Distributed Lag Behaviour in the Housing Market: Some Further Evidence
This article is a study of the distributed lag relationship between completions and starts of private dwellings in the UK and extends some results previously published in this journal. The main finding confirms that a proper study of builders' behaviour, as manifested in the distributed lag relationship between completions and starts, must allow for both disequilibrium effects and time varying lag structures. However, in examining the economic variables that modified builders' behaviour (and hence the lag structure) it was found that both the rate of house price inflation and the level of building society mortgage advances had an important influence. An increase in both caused builders, in the expectation of easier sales, to quicken their rates of completion. Additional plausible influences — like the level of construction activity in the public sector were, however, not supported by the data.
Consider a randomized load balancing problem consisting of a large number n of server sites each equipped with K servers. Under the greedy policy, clients randomly probe a site to check whether there is still a server available. If not, d -- 1 other sites are probed and the task is assigned to the site with the fewest number of busy servers. If all the servers are also busy in each of these d -- 1 sites, the task is lost. This short paper analyzes a set of policies, i.e., (L, d) policies, that will occasionally probe additional sites even when there is still a server available at the site that was probed first. Using mean field methods, we show that these policies, that preventively probe other sites, can achieve the same loss probability while requiring a lower overall probe rate.