We conducted preference assessments with 4 typically developing children to identify potential reinforcers and assessed the reinforcing efficacy of those stimuli. Next, we tested two predictions of economic theory: that overall consumption (reinforcers obtained) would decrease as the unit price (response requirement per reinforcer) increased and that the cost and benefit components that defined...

Many practical engineering applications can be formulated as a global optimization problem, in which objective function has many local minima, and derivatives of the objective function are unavailable. Differential Evolution (DE) is a floating-point encoding evolutionary algorithm for global optimization over continuous spaces (Storn & Price, 1997) (Liu & Lampinen, 2005) (Price, Storn & Lampine...

The conduct of monetary policy in an oil economy with a managed floating exchange rate regime can be challenging in an environment of fiscal dominance and incomplete transition to a market economy. The Five-Year Development Plans provide a natural benchmark against which to assess monetary policy performance in Iran. Price stability has proved elusive, with liquidity growth targets constan...

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Six hens pecked a key (Experiment 1) or pushed a door (Experiment 2) to obtain food reinforcement. In both experiments and as an analogue of price changes, the response requirements were varied in two ways: by increasing the number of responses required and by increasing the required force of each response. The two price manipulations (response number and response force) had different effects o...

We analyze optimal policy in a simple small open economy model with price setting frictions. In particular, we study the optimal response of the nominal exchange rate following a terms of trade shock. We depart from the New Keynesian literature in that we explicitly model internationally traded commodities as intermediate inputs in the production of local final goods and assume that the small o...

This paper proposes a Laplace-transform-based approach to price the fixed-strike quantile options as well as to calculate the associated hedging parameters (delta and gamma) under a hyperexponential jump diffusion model, which can be viewed as a generalization of the well-known Black–Scholes model and Kou’s double exponential jump diffusion model. By establishing a relationship between floating...

Uncertain process is an important tool tomodel dynamic uncertain systems. This paper proposes a special type of uncertain processes, named contour processes, whose sample paths can be classified by their inverse uncertainty distributions. It is shown that the set of contour processes is closed under the extreme value operator and the time integral operator as well as the monotone function. As a...

Let the underlying process Y be a semimartingale taking values in an interval I. Let φ : I → R be a difference of convex functions, and let X := φ(Y ). A typical application takes Y to be a positive price process and φ(y) = log y for y ∈ I = (0,∞). Then [the floating leg of] a forward-starting weighted variance swap or generalized variance swap on φ(Y ) (shortened to “on Y ” if the φ is underst...

ultimate limits of an open pit, which define its size and shape at the end of the mine’s life, is the pit with the highest profit value. a number of algorithms such as floating or moving cone method, floating cone method ii and the corrected forms of this method, the korobov algorithm and the corrected form of this method, dynamic programming and the lerchs and grossmann algorithm based on grap...