The purpose of this paper is to present an application of fuzzy logic to cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis. The conventional analytical tool cost-volume-profit, commonly called breakeven analysis (BE), is used widely in managerial decision making. In its basic form, CVP analysis examines sales prices, sales volume, variable costs and fixed costs in relation to target profit levels. This traditi...

A general framework for studying the transitivity of reciprocal relations is presented. The key feature is the cyclic evaluation of transitivity: triangles (i.e. any three points) are visited in a cyclic manner. An upper bound function acting upon the ordered weights encountered provides an upper bound for the ‘sum minus 1’ of these weights. Commutative quasi-copulas allow to translate a genera...

Proposition A–1. Suppose that F : R → R is a contraction mapping such that ‖F (x)− F (y)‖ ≤ λ ‖x− y‖ where λ ∈ [0, 1). Consider a closed convex set A ⊆ R and let π denote projection onto A; i.e., π(x) = argmin{‖x− y‖ : y ∈ A}. Let x = (x∗1, . . . , x∗d) denote the unique fixed point of F and suppose x ∈ A. Consider stochastic processes {Xk = (X 1 , . . . ,X d ) : k = 0, 1, 2, . . . } and ǫ = {(...

The behavior and dynamics of complex systems are in focus of many research fields. The complexity of such systems comes not only from the number of their elements, but also from the unavoidable emergence of new properties of the system, which are not just a simple summation of the properties of its elements. The behavior of complex systems can be fitted with a number of well developed models, w...

This paper argues that advanced demand exhibit three characteristics – that of being probabilistic, stochastic and deterministic. Deterministic demand results in revenue management practices being cross-functional. The paper proposes a new revenue management system that integrates four decision sets of the firm: the value set, the segmentation set, the sensitivity set and the forecasting set. A...

“Grounded” language learning employs training data in the form of sentences paired with relevant but ambiguous perceptual contexts. Börschinger et al. (2011) introduced an approach to grounded language learning based on unsupervised PCFG induction. Their approach works well when each sentence potentially refers to one of a small set of possible meanings, such as in the sportscasting task. Howev...

Two fundamental notions in microeconomic theory are efficiency—no agent can be made better off without making another one worse off—and strategyproofness—no agent can obtain a more preferred outcome by misrepresenting his preferences. When social outcomes are probability distributions (or lotteries) over alternatives, there are varying degrees of these notions depending on how preferences over ...

The set of bistochastic or doubly stochastic N × N matrices form a convex set called Birkhoff’s polytope, that we describe in some detail. Our problem is to characterize the set of unistochastic matrices as a subset of Birkhoff’s polytope. For N = 3 we present fairly complete results. For N = 4 partial results are obtained. An interesting difference between the two cases is that there is a ball...

The illusion of control refers to a phenomenon whereby people believe their chances of success at a task are greater than would be warranted by objective analysis. This article raises two questions. First, how robust is the illusion of control? Second, how might the illusion be 'shattered?' Previous experimental demonstrations involved situations that can be likened to unique or single-shot gam...

In this paper, we analyze the behavior of stochastic approximation schemes with set-valued maps in the absence of a stability guarantee. We prove that after a large number of iterations if the stochastic approximation process enters the domain of attraction of an attracting set it gets locked into the attracting set with high probability. We demonstrate that the above result is an effective ins...