We study impatient customers’ joining strategies in a single-server Markovian queue with synchronized abandonment and multiple vacations. Customers receive the system information upon arrival, and decide whether to join or balk, based on a linear reward-cost structure under the acquired information. Waiting customers are served in a first-come-first-serve discipline, and no service is rendered during vacation. Server’s vacation becomes the cause of impatience for the waiting customers, which leads to synchronous abandonment at the end of vacation. That is, customers consider simultaneously but independent of others, whether to renege the system or to remain. We are interested to study the effect of both information and reneging choice on the balking strategies of impatient customers. We examine the customers’ equilibrium and socially optimal balking strategies under four cases of information: fully/almost observable and fully/almost unobservable cases, assuming the linear reward-cost structure. We compare the social benefits under all the information policies.

Online retailers are increasingly adding buy-online and pick-up-in-store (BOPS) modes to order fulfilment. In this paper, we study a system of BOPS by developing a stochastic Nash equilibrium model with incentive compatibility constraints, where the online retailer seeks optimal online sale prices and an optimal delivery schedule in an order cycle, and the offline retailer pursues a maximal rate of sharing the profit owing to the consignment from the online retailer. By an expectation method and optimality conditions, the equilibrium model is first transformed into a system of constrained nonlinear equations. Then, by a case study and sensitivity analysis, the model is validated and the following practical insights are revealed. (I) Our method can reliably provide an equilibrium strategy for the online and offline retailers under BOPS mode, including the optimal online selling price, the optimal delivery schedule, the optimal inventory and the optimal allocation of profits. (II) Different model parameters, such as operational cost, price sensitivity coefficient, cross-sale factor, opportunity loss ratio and loss ratio of unsold goods, generate distinct impacts on the equilibrium solution and the profits of the BOPS system. (III) Optimization of the delivery schedule can generate greater consumer surplus, and makes the offline retailer share less sale profit from the online retailer, even if the total profit of the BOPS system becomes higher. (IV) Inventory subsidy is an indispensable factor to improve the applicability of the game model in BOPS mode.

In aquatic microbial systems, high-magnitude variations in abundance, such as sudden blooms alternating with comparatively long periods of very low abundance (“apparent disappearance”), are relatively common. We suggest that in order for this to occur, such variations in abundance in microbial systems and, in particular, the apparent disappearance of species do not require seasonal or periodic forcing of any kind or external factors of any other nature. Instead, such variations can be caused by internal factors and, in particular, by bacteria–phage interaction. Specifically, we suggest that the variations in abundance and the apparent disappearance phenomenon can be a result of phage infection and the lysis of infected bacteria. To illustrate this idea, we consider a reasonably simple mathematical model of bacteria–phage interaction based on the model suggested by Beretta and Kuang, which assumes neither periodic forcing nor action of other external factors. The model admits a loss of stability via Andronov–Hopf bifurcation and exhibits dynamics which explains the phenomenon. These properties of the model are especially distinctive for spatially nonhomogeneous biosystems as well as biosystems with some sort of cooperation or community effects.

Neodymium magnets were independently discovered in 1984 by General Motors and Sumitomo. Today, they are the strongest type of permanent magnets commercially available. They are the most widely used industrial magnets with many applications, including in hard disk drives, cordless tools and magnetic fasteners. We use a vector potential approach, rather than the more usual magnetic potential approach, to derive the three-dimensional (3D) magnetic field for a neodymium magnet, assuming an idealized block geometry and uniform magnetization. For each field or observation point, the 3D solution involves 24 nondimensional quantities, arising from the eight vertex positions of the magnet and the three components of the magnetic field. The only unknown in the model is the value of magnetization, with all other model quantities defined in terms of field position and magnet location. The longitudinal magnetic field component in the direction of magnetization is bounded everywhere, but discontinuous across the magnet faces parallel to the magnetization direction. The transverse magnetic fields are logarithmically unbounded on approaching a vertex of the magnet.

We consider an extension of the classical Fisher–Kolmogorov equation, called the “Fisher–Stefan” model, which is a moving boundary problem on $0<x<L(t)$. A key property of the Fisher–Stefan model is the “spreading–vanishing dichotomy”, where solutions with $L(t)>L_{\text{c}}$ will eventually spread as $t\rightarrow \infty$, whereas solutions where $L(t)\ngtr L_{\text{c}}$ will vanish as $t\rightarrow \infty$. In one dimension it is well known that the critical length is $L_{\text{c}}=\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}/2$. In this work, we re-formulate the Fisher–Stefan model in higher dimensions and calculate $L_{\text{c}}$ as a function of spatial dimensions in a radially symmetric coordinate system. Our results show how $L_{\text{c}}$ depends upon the dimension of the problem, and numerical solutions of the governing partial differential equation are consistent with our calculations.

We define and solve classes of sparse matrix problems that arise in multilevel modelling and data analysis. The classes are indexed by the number of nested units, with two-level problems corresponding to the common situation, in which data on level-1 units are grouped within a two-level structure. We provide full solutions for two-level and three-level problems, and their derivations provide blueprints for the challenging, albeit rarer in applications, higher-level versions of the problem. While our linear system solutions are a concise recasting of existing results, our matrix inverse sub-block results are novel and facilitate streamlined computation of standard errors in frequentist inference as well as allowing streamlined mean field variational Bayesian inference for models containing higher-level random effects.