Product designers need to consider users’ requirement changes in the product life cycle. Existing practices of product design lack an effective method to quantify uncertainty effects on products. This research proposes a method to evaluate product sustainability under the generational variety uncertainty. An integrated method of agent-based modeling, quality function deployment (QFD), and axiom...

Iraq’s economy has undergone a number of profound changes over the last several decades, many of which have had significant implications for the manner in which the country’s informal economy has evolved. The statist, heavy-handed economic policies of the Ba'athist government concentrated much of Iraq’s productive capacity in nationalized factors, which degraded under the sanctions regime of th...

The service sector, also known in economy as the third sector, is the new engine of the world’s economy. It is estimated that over 50% of gross domestic product of countries is derived from this sector. The technological developments of the late '90s led to the concept of Internet services through the so-called Web Services. With the increasing use of the Internet in various branches of the eco...

The adversarial tort system in the United States is a significant burden on the economy and its cost exceeds 2% of the gross domestic product (GDP). These costs have grown 4 times faster than the US economy between 1930 and 1994.1 In the next few years, tort costs could increase twice as fast as the economy, going from $200 billion in 2001 to $298 billion, or 2.4% of GDP, by 2005.2 The current ...

This paper dwells on the inevitability of multinational corporations in the sustainable development of developing economies, using Nigeria as a case study. Over the years and with the advent of globalization, multi-national corporations now move with ease across the world to economy of interest, most often times to developing economies. Obviously speaking and considering the huge amount and the...

This paper examines the importance of market institutions in the transition from communism to a market economy. Blanchard and Kremer’s (1997) developed a partial equilibrium model explaining how, in the presence of imperfect information and incomplete contracts, liberalization causes the “disorganization” of traditional producer-supplier relationships in post-socialist economies and contributes...

One scenario of the future of computation populates the Internet with vast numbers of software agents providing, trading, and using a rich variety of information goods and services in an open, free-market economy. An essential task in such an economy is the retailing or brokering of information: gathering it from the right producers and distributing it to the right consumers. This article inves...

Rural industries play a significant role in the development of the rural economy. Their role in integrating the rural economy with the urban economy in an agro-based country like India is indispensable for the overall economic development of the country. These industries by promoting rural entrepreneurship contribute significantly to the social and economic development through labour absorption...

This publication updates and refines a previous study on the same subject (Agriculture’s Contribution to Hawaii’s Economy, CTAHR Economic Issues publica­ tion EI-2, February 2000). That publication emphasized that estimates of agriculture’s contributions vary depend­ ing on what is defined as agriculture and on the method­ ology used to develop the estimates. As we define it here, agriculture i...