Progress payments and cost overruns in defence contracts

In recent years military procurement agencies have used “progress payments” in contracting. Although, overall, the adoption of such a policy may well have contributed to a decrease in total costs of procurement, we identify a class of inefficiencies that are likely to have been generated by it.     

An alliance between Cyprus and Greece: assessing its partners’ relative security contribution

The issue that this paper tackles is the assessment of the relative security benefits that Cyprus and Greece derive in the context of their cooperation on defence matters. This form of cooperation, known as the ‘Integrated Defence Space Doctrine’, aims at defending their interests in the Aegean Sea and the broader East Mediterranean theatre. The paper relies heavily on earlier research on this topic, which deals with the Greek–Cypriot alliance facing an arms race against Turkey, and uses a coefficient especially designed to assess the optimal levels of security and the associated defence expenditure of the two allies. A comparison of the relative security coefficient values for the two allies suggests that the security benefit that Greece derives thanks to its alliance with Cyprus exceeds the corresponding Cypriot benefit by far. Given the importance assigned to human resources by this index, in conjunction with the demographic problems of Greece, this conclusion justifies the recent Greek defence policy revision, emphasizing quality, capital equipment and flexibility of forces. This revision aims at satisfying the security requirements of the alliance and the increasing demands of an arms race against Turkey.     

Causal analysis of Australian economic growth and military expenditure: A note

Chowdhury (1991) applied Granger causality methods to military expenditure and economic growth series in 55 developing countries. This note applies a similar approach to Australia and finds no causal relationship between military expenditure and growth in either direction.     

Scheduling twin robots on a line

This article introduces the twin robots scheduling problem (TRSP), in which two robots positioned at the opposite ends of a rail are required to deliver items to positions along the rail, and the objective is to minimize the makespan. A proof of ‐hardness of the TRSP is presented, along with exact and heuristic algorithms. Computational results on challenging instances are provided.Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 119–130, 2014     

Cost analysis of warranty policies

This article analyzes two general warranty policies involving an initial free replacement period, followed by a pro rata period. We examine the short-run total costs and longrun average costs under these policies. Formulas for both consumer costs and manufacturer profits under warranty are derived. We also study the expected number of purchases over the product life cycle under both policies. Bounds for the expected total costs and expected number of purchases are obtained for the case where the failure distribution of the item is new better than used.