Search results for "COMPETITION"
showing 10 items of 1409 documents
An appraisal of Piero Sraffa's 'The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions'
2001
The paper proposes a new interpretation of Sraffa's 1926 Economic Journal article, ‘The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions’, according to which the latter derives from the same strategy of research which underlies its 1925 Italian precursor, ‘Sulle relazioni fra costo e quantità prodotta’. Sraffa tested the explanatory power of a Marshallian monopolistic partial equilibrium model and concluded that that model is able to treat one source of variable returns (firm-internal economies); but this articulation of Marshall‘s theory does not substantially improve on the trade-off between logical consistency and empirical relevance which afflicted the theory in its whole. © 2001, Taylor & …
Sensitivity of Estimators for Measuring Information Amount in Web-Based Medical Documents
2018
Nowadays, communication between patient and doctor during an appointment has changed significantly owning to the opportunity that medical portals provide. Whether or not necessarily appreciated by the doctors, the patients became more aware of the first symptoms’ suggesting a particular disease and the medical procedures that apply as a standard. Estimating amount of reliable factual medical information in a document is carried out by parametrizing space of digital documents and dividing it into subsequent layers that represent distribution of the system responses computed as random variables to a query about medical information. Analyzed are the following attributes: dynamism of decrease o…
Personnalité, stratégies d'approvisionnement et d'appariement chez les Diamants Mandarins (taeniopygia guttata)
2011
In evolutionary biology, phenotypic variation has for a long time been considered as the raw material on which natural selection acts. However, research on the consistency of behaviour led to the development of the animal personality concept during the 1990s. This concept was based on the characterization of traits such as neophobia, aggressiveness, exploratory tendencies and risk-taking behaviour. Since then, several studies have shown that personality can evolve through natural selection and is related to many life-history traits, such as dispersal or anti-predator behaviour.Pairing strategies and foraging strategies are two fundamental components of an organism’s life, but their relation…
Wingless ant males adjust mate-guarding behaviour to the competitive situation in the nest
2011
We investigated whether wingless sexuals of the ant Hypoponera opacior adjust mate-guarding behaviour to the level of competition in the nest. Males mate with young nestmate females shortly before these emerge from the cocoon. Aggressive interactions among adult males have never been observed, but males embrace and guard the cocoons of their mating partners for up to 2 days. In laboratory experiments, the duration of pupal guarding increased with the number of adult males in the nest, but decreased with an increasing number of mating partners per male. These findings demonstrate that males are aware of the competitive situation in the nest and adjust their mating behaviour in an adaptive ma…
Multi-objective memetic optimization for the bi-objective obnoxious p -median problem
2018
Abstract Location problems have been studied extensively in the optimization literature, the p-median being probably one of the most tackled models. The obnoxious p-median is an interesting variant that appears in the context of hazardous location. The aim of this paper is to formally introduce a bi-objective optimization model for this problem, in which a solution consists of a set of p locations, and two conflicting objectives arise. On the one hand, the sum of the minimum distance between each client and their nearest open facility and, on the other hand, the dispersion among facilities. Both objective values should be kept as large as possible for a convenient location of dangerous faci…
Skeletizing 3D-Objects by Projections
2004
Skeletization is used to simplify an object and to give an idea of the global shape of an object. This paper concerns the continuous domain. While many methods already exist, they are mostly applied in 2D-space. We present a new method to skeletize the polygonal approximation of a 3D-object, based on projections and 2D-skeletization from binary trees.
Interactive Nonconvex Pareto Navigator for Multiobjective Optimization
2019
Abstract We introduce a new interactive multiobjective optimization method operating in the objective space called Nonconvex Pareto Navigator . It extends the Pareto Navigator method for nonconvex problems. An approximation of the Pareto optimal front in the objective space is first generated with the PAINT method using a relatively small set of Pareto optimal outcomes that is assumed to be given or computed prior to the interaction with the decision maker. The decision maker can then navigate on the approximation and direct the search for interesting regions in the objective space. In this way, the decision maker can conveniently learn about the interdependencies between the conflicting ob…
The Materialisation of Children’s Mathematical Thinking Through Organisation of Turn-Taking in Small Group Interactions in Kindergarten
2020
This chapter reports from a case study which focuses on the coordination of turn-taking within two small groups of kindergarten children (age 5–6) working on addition problems. The two segments of small group interaction were analysed from a multimodal, interpretative perspective. Drawing on Radford’s (J Res Math Educ, 2:7–44, 2013) theory of knowledge objectification, the study explores the characteristics of children’s turn-taking and what role children’s organisation of turn-taking plays in the movement of the joint activity, and thus for the materialisation of their mathematical thinking. The findings suggest that children’s various ways of organising turn-taking give rise to different …
Multidimensional scaling of emotional responses to music: The effect of musical expertise and of the duration of the excerpts
2005
Musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to 27 musical excerpts and to group those that conveyed a similar emotional meaning (Experiment 1). The groupings were transformed into a matrix of emotional dissimilarity that was analysed through multidimensional scaling methods (MDS). A 3-dimensional space was found to provide a good fit of the data, with arousal and emotional valence as the primary dimensions. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed the consistency of this 3-dimensional space using excerpts of only 1 second duration. The overall findings indicate that emotional responses to music are very stable within and between participants, and are weakly influenced by musical …
Maize based diets and possible neurobehavioural after-effects among some populations in the world
1996
Maize is a cereal particularly lacking in tryptophan, which is the precursor of serotonin, an important neurotransmitter. Altough complementary foods may eliminate tryptophan deficiency, serotonin deficiency may often continue to exist because of competition made by other Large Neutral Amino Acids (LNAA) against tryptophan for neuron access, since they use the same carrier to cross the blood-brain barrier. Thus serotonin synthesis depends on two variables: the amount of tryptophan and the trp/LNAA ratio (R). “R” is lowest for common maize, low for beans and, as a rule, for most vegetable foods, higher for meat. So, when maize is the preponderant food in the meal, the “R” value lowers and so…