Goals on absolute emissions and intensity play key roles in CO2 mitigation. However, like cap-and-trade policies with price uncertainty, they suffer from significant uncertainty in abatement costs. This article examines whether an indicator could be established to complement CO2 mitigation goals and help reduce cost uncertainty with a particular focus on China. Performance indicators on CO2 emi...

This paper investigates whether unemployment and insecure employment periods merely delay fertility or also impact on completed fertility in France. It analyses both the timing of first childbearing and the fertility reached at age 40. Different indicators of declining employment security are used, i.e., current individual employment characteristics, the accumulation of unstable jobs, and aggre...

BACKGROUND The PERISTAT project aimed to develop an indicator set for monitoring and describing perinatal health in Europe. The challenge was to define indicators that cover common concerns and have the same meaning within the different European health care systems. METHODS PERISTAT included i) a review of existing recommendations on perinatal health indicators, ii) a DELPHI consensus process...

Tactical forecasting in supply chain management supports planning for inventory, scheduling production, and raw material purchase, amongst other functions. It typically refers to forecasts up to 12 months ahead. Traditional forecasting models take into account univariate information extrapolating from the past, but cannot anticipate macroeconomic events, such as steep increases or declines in n...

Internet auction companies have developed innovative tools that enable sellers to reveal more information about their credibility and product quality to avoid the “lemons” problem. On the basis of signaling and auction theories, the authors propose a typology of Internet auction quality and credibility indicators, adopt and modify Park and Bradlow’s (2005) model, and use eBay as an example to e...

Composite indicators are very common in economic and business statistics for benchmarking the mutual and relative progress of countries in a variety of policy domains such as industrial competitiveness, sustainable development, globalisation and innovation. As a consequence, improvements in the way these indicators are constructed and used seem to be a very important research issue from both th...

Implementation of an ecosystem approach to fisheries requires advice on trade-offs among fished species and between fisheries yields and biodiversity or food web properties. However, the lack of explicit representation, analysis and consideration of uncertainty in most multispecies models has limited their application in analyses that could support management advice.We assessed the consequences...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Primary care is an endeavor marked by breadth, complexity, and more clinical uncertainty than all non-primary care specialties except psychiatry. This is significant, as uncertainty is associated with a variety of troublesome economic and clinical indicators. Researchers have identified the three types of cognitive resources needed to combat uncertainty (technical, per...

Due to the multiplicity of standards and complex rules; maintenance, repair and servicing of machinery could be done only by the fully qualified and proficient experts. Since the knowledge of such experts is not available all times, using expert systems can help to improve the maintenance process. To address this need and the uncertainty of the maintenance process indicators, this research prop...