optimum management of intra- and interspecific competitions are key subject in most agroecosystems. the objective of this experiment was the study effect of intra- and interspecific competitions and n rates on yield and yield components of wheat which was carried out in agricultural faculty of shahid chamran university of ahvaz during 2011-2012. the experimental design was split–plot based on r...

This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British government introduced a major extension of their market-based reforms to the English National Health Service. From January 2006 onwards, every patient in England could choose their hospital for secondary care, and hospitals...

We consider a single buyer who wishes to outsource a fixed demand for a manufactured good or service at a fixed price to a set of potential suppliers. We examine the value of competition as a mechanism for the buyer to elicit service quality from the suppliers. We compare two approaches the buyer could use to orchestrate this competition: (1) a Supplier-Allocation (SA) approach, which allocates...

This report presents solutions of EUNITE Competition 2003 problem “Prediction of product quality in glass manufacturing process”. The first solution is based on Local Transfer Function Approximator (LTF-A) neural network, while the next three solutions utilize simple rules to predict glass quality. Despite advanced data preprocessing, LTF-A did not performed very well on the competition data. T...

When ejaculates from rival males compete for fertilization, there is strong selection for sperm traits that enhance fertilization success. Sperm quantity is one such trait, and numerous studies have demonstrated a positive association between sperm competition and both testes size and the number of sperm available for copulations. Sperm competition is also thought to favor increases in sperm qu...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non-experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a procompetitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The English government introduced a policy in 2006 to promote competition between hospitals. Using this pol...

As more and more container terminals open up all over the world, competition for business is becoming very intense for container terminal operators. They are finding out that even to keep their existing Sea Line customers, they have to make them happy by offering higher quality service. The quality of service they can provide depends on their operating policies and the design of the terminal la...

This study examines how firms’ voluntary disclosure decisions are influenced by the product market competition. Using separate measures to capture different dimensions of competition, I show that competition from potential entrants increases disclosure quantity while competition from existing rivals decreases disclosure quantity. I also find that competition enhances disclosure quality mainly t...

This paper examines two important aspects of telecommunications liberalization as a policy for economic development. The first involves the tradeoff between increased efficiency from competition and the consequences of higher prices for basic services resulting from rate-rebalancing. The second addresses an entrant’s ability to provide efficient, high-quality service under the given competitive...