Rangelands essentially comprise geographical regions dominated by grass with or without scattered woody plants. Rangelands are often considered to function primarily as feed for livestock. In this view, conservation and biodiversity issues are secondary. The alternate view involves recognising rangelands as a biome without a specific function, but where there is an implied responsibility for in...

Counterfeiting causes hundreds of billions dollars of losses around the world every year. Due to the growing prominence of online commerce, the seriousness of the situation could soon become much worse. Hence, reaching a clear understanding of the fundamental economic incentives behind this practice is of vital importance. In this paper, we investigate a problem within which a firm selling a co...

Simple additive weighting is a well-known method for scoring and ranking alternative options based on multiple attributes. However the pitfalls associated with this approach are not widely appreciated. For example, the apparently innocuous step of normalizing the various attribute data in order to obtain comparable figures leads to markedly different rankings depending on which normalization is...

Videogames now enable players to spend virtual fortunes on exotic virtual goods and even create and sell virtual artefacts. Online consumers may also browse endlessly through virtual marketplaces and create and display virtual goods. These virtual commodities are desired and enjoyed as if they were real, but are not actually bought, or owned in a material sense – often resulting in frustration ...

Rangelands provide the main forage resource for livestock in many parts of the world, but maintaining long-term productivity and providing sufficient income for the rancher remains a challenge. One key issue is to maintain the rangeland in conditions where the rancher has the greatest possibility to adapt his/her management choices to a highly fluctuating and uncertain environment. In this stud...

Woody biomass dynamics are an expression of ecosystem function, yet biomass estimates do not provide information on the spatial distribution of woody vegetation within the vertical vegetation subcanopy. We demonstrate the ability of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to measure aboveground biomass and subcanopy structure, as an explanatory tool to unravel vegetation dynamics in struct...

Conversion of rangelands into cultivated land is one of the main challenges affecting the management of rangelands in Ethiopia. In order to inform policy makers about trends in land-use conversion, this study examined the drivers, trends, and impacts of land conversions in five locations selected in the Borana rangelands of Southern Ethiopia. This study integrated survey interviews from agro-pa...

We introduce a new interpretation of two re­ lated notions conditional utility and utility independence. Unlike the traditional inter­ pretation, the new interpretation render the notions the direct analogues of their prob­ abilistic counterparts. To capture these no­ tions formally, we appeal to the notion of util­ ity distribution, introduced in previous paper. We show that utility distributi...