The nearly omnipresence of the Internet and the steady increase of wireless computing and mobile devices require highly dynamic adaptable distributed system architectures. Building such architectures needs a combination of key concepts from component technology and distributed systems. Mobile agents provide this combination. We use mobile agents as the building blocks of a component-based syste...

Consumers worldwide are driving changes in animal agriculture. Rising consumer income, changing demographics and lifestyles, and shifting preferences due to new information about the links between diet and health all contribute to new demands for foods. At the same time, technological changes in production, processing and distribution, structural change and growth in large-scale retailing, and ...

Coordination and harmony between different departments of a company can be an important factor in achieving competitive advantage if the company corrects alignment between strategies of different departments. This paper presents an integrated decision model based on recent advances of geometric programming technique. The demand of a product considers as a power function of factors such as produ...

When a …rm introduces a product with new features, some consumers may …nd it di¢ cult to assess their valuations for these new attributes. Their purchase decisions made under such uncertainty may lead to post-purchase regret. It has been experimentally shown that consumers anticipate their potential post-purchase regret in the future and make their current choices to mitigate or minimize it. Th...

In smart grid paradigm, the consumer demands are random and time-dependent, owning towards stochastic probabilities. The stochastically varying consumer demands have put the policy makers and supplying agencies in a demanding position for optimal generation management. The utility revenue functions are highly dependent on the consumer deterministic stochastic demand models. The sudden drifts in...

In our model, individual consumers follow simple behavioral decision rules based on imitation and habit as suggested in consumer research, social learning , and related fields. Demand can be viewed as the outcome of a population game whose revision protocol is determined by the consumers' behavioral rules. The consumer dynamics are then analyzed in order to explore the demand side and first imp...