Contracting Out Security

Private security companies (PSCs) currently receive a great deal of attention in the news media, in sensationalist reporting, and increasingly in scholarly books and articles. While the scholarly books and articles make significant contributions to our understanding of this global phenomenon, there are several impediments to analysis that must be recognized and overcome if analysis is to be improved. Three of these impediments are reviewed in this article. The author suggests that US government material is currently available to minimize impediments and offers a framework to make analytical sense of it. Since contracting out is based on contracts, and unless the complexities of awarding and managing contracts are understood, recommendations made to reform the process of contracting out security are unrealistic.     

Troubled triangle: Russia,Ukraine and the United States

A potentially productive triangular arrangement among Russia, Ukraine, and the United States emerged in 1994 from efforts to constrain nuclear weapons diffusion. By 2001, this promising initiative was nearly moribund, owing to the inability or unwillingness of the parties to fulfill the commitments of subsequent agreements. The domestic and external causes of this failure are many and clear. Yet the advantages to each of reengaging in a trilateral relationship are also plain. This means fulfilling their unfinished agenda by learning from past mistakes, adopting realistic premises and goals, and pursuing ‘bottom up’ as well as ‘top down’ strategies.     

On mixed integer quadratic programs

This paper provides a method for solving mixed integer quadratic programs with the help of cutting-plane technique.     

On nash subsets of bimatrix games

This work considers a class of bimatrix games to which some well-known structure theorems of 0-sum matrix games can be made to generalize. It is additionally shown how to construct such games and how to generate the equilibrium points defining a given game as a member of that class.     

Toward optimal bidding strategies

In this paper we investigate a form of rational behavior in response to an oligopoly pricing problem where only one buyer is involved. We investigate the problem from the standpoint of the seller who wants to maximize his gain from the transaction. In particular, we deal with the problem of one seller's response to an invitation to submit a sealed (i. e., noncooperative) bid to a government or other dominant purchasing agency for supplying a specified bundle of goods and services for which either (1) no other demand exists, or (2) the terms or quantities involved cannot, at least in the short run, be obtained from another source. Although treated from a normative standpoint, i. e., what bid the supplier should make, the paper also has implications for the buyer's behavior and oligopoly-monopsony pricing in a more general sense.     

Meeting seasonal demand for products with limited shelf lives

This article addresses a common misconception concerning production lead time and the use of inventory to meet seasonal demand for products with limited shelf lives. Two fundamental questions are answered: 1) Under what conditions will an increase in product life lead to increased ability to meet demand? 2) Under what conditions will increased levels of starting inventory be beneficial? The results of this analysis assisted a plastics manufacturing firm in making product pricing and inventory decisions. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 44 : 473–483, 1997