Ownership and control in a competitive industry

We study a differentiated product market in which an investor initially owns a controlling stake in one of two competing firms and may acquire a non-controlling or a controlling stake in a competitor, either directly using her own assets, or indirectly via the controlled firm. While industry profits are maximized within a symmetric two product monopoly, the investor attains this only in exceptional cases. Instead, she sometimes acquires a noncontrolling stake. Or she invests asymmetrically rather than pursuing a full takeover if she acquires a controlling one. Generally, she invests indirectly if she only wants to affect the product market outcome, and directly if acquiring shares is profitable per se. --differentiated products,separation of ownership and control,private benefits of control

Stochastic Local Search for Multiprocessor Scheduling for Minimum Total Tardiness

The multi-processor total tardiness problem (MPTTP) is an NP-hard scheduling problem, in which the goal is to minimise the tardiness of a set of jobs that are processed on a number of processors. Exact algorithms like branch and bound have proven to be impractical for the MPTTP, leaving stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms as the main alternative to find high-quality schedules. Among the available..