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For most of the past 50 years the simplest asset allocation solution was often the best. A balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds provided the investor with good returns. Unfortunately, this approach is not likely to work as well in the future. Interest rates are close to historic lows, equity valuations and bond prices appear stretched, and global economic growth has slowed. Investors need a new asset allocation solution. In 'Portfolio Construction for Today's Markets,' BlackRock Portfolio Manager and investment expert Russ Koesterich addresses this problem by describing the step-by-step approach to building a portfolio consistent with investor goals and suited to today's market environment.

Racial bias is associated with the allocation of advanced heart failure therapies, heart transplants, and ventricular assist devices. It is unknown whether gender and racial biases are associated with the allocation of advanced therapies among women. To determine whether the intersection of patient gender and race is associated with the decision-making of clinicians during the allocation of advanced heart failure therapies. In this qualitative study, 46 US clinicians attending a conference for an international heart transplant organization in April 2019 were interviewed on the allocation of advanced heart failure therapies. Participants were randomized to examine clinical vignettes that varied 1:1 by patient race (African American to white) and 20:3 by gender (women to men) to purposefully target vignettes of women patients to compare with a prior study of vignettes of men patients. Participants were interviewed about their decision-making process using the think-aloud technique and provided supplemental surveys. Interviews were analyzed using grounded theory methodology, and surveys were analyzed with Wilcoxon tests. Randomization to clinical vignettes. Thematic differences in allocation of advanced therapies by patient race and gender. Among 46 participants (24 [52%] women, 20 [43%] racial minority), participants were randomized to the vignette of a white woman (20 participants [43%]), an African American woman (20 participants [43%]), a white man (3 participants [7%]), and an African American man (3 participants [7%]). Allocation differences centered on 5 themes. First, clinicians critiqued the appearance of the women more harshly than the men as part of their overall impressions. Second, the African American man was perceived as experiencing more severe illness than individuals from other racial and gender groups. Third, there was more concern regarding appropriateness of prior care of the African American woman compared with the white woman. Fourth, there were greater concerns about adequacy of social support for the women than for the men. Children were perceived as liabilities for women, particularly the African American woman. Family dynamics and finances were perceived to be greater concerns for the African American woman than for individuals in the other vignettes; spouses were deemed inadequate support for women. Last, participants recommended ventricular assist devices over transplantation for all racial and gender groups. Surveys revealed no statistically significant differences in allocation recommendations for African American and white women patients. This national study of health care professionals randomized to clinical vignettes that varied only by gender and race found evidence of gender and race bias in the decision-making process for offering advanced therapies for heart failure, particularly for African American women patients, who were judged more harshly by appearance and adequacy of social support. There was no associated between patient gender and race and final recommendations for allocation of advanced therapies. However, it is possible that bias may contribute to delayed allocation and ultimately inequity in the allocation of advanced therapies in a clinical setting.

PurposeThis paper aims to present a concise review on the variant state-of-the-art dynamic task allocation strategies. It presents a thorough discussion about the existing dynamic task allocation strategies mainly with respect to the problem application, constraints, objective functions and uncertainty handling methods.Design/methodology/approachThis paper briefs the introduction of multi-robot dynamic task allocation problem and discloses the challenges that exist in real-world dynamic task allocation problems. Numerous task allocation strategies are discussed in this paper, and it establishes the characteristics features between them in a qualitative manner. This paper also exhibits the existing research gaps and conducive future research directions in dynamic task allocation for multiple mobile robot systems.FindingsThis paper concerns the objective functions, robustness, task allocation time, completion time, and task reallocation feature for performance analysis of different task allocation strategies. It prescribes suitable real-world applications for variant task allocation strategies and identifies the challenges to be resolved in multi-robot task allocation strategies.Originality/valueThis paper provides a comprehensive review of dynamic task allocation strategies and incites the salient research directions to the researchers in multi-robot dynamic task allocation problems. This paper aims to summarize the latest approaches in the application of exploration problems.

We study choices of households deciding on consumption and allocation of spouses’ time to work, leisure, and child care. With uncertainty, the allocation of goods and time over the life cycle also serves the purpose of smoothing marginal utility in response to shocks. Combining data on consumption, wages, hours of work, and time spent with children, we compute the sensitivity of consumption and time allocation to transitory and permanent wage shocks. We find that family labor supply responses depend on three counteracting forces: complementarity of leisure time, substitutability of time in the production of child services, and added worker effects.

An empirical approach to optimal income taxation design is developed within an equilibrium collective marriage market model with imperfectly transferable utility. Taxes distort time allocation decisions, as well as marriage market outcomes, and the within household decision process. Using data from the American Community Survey and American Time Use Survey, we structurally estimate our model and explore empirical design problems. We allow taxes to depend upon marital status, with the form of tax jointness for married couples unrestricted. We find that the optimal tax system for married couples is characterized by negative jointness, although the welfare gains from jointness are modest. These welfare gains are then shown to be increasing in the gender wage gap, with taxes here, as in the case of gender based taxation, providing an instrument to address within household inequality.

A sub-optimal precoding scheme for distributed antenna systems in a spatially correlated Rayleigh channel is developed by asymptotical analysis at low and high SNRs. A Newton's method based practical iterative algorithm is presented to find the power allocation coefficients in this scheme. Compared to the existing optimal scheme which requires multidimensional roots finding, the scheme developed in this reported work only needs one-dimensional root finding, and thus it has lower calculation complexity. Moreover, it can converge to the solution quickly, and obtain a performance close to a optimal scheme. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the developed scheme. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]