Context: Open-source ecosystems rely on sustained package maintenance. When maintenance slows or stops, Technical Lag (TL), the gap between installed and latest dependency versions accumulates, creating security and sustainability risks. However, some existing TL metrics, such as Version Lag, struggle to distinguish between actively maintained and abandoned packages, leading to a systematic underestimation of risk. Objective: We investigate the relationship between Version Lag and software abandonment by (i) identifying which repository-level signals reliably distinguish sustained maintenance from long-term decline, (ii) quantifying how Version Lag magnitude and persistence differ across maintenance states, and (iii) evaluating how maintenance-aware metrics change the identification of high-risk dependencies. Method: We introduce Maintenance-Aware Lag and Technical Abandonment (MALTA), a scoring framework comprising three metrics: Development Activity Score (DAS), Maintainer Responsiveness Score (MRS), and Repository Metadata Viability Score (RMVS). We evaluate MALTA on a dataset of 11,047 Debian packages linked to upstream GitHub repositories, encompassing 1.7 million commits and
Single-server queues with customer abandonment arise in call centers and many service systems, but steady-state performance measures remain analytically intractable beyond Markovian assumptions. This paper develops Robust Queueing (RQ) approximations for the mean steady-state virtual waiting time (offered waiting time) in the GI/GI/1+GI model. The approach starts from a reverse-time supremum representation of the virtual waiting time as the reflection of an effective net-input process that accounts for abandonments. We approximate effective net-input increments by their mean plus a robustness parameter times their standard deviation. For the drift, we introduce a Poisson-surrogate compensator and show that the associated correction term is asymptotically negligible in the long-patience regime. For variability, we propose two implementable surrogates: (i) a deterministic time-change approximation that yields a first RQ algorithm, and (ii) a refined algorithm based on a heavy-traffic limit that produces a scale-dependent variance function capturing the variance-reduction effect of abandonment. The resulting steady-state approximation reduces to a one-dimensional fixed point solvable
Responsible AI research typically focuses on examining the use and impacts of deployed AI systems. Yet, there is currently limited visibility into the pre-deployment decisions to pursue building such systems in the first place. Decisions taken in the earlier stages of development shape which systems are ultimately released, and therefore represent potential, but underexplored, points for intervention. As such, this paper investigates factors influencing AI non-development and abandonment throughout the development lifecycle. Specifically, we first perform a scoping review of academic literature, civil society resources, and grey literature including journalism and industry reports. Through thematic analysis of these sources, we develop a taxonomy of six categories of factors contributing to AI abandonment: ethical concerns, stakeholder feedback, development lifecycle challenges, organizational dynamics, resource constraints, and legal/regulatory concerns. Then, we collect data on real-world case of AI system abandonment via an AI incident database and a practitioner survey to evidence and compare factors that drive abandonment both prior to and following system deployment. While ac
We study a heavily overloaded single-server queue with abandonment and derive bounds on stationary tail probabilities of the queue length. As the abandonment rate $γ\downarrow 0$, the centered-scaled queue length $\tilde{q}$ is known to converge in distribution to a Gaussian. However, such asymptotic limits do not quantify the pre-limit tail $\mathbb{P}(\tilde{q}>a)$ for fixed $γ>0$. Our goal is to obtain pre-limit bounds that are \emph{efficient} across different deviation regimes. For constant deviations, efficiency means Gaussian-type decay in $a$ together with a pre-limit error that vanishes as $γ\downarrow 0$, yielding the correct Gaussian tail in the limit. We establish such an efficient bound that is best-of-both-worlds. For larger deviations when $a$ is a function of $γ$, efficiency translates into exponentially tight, matching upper and lower bounds. For moderate deviation, we obtain sub-Gaussian tails, while in the large deviation regime the decay becomes sub-Poisson. Our bounds are obtained using a combination of Stein's method for Wasserstein-$p$ distance and the transform method. We then consider a load-balancing system of abandonment queues with heterogeneous se
The on-demand ride-hailing industry has experienced rapid growth, transforming transportation norms worldwide. Despite improvements in efficiency over traditional taxi services, significant challenges remain, including drivers' strategic repositioning behavior, customer abandonment, and inefficiencies in dispatch algorithms. To address these issues, we introduce a comprehensive mean field game model that systematically analyzes the dynamics of ride-hailing platforms by incorporating driver repositioning across multiple regions, customer abandonment behavior, and platform dispatch algorithms. Using this framework, we identify all possible mean field equilibria as the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points of an associated optimization problem. Our analysis reveals the emergence of multiple equilibria, including the inefficient "Wild Goose Chase" one, characterized by drivers pursuing distant requests, leading to suboptimal system performance. To mitigate these inefficiencies, we propose a novel two-matching-radius nearest-neighbor dispatch algorithm that eliminates undesirable equilibria and ensures a unique mean field equilibrium for multi-region systems. The algorithm dynamically adjusts
Socio-economic networks, from cities and firms to collaborative projects, often appear resilient for long periods before experiencing rapid, cascading decline as participation erodes. We explain such dynamics through a framework of strategic network abandonment, in which interconnected agents choose activity levels in a network game and remain active only if participation yields higher utility than an improving outside option. As outside opportunities rise, agents exit endogenously, triggering equilibrium readjustments that may either dissipate locally or propagate through the network. The resulting decay dynamics are governed by the strength of strategic complementarities, measuring how strongly an agent's incentives depend on the actions of others. When complementarities are weak, decay follows a heterogeneous threshold process analogous to bootstrap percolation: failures are driven by local neighborhoods, vulnerable clusters can be identified ex ante, and large cascades emerge only through bottom-up accumulation of fragility. When complementarities are strong, departures propagate globally, producing rupture-like dynamics characterized by metastable plateaus, abrupt system-wide
The sustainability of libraries is critical for modern software development, yet many libraries face abandonment, posing significant risks to dependent projects. This study explores the prevalence and patterns of library abandonment in the Maven ecosystem. We investigate abandonment trends over the past decade, revealing that approximately one in four libraries fail to survive beyond their creation year. We also analyze the release activities of libraries, focusing on their lifespan and release speed, and analyze the evolution of these metrics within the lifespan of libraries. We find that while slow release speed and relatively long periods of inactivity are often precursors to abandonment, some abandoned libraries exhibit bursts of high frequent release activity late in their life cycle. Our findings contribute to a new understanding of library abandonment dynamics and offer insights for practitioners to identify and mitigate risks in software ecosystems.
We investigate the optimal pricing strategy in a service-providing framework, where customers can leave the system prior to service completion. In this setting, a price is quoted to an incoming customer based on the current number of customers in the system. When the quoted price is lower than the price the incoming customer is willing to pay (which follows a fixed probability distribution), then the customer joins the system and a reward equal to the quoted price is earned. A cost is incurred upon abandonment and a holding cost is incurred for customers waiting to be served. Our goal is to determine the pricing policy that maximizes the long-run average profit. Unlike traditional queueing systems without abandonments, we show that the optimal quoted prices do not always increase with the queue length in this setting. We fully characterize the possible structure of the optimal dynamic pricing policy and provide conditions guaranteeing that the optimal policy is increasing in the number of customers in the system. Moreover, we introduce two heuristics that simplify the optimal dynamic pricing policy. Both heuristics admit customers until the number of customers in the system reaches
Background. Career abandonment, the process in which professionals leave the activity, assuming positions in another area, among software developers involves frustration with the lost investment and emotional and financial costs, even though being beneficial for the human being, depending on personal context. Previous studies have identified work-related motivators for career abandonment, such as the threat of obsolescence, unstable requirements, and low code quality, though these factors have primarily been examined in former developers. The relationship between these motivators and the intention to abandon among currently active developers remains unexplored. Goal. This article investigates the relationship between key work-related motivators and currently active software developers intention to abandon their careers. Method. We employed a quantitative approach, surveying 221 software developers to validate a theoretical model for career abandonment intention, based on an adaptation of the Investment Model, which incorporates satisfaction with technical aspects of the profession as well as the intention to abandon. Findings. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, through s
Open Source Software (OSS) is a cornerstone of contemporary software development, yet the increasing prevalence of OSS project abandonment threatens global software supply chains. Although previous research has explored abandonment prediction methods, these methods often demonstrate unsatisfactory predictive performance, further plagued by imprecise abandonment discrimination, limited interpretability, and a lack of large, generalizable datasets. In this work, we address these challenges by reliably detecting OSS project abandonment through a dual approach: explicit archival status and rigorous semantic analysis of project documentation or description. Leveraging a precise and scalable labeling pipeline, we curate a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of 115,466 GitHub repositories, encompassing 57,733 confirmed abandonment repositories, enriched with detailed, timeline-based behavioral features. Building on this foundation, we introduce an integrated, multi-perspective feature framework for abandonment prediction, capturing user-centric, maintainer-centric, and project evolution features. Survival analysis using an AFT model yields a high C-index of 0.846, substantially outperformi
Scientific software is essential to scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Abandoned (or unmaintained), buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software can hinder scientific progress, yet, in contrast to other types of software, its longevity is poorly understood. Existing data curation efforts are fragmented by science domain and/or are small in scale and lack key attributes. We use large language models to classify public software repositories in World of Code into distinct scientific domains and layers of the software stack, curating a large and diverse collection of over 18,000 scientific software projects. Using this data, we estimate survival models to understand how the domain, infrastructural layer, and other attributes of scientific software affect its longevity. We further obtain a matched sample of non-scientific software repositories and investigate the differences. We find that infrastructural layers, downstream dependencies, mentions of publications, and participants from government are associated with a longer lifespan, while newer projects with participants from academia had shorter
When language models correctly parse "The cat that the dog chased meowed," are they analyzing syntax or simply familiar with dogs chasing cats? Despite extensive benchmarking, we lack methods to distinguish structural understanding from semantic pattern matching. We introduce CenterBench, a dataset of 9,720 comprehension questions on center-embedded sentences (like "The cat [that the dog chased] meowed") where relative clauses nest recursively, creating processing demands from simple to deeply nested structures. Each sentence has a syntactically identical but semantically implausible counterpart (e.g., mailmen prescribe medicine, doctors deliver mail) and six comprehension questions testing surface understanding, syntactic dependencies, and causal reasoning. Testing six models reveals that performance gaps between plausible and implausible sentences widen systematically with complexity, with models showing median gaps up to 26.8 percentage points, quantifying when they abandon structural analysis for semantic associations. Notably, semantic plausibility harms performance on questions about resulting actions, where following causal relationships matters more than semantic coherence.
We consider a Markovian single server queue with impatient customers. There is a customer abandonment cost and a holding cost for customers in the system. We consider two versions of the problem. In the first version, customers pay a reward at the time of arrival whereas in the second version, reward is received at the time of service completion. Service rate attains values in a compact set and there is a cost associated with each service rate. Under these assumptions, our objective is to characterize the service rate policy that maximizes the infinite-horizon discounted reward and the long-run average reward. We show that for systems with an infinite buffer, the optimal service rate policy is monotone. However, the optimal policy is not necessarily monotone when capacity is finite. Furthermore, we prove that the set of possible optimal actions can be reduced to the lower boundary of the convex hull of the action space and develop an efficient policy iteration algorithm. Finally, we show that the optimal service rate converges as the state goes to infinity which allows us to truncate the state space to numerically compute the optimal service rate when system has infinite buffer spa
In the quest to improve services, companies offer customers the option to interact with agents via texting. Such contact centers face unique challenges compared to traditional call centers, as measuring customer experience proxies like abandonment and patience involves uncertainty. A key source of this uncertainty is silent abandonment, where customers leave without notifying the system, wasting agent time and leaving their status unclear. Silent abandonment also obscures whether a customer was served or left. Our goals are to measure the magnitude of silent abandonment and mitigate its effects. Classification models show that 3%-70% of customers across 17 companies abandon silently. In one study, 71.3% of abandoning customers did so silently, reducing agent efficiency by 3.2% and system capacity by 15.3%, incurring $5,457 in annual costs per agent. We develop an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate customer patience under uncertainty and identify influencing covariates. We find that companies should use classification models to estimate abandonment scope and our EM algorithm to assess patience. We suggest strategies to operationally mitigate the impact of silent aba
This paper considers guessing-based decoders with abandonment for discrete memoryless channels in which all codewords have the same composition. This class of decoders rank-orders all input sequences in the codebook's composition class from ``closest'' to ``farthest'' from the channel output and then queries them sequentially in that order for codebook membership. Decoding terminates when a codeword is encountered or when a predetermined number of guesses is reached, and decoding is abandoned. We derive ensemble-tight first-order asymptotics for the code rate and abandonment rate, which shows that guessing-based decoding is more efficient than conventional testing-based decoding whenever the capacity of the channel exceeds half the entropy of the capacity-achieving input distribution. The main focus of this paper is on refined asymptotics, specifically, second-order asymptotics, error exponents, and strong converse exponents. The optimal second-order region is characterized in terms of the minimum of the second-order code and abandonment rates. The error (resp.\ strong converse) exponent is characterized in terms of the minimum (resp.\ maximum) of the usual channel coding exponent
We employ an n-player coordination game to model mutualism emergence and abandonment. We illustrate our findings in the context of the host--host interactions among plants in plant-mycorrhizal fungi (MF) mutualisms. The coordination game payoff structure captures the insight that mutualistic strategies lead to robust advantages only after such "biological markets" reach a certain scale. The game gives rise to three types of Nash equilibria, which correspond to the states derived in studies of the ancestral reconstruction of the mycorrhizal symbiosis in seed plants. We show that all types of Nash equilibria correspond to steady states of a dynamical system describing the underlying evolutionary process. We then employ methods from large deviation theory on discrete-time Markov processes to study stochastic evolutionary dynamics. We provide a sharp analytical characterization of the stochastic steady states and of the transition dynamics across Nash equilibria and employ simulations to illustrate these results in special cases. We find that the mutualism is abandoned and re-established several times through evolutionary time, but the mutualism may persist the majority of time. Change
Despite the vast literature on the diffusion of innovations that impacts a broad range of disciplines, our understanding of the abandonment of innovations remains limited yet is essential for a deeper understanding of the innovation lifecycle. Here, we analyze four large-scale datasets that capture the temporal and structural patterns of innovation abandonment across scientific, technological, commercial, and pharmacological domains. The paper makes three primary contributions. First, across these diverse domains, we uncover one simple pattern of preferential abandonment, whereby the probability for individuals or organizations to abandon an innovation increases with time and correlates with the number of network neighbors who have abandoned the innovation. Second, we find that the presence of preferential abandonment fundamentally alters the way in which the underlying ecosystem breaks down, inducing a novel structural collapse in networked systems commonly perceived as robust against abandonments. Third, we derive an analytical framework to systematically understand the impact of preferential abandonment on network dynamics, pinpointing specific conditions where it may accelerate
We study the optimal scheduling problem for a Markovian multiclass queueing network with abandonment in the Halfin--Whitt regime, under the long run average (ergodic) risk sensitive cost criterion. The objective is to prove asymptotic optimality for the optimal control arising from the corresponding ergodic risk sensitive control (ERSC) problem for the limiting diffusion. In particular, we show that the optimal ERSC value associated with the diffusion-scaled queueing process converges to that of the limiting diffusion in the asymptotic regime. The challenge that ERSC poses is that one cannot express the ERSC cost as an expectation over the mean empirical measure associated with the queueing process, unlike in the usual case of a long run average (ergodic) cost. We develop a novel approach by exploiting the variational representations of the limiting diffusion and the Poisson-driven queueing dynamics, which both involve certain auxiliary controls. The ERSC costs for both the diffusion-scaled queueing process and the limiting diffusion can be represented as the integrals of an extended running cost over a mean empirical measure associated with the corresponding extended processes usi
We consider the classic question posed by Pardo and Spergel about the price of abandoning dark matter in the context of an invariant, metric-based theory of gravity. Our answer is that the price is nonlocality. This has been known for some time in the context of the quasi-static regime. We show that it also applies for cosmology and we exhibit a model which reproduces standard CDM successes such as perturbations in the cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillations and structure formation.
Addressing strategies for managing vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties is important for maintaining healthy communities. Yet, the process of identifying these properties can be difficult. Here, we create a human-in-the-loop machine learning (HITLML) model called VADecide and apply it to a parcel-level case study in Savannah, Georgia. The results show a higher prediction accuracy than was achieved when using a machine learning model without human input in the training. The HITLML approach also reveals differences between machine vs. human-generated results. Our findings contribute to knowledge about the advantages and challenges of HITLML in urban planning. [Accepted for Publication at a Peer Review Journal]