This paper reports the development and testing of a normative model for determining how firms should select the countries to be used in the information search for foreign direct investment. After a subset of countries is selected in the first stage of the decision process, a final selection process chooses the country with the best score within the subset: A "percentile method of subset selecti...

in this paper, the amount of wasted heat from different parts of a 12 liter compression ignition engine and their potential for waste heat recovery were investigated. then, two-stage configuration of organic rankine cycle was introduced for simultaneous heat recovery from exhaust gases and coolant. finally, parameters like hybrid generated power, engine thermal efficiency and brake specific fue...

‎In this paper, we present a two-stage model for ranking of decision making units (DMUs) using interval analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Since the efficiency score of unity is assigned to the efficient units, we evaluate the efficiency of each DMU by basic DEA models and calculate the weights of the criteria using proposed model. In the first stage, the proposed model evaluates decision making...

In data envelopment analysis (DEA), mul-tiplier and envelopment CCR models eval-uate the decision-making units (DMUs) under optimal conditions. Therefore, the best prices are allocated to the inputs and outputs. Thus, if a given DMU was not efficient under optimal conditions, it would not be considered efficient by any other models. In the current study, using common weights in DEA, a number of...

Background: Many different techniques have been described to treat undescended testes. We aimed to study a new technique of two-stage orchiopexy with total inguinal canal mobilization to prevent cord damage and testicular atrophy. Methods: Between March 2002 and July 2005, we operated on 16 testes with short spermatic cord. In the first stage, the testes were anchored to the pubic tubercle and ...

The study of inter-trial effects in visual search has generated an increasing amount of research in recent years. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects are still a matter of debate. Two rival accounts have been suggested. One view stipulates that inter-trial effects facilitate early perceptual/attentional processes, whereas the other proposes that it affects post-perceptual response-...

We propose a two-stage optimization approach for protein folding simulation in the FCC lattice, inspired from the phenomenon of hydrophobic collapse. Given a protein sequence, the first stage of the approach produces compact protein structures with the maximal number of contacts among hydrophobic monomers, using the CPSP tools for optimal structure prediction in the HP model. The second stage u...

In mathematical modeling, determining most influential parameters on outputs is of major importance. Thus, sensitivity analysis of parameters plays an important role in model validation. We give detailed procedure of constructing a new derivative estimator for general performance measure in Gaussian systems. We will take advantage of using score function and measure-value derivative estimators ...

Since data envelopment analysis (DEA) introduced in 1970s, it has been widely applied to measure the efficiency of a wide variety of production and operation systems. Recently DEA has been extended to examine the efficiency of decision making units (DMUs) with two-stage network structures or processes, where the outputs from the first stage are intermediate measures that make up the inputs of t...