Annual report

The Recycling Market Development Advisory Council is comprised of 14 governor-appointed members representing the recycling industry, government, higher education, solid waste industry and citizen affiliations. The Council is staffed by the South Carolina Department of Commerce. This report also provides information on RMDAC’s work plan, economic development data, resources and market information for the glass, paper, plastics, scrap tires, used oil, nonferrous aluminum and ferrous scrap metal industries.

Annual report

The Recycling Market Development Advisory Council is comprised of 14 governor-appointed members representing the recycling industry, government, higher education, solid waste industry and citizen affiliations. The Council is staffed by the South Carolina Department of Commerce. This report also provides information on RMDAC’s work plan, economic development data, resources and market information for the glass, paper, plastics, scrap tires, used oil, nonferrous aluminum and ferrous scrap metal industries.

2007 annual report

The Recycling Market Development Advisory Council is comprised of 14 governor-appointed members representing the recycling industry, government, higher education, solid waste industry and citizen affiliations. The Council is staffed by the South Carolina Department of Commerce. This report also provides information on RMDAC’s work plan, economic development data, resources and market information for the glass, paper, plastics, scrap tires, used oil, nonferrous aluminum and ferrous scrap metal industries.

2008 annual report

The Recycling Market Development Advisory Council is comprised of 14 governor-appointed members representing the recycling industry, government, higher education, solid waste industry and citizen affiliations. The Council is staffed by the South Carolina Department of Commerce. This report also provides information on RMDAC’s work plan, economic development data, resources and market information for the glass, paper, plastics, scrap tires, used oil, nonferrous aluminum and ferrous scrap metal industries.

2009 annual report

The Recycling Market Development Advisory Council is comprised of 14 governor-appointed members representing the recycling industry, government, higher education, solid waste industry and citizen affiliations. The Council is staffed by the South Carolina Department of Commerce. This report also provides information on RMDAC’s work plan, economic development data, resources and market information for the glass, paper, plastics, scrap tires, used oil, nonferrous aluminum and ferrous scrap metal industries.

2010 annual report

The Recycling Market Development Advisory Council is comprised of 14 governor-appointed members representing the recycling industry, government, higher education, solid waste industry and citizen affiliations. The Council is staffed by the South Carolina Department of Commerce. This report also provides information on RMDAC’s work plan, economic development data, resources and market information for the glass, paper, plastics, scrap tires, used oil, nonferrous aluminum and ferrous scrap metal industries.

2013 annual report

The Recycling Market Development Advisory Council is comprised of 14 governor-appointed members representing the recycling industry, government, higher education, solid waste industry and citizen affiliations. The Council is staffed by the South Carolina Department of Commerce. This report also provides information on RMDAC’s work plan, economic development data, resources and market information for the glass, paper, plastics, scrap tires, used oil, nonferrous aluminum and ferrous scrap metal industries.

2014 annual report

The Recycling Market Development Advisory Council is comprised of 14 governor-appointed members representing the recycling industry, government, higher education, solid waste industry and citizen affiliations. The Council is staffed by the South Carolina Department of Commerce. This report also provides information on RMDAC’s work plan, economic development data, resources and market information for the glass, paper, plastics, scrap tires, used oil, nonferrous aluminum and ferrous scrap metal industries.

UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER CHOICES IN SERVICE OUTSOURCING AND REVENUE MANAGEMENT

This dissertation investigates customer behavior modeling in service outsourcing and revenue management in the service sector (i.e., airline and hotel industries). In particular, it focuses on a common theme of improving firms’ strategic decisions through the understanding of customer preferences. Decisions concerning degrees of outsourcing, such as firms’ capacity choices, are important to performance outcomes. These choices are especially important in high-customer-contact services (e.g., airline industry) because of the characteristics of services: simultaneity of consumption and production, and intangibility and perishability of the offering. Essay 1 estimates how outsourcing affects customer choices and market share in the airline industry, and consequently the revenue implications from outsourcing. However, outsourcing decisions are typically endogenous. A firm may choose whether to outsource or not based on what a firm expects to be the best outcome. Essay 2 contributes to the literature by proposing a structural model which could capture a firm’s profit-maximizing decision-making behavior in a market. This makes possible the prediction of consequences (i.e., performance outcomes) of future strategic moves. Another emerging area in service operations management is revenue management. Choice-based revenue systems incorporate discrete choice models into traditional revenue management algorithms. To successfully implement a choice-based revenue system, it is necessary to estimate customer preferences as a valid input to optimization algorithms. The third essay investigates how to estimate customer preferences when part of the market is consistently unobserved. This issue is especially prominent in choice-based revenue management systems. Normally a firm only has its own observed purchases, while those customers who purchase from competitors or do not make purchases are unobserved. Most current estimation procedures depend on unrealistic assumptions about customer arriving. This study proposes a new estimation methodology, which does not require any prior knowledge about the customer arrival process and allows for arbitrary demand distributions. Compared with previous methods, this model performs superior when the true demand is highly variable.

Essays on Matching Markets and Their Equilibria

Matching theory and matching markets are a core component of modern economic theory and market design. This dissertation presents three original contributions to this area. The first essay constructs a matching mechanism in an incomplete information matching market in which the positive assortative match is the unique efficient and unique stable match. The mechanism asks each agent in the matching market to reveal her privately known type. Through its novel payment rule, truthful revelation forms an ex post Nash equilibrium in this setting. This mechanism works in one-, two- and many-sided matching markets, thus offering the first mechanism to unify these matching markets under a single mechanism design framework. The second essay confronts a problem of matching in an environment in which no efficient and incentive compatible matching mechanism exists due to matching externalities. I develop a two-stage matching game in which a contracting stage facilitates subsequent conditionally efficient and incentive compatible Vickrey auction stage. Infinite repetition of this two-stage matching game enforces the contract in every period. This mechanism produces inequitably distributed social improvement: parties to the contract receive all of the gains and then some. The final essay demonstrates the existence of prices which stably and efficiently partition a single set of agents into firms and workers, and match those two sets to each other. This pricing system extends Kelso and Crawford's general equilibrium results in a labor market matching model and links one- and two-sided matching markets as well.

Andamos - Agência de Marketing Digital para Micro Empresas e PMEs

Nos últimos anos, tem sido evidente o crescimento exponencial das novas tecnologias e da utilização frequente de plataformas digitais. A tendência de mercado é a continuação deste aumento, contribuindo para que cada vez mais, surjam prestações de serviços e vendas de produtos no âmbito digital. As agências ocupam um lugar de destaque neste tipo de oferta, no entanto, as mais pequenas tem por vezes dificuldade em subsistir, devido à maioria do seu target serem pequenas e médias empresas. Tendo em conta esta realidade, foi criado o projeto Andamos, que consiste na criação de uma agência de marketing digital, adequada à realidade portuguesa, sendo o seu target micro, pequenas e médias empresas, mas que consiga criar uma estrutura de custos muito reduzidos, potenciando um negócio viável e lucrativo. Nesse sentido, foi desenvolvido uma descrição de projeto, que pretende detalhar o mercado através de benchmark, desenvolver o planeamento estratégico, o plano de marketing e comunicação e o modelo de negócio. Com o intuito de sustentar a validade do projeto, foi efetuado numa primeira fase um estudo, utilizando um questionário segundo o método Delphi, que demonstrou com base nas respostas apuradas, que existe necessidade no mercado, justificando a existência da Andamos. Numa segunda fase foi estudada a viabilidade do projeto, através de um planeamento financeiro, utilizando o modelo FINICIA, do IAPMEI. Por conseguinte, foi possível analisar os indicadores mais importantes, como a TIR, VAL, cash flow e payback period, entre outros, que suportaram a exequibilidade do negócio e a sua capacidade de gerar lucro.

Essays on Financial Constraints, R&D Investments, and Competition

This dissertation consists of two chapters of theoretical studies that investigate the effect of financial constraints and market competition on research and development (R&D) investments. In the first chapter, I explore the impact of financial constraints on two different types of R&D investments. In the second chapter, I examine the impact of market competition on the relationship between financial constraints and R&D investments. In the first chapter, I develop a dynamic monopoly model to study a firm’s R&D strategy. Contrary to intuition, I show that a financially constrained firm may invest more aggressively in R&D projects than an unconstrained firm. Financial constraints introduce a risk that a firm may run out of money before its project bears fruit, which leads to involuntary termination on an otherwise positive-NPV project. For a company that relies on cash flow from assets in place to keep its R&D project alive, early success can be relatively important. I find that when the discovery process can be expedited by heavier investment (“accelerable” projects), a financially constrained company may find it optimal to “over”-invest in order to raise the probability of project survival. The over-investment will not happen if the project is only “scalable” (investment scales up payoffs). The model generates several testable implications regarding over-investment and project values. In the second chapter, I study the effects of competition on R&D investments in a duopoly framework. Using a homogeneous duopoly model where two unconstrained firms compete head to head in an R&D race, I find that competition has no effect on R&D investment if the project is not accelerable, and the competing firms are not constrained. In a heterogeneous duopoly model where a financially constrained firm competes against an unconstrained firm, I discover interesting strategic interactions that lead to preemption by the constrained firm in equilibrium. The unconstrained competitor responds to its constrained rival’s investment in an inverted-U shape fashion. When the constrained competitor has high cash flow risk, it accelerates the innovation in equilibrium, while the unconstrained firm invests less aggressively and waits for its rival to quit the race due to shortage of funds.

Public participation plan 2016 update

The Public Participation Plan provides direction for effective participation in the development of the South Carolina Department of Transportation’s (SCDOT) transportation plans and programs. For SCDOT’s stakeholders, the participation plan describes opportunities to participate in identifying the statewide priorities for transportation investments in South Carolina. Two major components of the statewide planning process are the Statewide Multimodal Transportation Plan and the State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP). The Statewide Multimodal Transportation Plan provides long-term guidance for the development of transportation programs and establishes strategies to achieve transportation goals for a 20-year period. The STIP is a short-term program that lists all roads, bridge, and transit projects scheduled for improvement based on available funding over a six-year period.

Development of Planning And Evaluation Models For Superstreets

Despite the extensive implementation of Superstreets on congested arterials, reliable methodologies for such designs remain unavailable. The purpose of this research is to fill the information gap by offering reliable tools to assist traffic professionals in the design of Superstreets with and without signal control. The entire tool developed in this thesis consists of three models. The first model is used to determine the minimum U-turn offset length for an Un-signalized Superstreet, given the arterial headway distribution of the traffic flows and the distribution of critical gaps among drivers. The second model is designed to estimate the queue size and its variation on each critical link in a signalized Superstreet, based on the given signal plan and the range of observed volumes. Recognizing that the operational performance of a Superstreet cannot be achieved without an effective signal plan, the third model is developed to produce a signal optimization method that can generate progression offsets for heavy arterial flows moving into and out of such an intersection design.

The Road to Bali: ERIA Perspectives on the WTO Ministerial and Asian Integration

The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) forthcoming Ninth Ministerial Conference in Bali comes at a critical juncture for the multilateral trade body, long mired in the Doha Round stalemate. Beyond offering a critical first test at consensus-building and institutional renewal, the Bali Ministerial affords a unique opportunity to gauge contrasting perceptions across ASEAN and East Asian countries of the continued relevance of the WTO to trade and economic governance within the region and beyond. Resulting from the collaborative efforts of the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA), the Universitas Pelita Harapan (UPH) and the World Trade Institute at the University of Bern (WTI), this policy research initiative offers comparative scholarship on some of the key questions arising from the forthcoming WTO Ministerial gathering from an East Asian perspective. Specifically, it explores what scholars in the region expect the Bali Ministerial to produce by way of tangible outcomes and whether the Ministerial will restore the momentum needed to bring the Doha Round to a successful conclusion. Contributors also investigate how relevant the WTO remains to the multiple processes of deepening economic integration in ASEAN and East Asia (e.g. AEC, TPP, RCEP) and, importantly, what lessons in rule-design and market opening WTO Members could usefully draw from the ongoing march towards the establishment of an ASEAN Economic Community.