While neoclassical models of profit-maximization assume static cost-minimizing behavior, agency models of managerial behavior, particularly under regulation, suggest that managers may not minimize costs in less-competitive environments. We test whether the transition from cost-of-service regulation to more marketoriented environments affected input demand at U.S. electric generating plants. We ...

A supply chain is a set of suppliers, manufactures and distributors, which are linked together. The first chain is a supplier and the last one is customers. What is the most important in supply chain are highquality products by the least cost and the most benefit. In this regard, each input and output and intermediate have unit price and unit cost information. The cost-minimization and the prof...

The human brain's capacity for cognitive function is thought to depend on coordinated activity in sparsely connected, complex networks organized over many scales of space and time. Recent work has demonstrated that human brain networks constructed from neuroimaging data have economical small-world properties that confer high efficiency of information processing at relatively low connection cost...

Defining long-run stabilization targets for atmospheric CO2 is ultimately a political question since it depends on value judgments. However, because of the enormous uncertainties that surround projections of climate change, their impacts and mitigation costs, any proposed stabilization target is, quite expectedly, controversial. This uncertainty, some have argued, implies that climatic change m...

Fatigue-driven damage propagation is one of the most unpredictable failure mechanisms for a large variety of mechanical and structural systems subjected to cyclic and/or random operational loads during their service life. Therefore, monitoring the critical components of these systems, assessing their structural integrity, recursively predicting their remaining fatigue life (RFL), and providing ...

is one of the most important broadband wireless technologies and is anticipated to be a viable alternative to traditional wired broadband techniques due to its cost efficiency. Being an emerging technology, WiMAX supports multimedia applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), voice conference and online gaming. It is necessary to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed with different charact...

The difficulty in assessing the cost output and outcome for Geospatial Data Infrastructures (GDI’s) can be traced back to the differences between the various models and techniques that are applied interchangeably. These include economic models, statistical techniques, responsibility accounting and value approaches. Various publications have described either estimates of the total cost, possible...

In the absence of a perfect risk adjustment scheme, cost sharing can reduce risk selection in community-rated health insurance markets. However, cost sharing also reduces incentives for efficiency. In this paper, we develop a model in which insurers determine the cost efficiency of health care. They have incentives for risk selection because there are two risk types which differ in their expect...

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud providers offer a number of different tariff structures. The user has to balance the flexibility of the often quoted pay-by-the-hour, fixed price (“on demand”) model against the lower-cost-per-hour rate of a “reserved contract”. These tariff structures offer a significantly reduced cost per server hour (up to 50%), in exchange for an up-front payment by ...

In this work the distillation column sequencing problem is addressed through the Generalized Modular Framework, based on formal superstructure optimization techniques. The proposed method overcomes structural complexities through the use of systematically composed structural models incorporating all the feasible sequencing alternatives. The generated sequences are evaluated with respect to thei...