In this competitive environment, organizations in service sector and industrial sector are trying their best to win the loyalty of their customers by providing the superior quality services and innovative products to remain competitive in the market. The objective of this study is to focus on the concept that organizational well structured HRM policies and top management commitment for quality ...

How plant competition varies across environmental gradients has been a long debate among ecologists. We conducted a growth chamber experiment to determine the intensity and importance of competition for plants grown in changed environmental conditions. Festuca rubra and Trifolium pratense were grown in monoculture and in two- and/or three-species mixtures under three environmental treatments. T...

Disease may play a critical role in invasions by nonnative plants and animals that currently threaten global biodiversity. For example, a generalist viral pathogen has been recently implicated in one of the most extensive plant invasions worldwide, the invasion and domination of California's perennial grasslands by exotic annual grasses. To date, disease has never been quantitatively assessed a...

Are Females Scared of Competing with Males? Results from a Field Experiment We conducted a field experiment involving 720 Italian undergraduate students to investigate the existence of gender differences in performance in competitive settings and whether performance is affected by one’s opponent gender. The experimental design was aimed at disentangling gender differences in taste for competiti...

the use of more competitive species and cultivars in small grain cereal production may help to develop production systems that require less herbicide. this study was designed to identify root and shoot characteristics of cereal seedlings that would allow distinguishing the more competitive (mc) cultivars from the less competitive (lc) ones. two growth cabinet trials were conducted using four cr...

Our infrastructure touches the day-to-day life of each of our fellow citizens, and its capabilities, integrity and sustainability are crucial to the overall competitiveness and prosperity of our country. Unfortunately, the current state of U.S. infrastructure is not good: the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest report on America’s infrastructure ranked it at a D+ — in need of $3.9 trill...

The effect of different kinds of weight normalization on the outcome of a simple competitive learning rule is analysed. It is shown that there are important differences in the representation formed depending on whether the constraint is enforced by dividing each weight by the same amount (“divisive enforcement”), or subtracting a fixed amount from each weight (“subtractive enforcement”). For th...

This paper studies the following online replacement problem. There is a real function f(t), called the ow rate, deened over a nite time horizon 0; T]. It is known that m f(t) M for some reals 0 m < M. At time 0 an online player starts to pay money at the rate f(0). At each time 0 < t T the player may changeover and continue paying money at the rate f(t). The complication is that each such chang...

We describe a multi-network, or modular, connectionist architecture that captures that fact that many tasks have structure at a level of granularity intermediate to that assumed by local and global function approximation schemes. The main innovation of the architecture is that it combines associative and competitive learning in order to learn task decompositions. A task decomposition is discove...

As exemplified by classic Lotka–Volterra theory, there are several canonical outcomes possible to a two species (interference) competitive interaction: coexistence, initial condition-dependent competitive exclusion of one species, or the global exclusion of one species. Evolutionary versions of Lotka–Volterra dynamics have been investigated in order to see the role that evolutionary adaptation ...