Construction planners often face the challenge of optimum resource utilization to compromise between different and usually conflicting aspects of projects. Time, cost and quality of project delivery are among the crucial aspects of each project. Emergence of new contracts that place an increasing pressure on maximizing the quality of projects while minimizing its time and cost, requires the dev...

Mutation rates should be governed by at least three evolutionary factors: the need for beneficial mutations, the benefit of minimizing the mutational load and the cost of replication fidelity. RNA viruses show high mutation rates compared with DNA micro-organisms, and recent findings suggest that the cost of fidelity might play a role in the evolution of increased mutation rates. Here, by analy...

Behaviors recruit multiple, mutually substitutable types of cognitive resources (e.g., data acquisition and memorization in comparative visual search), and the allocation of resources is performed in a cost-optimizing way. If costs associated with each type of resource are manipulated, e.g., by varying the complexity of the items studied or the visual separation of the arrays to be compared, ac...

We consider the problem of representation of a finite-energy optical field, with a finite number of bits. The optical field is represented with a finite number of uniformly spaced finite-accuracy samples (there is a finite number of amplitude levels that can be reliably distinguished for each sample). The total number of bits required to encode all samples constitutes the cost of the representa...

The regulator of a natural monopoly that sets a two-part tariff and whose marginal cost is stochastic will generally want the price to vary less than marginal cost when the lump-sum charge in the tariff is fixed. A trade-off exists between efficient pricing and an optimal allocation of risk. Pricing at marginal cost is only optimal when the consumer’s marginal utility is independent of the pric...

OF THE DISSERTATION Supervised Machine Learning Under Test-Time Resource Constraints: A Trade-off Between Accuracy and Cost by Zhixiang (Eddie) Xu Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science Washington University in St. Louis, 2014 Research Advisor: Professor Kilian Q. Weinberger, Chair The past decade has witnessed how the field of machine learning has established itself as a necessary component ...

Is There a Risk-Return Trade-Off across Occupations? Evidence from Spain We use data from Spain to test for an effect of earnings risk and skewness on individual wages. We carry out separate estimation for men, women, public and private sector employees. In accordance with previous evidence for the US we show the existence of a riskreturn trade-off across occupations in the Spanish labour marke...

We tested for a tradeoff across species between plant maximum photosynthetic rate and the ability to maintain photosynthesis under adverse conditions in the unfavorable season. Such a trade-off would be consistent with the observed trade-off between maximum speed and endurance in athletes and some animals that has been explained by cost-benefit theory. This trend would have importance for the g...