Models of endogenous growth have not been able to account for the variety of empirically observed distributional properties of the returns to innovation, in part, because of the limitations necessarily imposed on competition to cope with increasing returns to scale. Exponential growth, fat tails, Pareto–Levy distributed upper tails, and upper value outliers, are associated with increasing retur...

This paper introduces a series of new concepts under the name Economic Cross-Efficiency, which is rendered operational through Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. To achieve this goal, from theoretical perspective, we connect two key topics in efficiency literature that have been unrelated until now: economic and cross-efficiency. In particular, it shown that, input (output) homothetici...

This research identifies returns to scale (RTS) of efficient decision making units (DMUs) with desirable (good) and undesirable (bad) inputs and outputs by presenting a new DEA (data envelopment analysis) approach. In this study, we first introduce a new input-output oriented model to determine efficient DMUs in the presence of undesirable factors and then, returns to scale of these DMUs are es...

Nowadays, the assessment of environmental performance has received considerable attention by environmental strategy advocators and decision makers. In recent years, increased emission of CO2 into the air, water pollution, and global warming are universal problems all over the world. Therefore, development of firms with less CO2 emission is an important issue of attention in every area of produc...

awardness about structure of production technology and its characteristics is a usefull tool for planning in agricultural sector. in this regard, this study aims to determine some effective parameters of structure of production technology in rain fed barley production. before estimating these parameters, we examine the aggregation consistency condition for barley fields using the mean scaling t...

Discovering and utilizing problem domain knowledge is a promising direction towards improving the efficiency of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) when solving optimization problems. We propose a knowledge-based variable reduction strategy (VRS) that can be integrated into EAs to solve unconstrained and first-order derivative optimization functions more efficiently. VRS originates from the knowledge...

Age significantly influences the detection thresholds to noxious heat; such thresholds depend on responses in the cerebral cortex to thermal stimuli and the psychophysical perception of such responses. To understand the influence of age on cerebral responses, we used contact heat-evoked potentials (CHEPs) to investigate the physiology of cerebral responses to thermal stimuli in 70 healthy subje...