Top-down knowledge about the target is essential in visual search. It biases visual attention to information that matches the target-defining criteria. Extensive research in the past has examined visual search when the target is defined by fixed criteria throughout the experiment, with few studies investigating how subjects set up the target. To address this issue, we conducted five experiments...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a powerful tool for measuring the relative efficiencies of a set of decision making units (DMUs) such as schools and bank branches that transform multiple inputs to multiple outputs. In centralized decision-making systems, management normally imposes common resource constraints such as fixed capital, budgets for operating capital and staff count. In consequenc...

The determination of the target for a manufacturing process involves a complex and fiscally vital decision. This study examines a situation where a product is classified into several grades with respect to specifications of markets. It is reasonably assumed that each grade gives its price and manufacturers cannot produce every item in good grade due to uncontrollable variation of product perfor...

Iran`s pharmaceutical products market as one of the major markets of the country has been faced with fluctuations over time. Suitable market selection is necessary for stability of pharmaceutical exports. Study of the global market structure of this product leads to policy makers in development, production, and trade of pharmaceuticals and finally increases country’s share of the world pharmace...

background: in the recent years, using health technologies to diagnose and treat diseases has had a considerable and accelerated growth. the proper use of these technologies may considerably help in the diagnosis and treatment of different diseases. on the other hand, unlimited and unrestricted entry of these technologies may result in induced demand by service providers. the aim of this study ...

achieving optimal production cycle time for improving manufacturing processes is one of the common problems in production planning. during recent years, different approaches have been developed for solving this problem, but most of them assume that mean quality characteristic is constant over production run length and sets it on customer’s target value. however, the process mean may drift from ...