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AbstractRecent years have seen a strong trend toward outsourcing warranty repair services to outside vendors. In this article we consider the problem of dynamically routing warranty repairs to service vendors when warranties have priority levels. Each time an item under warranty fails, it is sent to one of the vendors for repair. Items covered by higher priority warranty receive higher priority in repair service. The manufacturer pays a fixed fee per repair and incurs a linear holding cost while an item is undergoing or waiting for repair. The objective is to minimize the manufacturer's long‐run average cost. Because of the complexity of the problem, it is very unlikely that there exist tractable ways to find the optimal routing strategies. Therefore, we propose five heuristic routing procedures that are applicable to real‐life problems. We evaluate the heuristics using simulation. The simulation results show that the index‐based "generalized join the shortest queue" policy, which applies a single policy improvement step to an initial state‐independent policy, performs the best among all five heuristics. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008

Though the financial crisis recently suffered by several Southeast Asian countries has already been extensively studied, this article views the crisis as an object lesson for India. An analysis of the World Debt Tables, published by the World Bank indicates that, on the whole, India's indebtedness has been more carefully managed. However, there are clear danger signals which show that the government must give priority to the management of external debt.

In a perfect world, it will be great if the growth can be distributed equally and all poverty is removed simultaneously. Unfortunately, as Simon Kuznets has pointed out, economic growth is rarely distributed equally, in fact, according to him, economic growth initially leads to higher income inequality of income, as some sectors grow faster and some do not grow at all. In this paper, we apply the Kuznets hypothesis to the Brazilian case. Our test shows that in case of Brazil, the Gini coefficient has in fact behaved as Kuznets predicted.