Search results for "Frontier"
showing 10 items of 145 documents
SSPMO: A Scatter Tabu Search Procedure for Non-Linear Multiobjective Optimization
2007
We describe the development and testing of a metaheuristic procedure, based on the scatter-search methodology, for the problem of approximating the efficient frontier of nonlinear multiobjective optimization problems with continuous variables. Recent applications of scatter search have shown its merit as a global optimization technique for single-objective problems. However, the application of scatter search to multiobjective optimization problems has not been fully explored in the literature. We test the proposed procedure on a suite of problems that have been used extensively in multiobjective optimization. Additional tests are performed on instances that are an extension of those consid…
Education, Growth and Development
2016
The link between higher-education investment and growth is more relevant when a country’s economy is no longer based on imitation, and begins to rely instead, on innovation as the main engine for growth. The knowledge triangle – research, education and innovation – was a core factor in European efforts to meet the Lisbon strategy and its stated objective that knowledge should help the European economy become the most dynamic knowledge-based one in the world. The failure of the Lisbon strategy was later conducive to a new ambitious scheme, namely Horizon 2020. Human capital, when transposed to educational matters, helps put forward an assessment of the relevance of the neo-Schumpeterian view…
Border diplomacy and state-building in north-western Ethiopia,c. 1965–1977
2017
In the first half of the twentieth century, the north-western lowlands of imperial Ethiopia were the typical interstitial frontier of the Ethiopian–Sudanese borderlands. Starting in the early 1960s, a cash crop revolution paved the way to the transformation of the Mazega into a settlement frontier and the emergence of a dispute with Sudan for demarcation of the international border. This article explores the entanglement between the political economy of frontier governance and border diplomacy in the contested area. It highlights how the management of the border dispute was deeply affected by the contradictory interests of the various layers of government and “twilight” entities that projec…
Light-controlled reversible modulation of frontier molecular orbital energy levels in trifluoromethylated diarylethenes
2017
Among bistable photochromic molecules, diarylethenes (DAEs) possess the distinct feature that upon photoisomerization they undergo a large modulation of their π-electronic system, accompanied by a marked shift of the HOMO/LUMO energies and hence oxidation/reduction potentials. The electronic modulation can be utilized to remote-control charge- as well as energy-transfer processes and it can be transduced to functional entities adjacent to the DAE core, thereby regulating their properties. In order to exploit such photoswitchable systems it is important to precisely adjust the absolute position of their HOMO and LUMO levels and to maximize the extent of the photoinduced shifts of these energ…
ELECTRE III to dynamically support the decision maker about the periodic replacements configurations for a multi-component system
2013
The problem tackled by the present paper concerns the selection of the elements of a repairable and stochastically deteriorating multi-component system to replace (replacements configuration) during each scheduled and periodical system stop within a finite optimization cycle, by ensuring the simultaneous minimization of both the expected total maintenance cost and the system unavailability. To solve the considered problem, a combined approach between multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) and multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) resolution techniques is proposed. In particular, the @e constraint method is used to single out the optimal Pareto frontier whereas the ELECTRE III multi-cri…
Climate variability and agricultural production efficiency: evidence from Ethiopian farmers
2020
It is known that climate and weather variability have negative impacts on agricultural production efficiency. The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of climatic variables on farms’ efficiency in Ethiopia making use of nationally representative datasets from Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) 2011/2012. By using the Stochastic Frontier Approach, we estimate simultaneously the farmers’ optimal production function and technical inefficiency equations, taking into account unobserved heterogeneity of farmers. Our main findings show that climate change variables have a positive effect on households’ efficiency but the impact depends on the diff…
Assessment of Tourist Competitiveness by Analysing Destination Efficiency
2006
Recently the notion and the measurement of destination competitiveness have received increasing attention in the economics literature on tourism. The reason for this interest emerges from both the increasing economic importance of the tourist sector and the increasing competition on the tourist market as a consequence of the transition from mass tourism to a new age of tourism that calls for a tailor-made approach to the specific attitudes and needs of tourists. The central subject of this paper - inspired by the conceptual competitiveness model developed earlier by Crouch and Ritchie - concerns the efficiency of tourist site destinations. Using a dataset of 103 Italian regions for the year…
ASSESSMENT OF TOURISM COMPETITIVENESS BY ANALYSING DESTINATION EFFICIENCY
2008
The notion and measurement of destination competitiveness have received increasing attention in the economics literature on tourism. The reason for this emerges from both the growing economic importance of the tourist sector and the increasing competition in the tourist market resulting from the transition from mass tourism to a new age of tourism that calls for a tailor-made approach to the specific attitudes and needs of tourists. The central subject of this paper – inspired by the conceptual competitiveness model developed by Crouch and Ritchie – concerns the efficiency of tourist site destinations. Using a data set of 103 Italian regions for 2001, an economic efficiency analysis is car…
An optimized system dynamics approach for a hotel chain management
2009
The proposed model consists of an integrated system dynamics-data envelopment analysis approach to value, in a dynamic framework, the effects over time of the policies implemented according to the relative efficiency analysis. Rooms’ price and competing facilities (the hedonics) are the decision variables to move in order to push the hotels towards a higher relative efficiency at the end of the observation periods. In fact, in competitive markets as tourism, hotels compete for money offering differentiated quality. Moreover, according to the microeconomic theory, a producer of differentiated goods is not a price taker but a price maker. Therefore, we assume that the decision maker of the ho…
How efficient is maize production among smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe? A comparison of semiparametric and parametric frontier efficiency analyses
2018
The controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe that redistributes commercially-owned farmland to smallholder households has caused concerns about the efficiency of agricultural prod...