ABSTRACT- Iran achieved its self-sufficiency goal in wheat production a few years ago, perhaps at the expense of decreasing the production of other grains specially barley as stated by critics in the country. Considering the dependency of wheat and barley markets on each other, policy preference functions were estimated separately for each market. Incorporating political weights, a game theory ...

This article introduces the reader to this special issue on Systems Change and highlights six lessons learned about theory, methods, and interventions for systems change that emerged across the included articles. The value of a systems approach to systems change is examined, including the need for frameworks, methods, and change activities that attend to the characteristics of systems.

In their recent work, Matsumura and Ogawa (2012) showed that in the context of a mixed duopoly, equilibrium social welfare is higher in price-setting competition than in quantity-setting competition. We found that when the strength of network effects is sufficiently high, the above result is totally reversed; thus, in a mixed duopoly, the presence of network effects weakens the superiority of p...

Previous literature has mostly considered R&D and licensing activities separately. In this paper we examine the effect of licensing on R&D and social welfare. We show that the effect of licensing on the incentive for doing R&D is ambiguous and depends on the costs of doing R&D. We also show that the possibility of licensing can change the identity of the innovating firm. However, we find that s...

The concentration index is widely used to measure income-related inequality in health. No insight exists, however, whether the concentration index connects with people's preferences about distributions of income and health and whether a reduction in the concentration index reflects an increase in social welfare. We explored this question by testing the central assumption underlying the concentr...

This article describes the problem of homelessness in Japan, and contrasts the status of the problem between the United Kingdom and Japan. Demographic characteristics of the homeless, including age and gender, vary across the two countries (for example, there are very few homeless women in Japan). Factors contributing to the development of homelessness in each country are discussed and contrast...

New results on a class of distributed two-sided matching algorithms are described. In particular, these algorithms can dominate the matches produced by the Gale-Shapley algorithm in terms of both average social welfare and fairness. However, stability is not guaranteed and therefore a natural tradeoff arises between stability and social welfare. At one extreme, stability is ‘purchased’ in Gale-...

Improving the Attitudes of Tehrani Preschool Teachers towards the Environment through Teaching N. Moosavi, Ph.D.* M. Sharifiaan Saani, Ph.D.** G. Ghaa’edAmini Haarooni, Ph.D.*** S. Sanaaye’ Goldooz, Ph.D.**** A. Darvishi***** F. Ghamarzaad Shishvaan******   Given the environmental crises, it is necessary to help citizens with the improvement of their attitudes. Attitudes, or predispos...