In multi-division organizations, goal congruence between different divisions and top management is critical to the success of management. In this paper, drawing upon a nonparametric framework to model production technology, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for a firm with multiple divisions to be goal-congruent, and then extend it to a goal congruence testing measure, which coinci...

We introduce average cost optimal adaptive policies in a class of discrete-time Markov control processes with Borel state and action spaces, allowing unbounded costs. The processes evolve according to the system equations xt+1 = F (xt, at, ξt), t = 1, 2, . . . , with i.i.d. R -valued random vectors ξt, which are observable but whose density ̺ is unknown.

During recent decades large changes in vegetation biomass have been observed in arctic and alpine areas. While these temporal trends have been clearly linked to changing climatic conditions, the drivers of local spatial variation in biomass are still relatively poorly understood. Thus, we examine the effects of abiotic conditions (as measured by ten variables representing topography, soil prope...

This paper examines changes in the industry-adjusted financial performance of 48 sample firms that laid off five percent or more employees between 1985 and 1990. Our findings indicate that the firms show significant improvements in operating cash flows and cost efficiency despite poor sales performance following layoffs. There is also evidence that the firms’ asset size increases after the layo...

High price of chippers and small scale of forestry management area seemed to create a standstill situation of chip utilization system in Japan. By combining the benefits of small scale forestry and low price chippers, a simple and low-cost chip supply model could be established, creating new employments opportunities. The object of this study is to propose the benefits of a chip supply system i...

The nuclear phase-out and the increased share of renewable distributed generation implicate new challenges for transforming the electric power system into an environmentally sustainable, reliable and cost-efficient system. An important component in transforming the electric power system is the reliable substitution of large controllable power plants by small generation units (photovoltaic syste...

To understand the transformation of banking in the post-communist transition, this paper examines the cost efficiency of 289 banks in 15 east European countries. The findings showed that banking systems in which foreign-owned banks have a larger share of total assets record lower costs and that the association between a country’s progress in banking reform and cost efficiency is non-linear. Ear...

This paper describes the process of developing an approach to evaluating the cost-efficiency of Finnish electricity distribution companies for regulation purposes. The process consisted of three main stages 1) describing of the problem and exploring the key factors, 2) finding measurable quantities for the most essential factors, and 3) selecting the final model to be used in the regulation. Th...

Symbolic PDBs and Merge-and-Shrink (M&S) are two approaches to derive admissible heuristics for optimal planning. We present a combination of these techniques, Symbolic Merge-and-Shrink (SM&S), which uses M&S abstractions as a relaxation criterion for a symbolic backward search. Empirical evaluation shows that SM&S has the strengths of both techniques deriving heuristics at least as good as the...

We introduce a video distribution architecture where the prefix of the video is delivered on demand by a prefix server while the body of the video is broken in equal length segments and each segment is periodically transmitted by a central server. The combination of open-loop distribution for the video body and closed-loop multicast transmission for the video prefix makes the overall system hig...