ration. The features of personal hygiene of blockade runners in conditions of acute shortage of detergents and interruptions in the work of baths are characterized. The conclusion is made about the progressive difficulties in maintaining soap production in the conditions of the blockade of the city. Despite the efforts of the management of enterprises to find substitutes for raw materials and change technological processes, the complete exhaustion of even conditionally suitable materials for soap production could not allow the restoration of detergent production with the start of electricity supply to plants.
The increasing trend of technological advancement has led to significant changes in how customers purchase goods. Currently, buying products can be done most effectively from the comfort of one’s home through online shopping. Customers send and receive thousands of shipments daily, contributing to many materials and packaging that go to waste. While environmental sustainability is becoming increasingly important in all industries, little is known about the factors that drive e-commerce enterprises to adopt green logistical practices. The current study aims to identify the factors that have the most significance in creating sustainable e-commerce in the future of logistics and marketing. This study performed a statewide online seller survey in the Philippines to acquire data on product characteristics, including how internal processes and external partnerships are used and perceived to minimize the carbon footprint connected with order fulfillment and delivery. It encompassed a sample of 286 online sellers nationwide and employed structural equation modeling to identify the factors influencing green logistics practices within the e-commerce industry. The findings underscore that technology has a positive relationship in fostering sustainability. The results also establish significant positive correlations between sustainable e-commerce practices, government laws, seller behavior, and reverse logistics. Notably, this research sheds light on the intricate dynamics of drivers promoting green logistics within the Philippine e-commerce landscape.
Christoph Martius, Emin Çağatay Nakilcioğlu, Maximilian Reimann
et al.
Maritime transport serves as a critical component of global trade and logistics, enabling the movement of goods and resources across oceans and waterways. Especially in busy waterways and ports, effective and accurate communication is essential, as it ensures the seamless exchange of information and the coordinated execution of port activities. However, comprehensibility is often hindered by factors such as poor audio quality, background noise, and diverse languages and accents. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems can mitigate these issues by providing real-time transcription and enabling the implementation of automated, value-adding services to enhance situational awareness. While pre-trained ASR models excel on general speech, maritime ASR faces unique challenges due to a lack of annotated data, diverse accents, and specialized terminology.To this end, we focus on improving the transcription quality of pre-trained ASR models for maritime communication with a particular focus on accurately recognizing maritime-specific terminology such as vessel and location names. Due to the scarcity of transcribed maritime communication, we create a synthetic training dataset tailored to regional maritime terminology. The synthetic audio is augmented with general human speech and used to fine-tune an end-to-end ASR model under various settings. The evaluation of the models employs a proprietary dataset of regional maritime radio communication from the port of Hamburg.The experimental results demonstrate a notable enhancement in ASR performance. Specifically, our approach yields an absolute improvement over the pre-trained baseline of 13.46% Word-Error-Rate and an increase of 41.57% recall for vessel names and 38.65% recall for locations. Our findings underscore the efficacy of integrating synthetic training data to address the challenges encountered in maritime ASR, paving the way for more robust and accurate speech recognition systems tailored to maritime applications.
Understanding the emergence of cooperation in social networks has advanced through pairwise interactions, but the corresponding theory for group-based public goods games (PGGs) remains less explored. Here, we provide theoretical conditions under which cooperation thrives in PGGs on arbitrary population structures, which are accurate under weak selection. We find that a class of networks that would otherwise fail to produce cooperation, such as star graphs, are particularly conducive to cooperation in PGGs. More generally, PGGs can support cooperation on almost all networks, which is robust across all kinds of model details. This fundamental advantage of PGGs derives from self-reciprocity realized by group separations and from clustering through second-order interactions. We also apply PGGs to empirical networks, which shows that PGGs could be a promising interaction mode for the emergence of cooperation in real-world systems.
Deploying an algorithmically informed policy is a significant intervention in society. Prominent methods for algorithmic fairness focus on the distribution of predictions at the time of training, rather than the distribution of social goods that arises after deploying the algorithm in a specific social context. However, requiring a "fair" distribution of predictions may undermine efforts at establishing a fair distribution of social goods. First, we argue that addressing this problem requires a notion of prospective fairness that anticipates the change in the distribution of social goods after deployment. Second, we provide formal conditions under which this change is identified from pre-deployment data. That requires accounting for different kinds of performative effects. Here, we focus on the way predictions change policy decisions and, consequently, the causally downstream distribution of social goods. Throughout, we are guided by an application from public administration: the use of algorithms to predict who among the recently unemployed will remain unemployed in the long term and to target them with labor market programs. Third, using administrative data from the Swiss public employment service, we simulate how such algorithmically informed policies would affect gender inequalities in long-term unemployment. When risk predictions are required to be "fair" according to statistical parity and equality of opportunity, targeting decisions are less effective, undermining efforts to both lower overall levels of long-term unemployment and to close the gender gap in long-term unemployment.
The existence of $\textsf{EFX}$ allocations stands as one of the main challenges in discrete fair division.In this paper, we present symmetrical results on the existence of $\textsf{EFX}$ and its approximate variations for two distinct valuations: restricted additive valuations and $(p,q)$-bounded valuations introduced by Christodoulou \etal \cite{christodoulou2023fair}. In a $(p,q)$-bounded instance, each good has relevance for at most $p$ agents, and any pair of agents shares at most $q$ common relevant goods. We show that instances with $(\infty,1)$-bounded valuations admit $\textsf{EF2X}$ allocations and $\textsf{EFX}$ allocations with at most $\lfloor {n}/{2} \rfloor - 1$ discarded goods, mirroring results for the restricted additive setting \cite{akrami2022ef2x}. We also present ${({\sqrt{2}}/{2})\textsf{-EFX}}$ algorithms for both restricted additive and $(\infty,1)$-bounded subadditive settings. The symmetry of these results suggests these valuations share symmetric structures. Building on this, we propose an $\textsf{EFX}$ allocation for restricted additive valuations when $p=2$ and $q=\infty$. To achieve these results, we further develop the rank concept introduced by Farhadi \etal \cite{farhadi2021almost} and introduce several new concepts such as virtual value, rankpath, and root, which advance the overall understanding of $\textsf{EFX}$ allocations. In addition, we suggest an updating rule based on the virtual values which we believe will lead to broader and more generalized results on $\textsf{EFX}$.
Mohammed Balfaqih, Zain Balfagih, Miltiadis Demetrios Lytras
et al.
The concept of a smart city is aimed at enhancing the quality of life for urban residents, and logistic services are a crucial component of this effort. Despite this, the logistics industry has encountered issues due to the exponential growth of logistics volumes, as well as the complexity of processes and lack of transparency. Consequently, it is necessary to develop an efficient management system that offers traceability and condition monitoring capabilities to ensure the safe and high-quality delivery of goods. Moreover, it is crucial to guarantee the accuracy and dependability of distribution data. In this context, this paper proposes a blockchain-enabled IoT logistics system for the efficient tracking and management of high-price shipments. A smart contract based on blockchain technology has been designed for automatic approval and payment, with the aim of distributing shipping information exclusively among legitimate logistics parties. To ensure authentication, a zero-knowledge proof is used to conceal the blockchain address. Moreover, an intelligent parcel (iParcel) containing piezoresistive sensors is developed to pack delivered goods during the shipping process for violation detection such as severe falls or theft. The iParcels are automatically tracked and traced, and if a violation occurs, the contract is cancelled, and payment is refunded. The transaction fee per party is reasonable, particularly for high-price products that guarantee successful shipment.
Jonas Mendes Constante, Peter W. de Langen, Salvador Furió Pruñonosa
Abstract The term ‘innovation ecosystem’ has become popular among stakeholders involved in innovation. The core idea is that innovation does not thrive through isolated actions of individual companies, but rather depends on a broad array of interrelated actors, institutions and policies. In this paper, we apply the concept of innovation ecosystems to ports by first providing a theoretical overview of its components and then comparing the efforts to build such an ecosystem in the port cities of Rotterdam and Valencia. Our main findings are as follows. First, the importance of innovation for the ability of ports to continue to create ‘value for society’ is widely acknowledged. Second, research and development (R&D) activities in both Rotterdam and Valencia are relatively limited and the dominant innovation challenge is the early application of new technologies developed outside the ports industry. Third, a ‘systemic approach’ is required to understand the innovation ecosystem in ports, given the strong interrelations among companies in the port and the need for broad coalitions to implement new technologies. Fourth and fifth, human capital formation and research cooperation, respectively, play a central role in improving the port innovation ecosystem. Finally, the ecosystem in Rotterdam is ‘distributed and connected’ while Valencia is more centralised.
Shipment of goods. Delivery of goods, Transportation and communications