Consider a set of K alternatives. We say that an alternative is socially acceptable if the number of individuals that rank it among their most preferred half of the alternatives is at least as large as the number of individuals that rank it among the least preferred half. A Condorcet winner is not necessarily socially acceptable. We propose a concept of consensus as a condition on preference pr...

Although the Individuals Education Act (IDEA, 1990; 1997) has provided a national mandate to help high school students with disabilities grow into independent adults, youth with emotional and behavioral difficulties continue to experience considerable problems transitioning into adulthood. Their adjustment into socially acceptable adult roles has been examined in a number of follow-up and follo...

This paper deals with the problem of scheduling optimal advertising policy for a very general class of consumer buying behavior models. To avoid analysis of a complex multitude of social-psychological and cultural-environmental factors affecting the consumer’s decision we construct a stochastic model. Because of the diminishing effect of even advertising policy, we consider advertising pulsing ...

Due to urbanization and population increase, need for metro tunnels, has been considerably increased in urban areas. Estimating the surface settlement caused by tunnel excavation is an important task especially where the tunnels are excavated in urban areas or beneath important structures. Many models have been established for this purpose by extracting the relationship between the settlement a...

At present, reducing subgrade settlement of soft soil foundation is a key problem in high-speed railway construction. Pile-slab structure is a widely-utilized form of foundation structure to reduce the subgrade settlement in China. In order to save the engineering cost for high-speed railway construction in developing countries, the author developed a pile-slab structure and named it as the new...