On deciding how to decide: Designing participatory budget processes

Participatory budgets are becoming increasingly popular in many municipalities all around the world. The underlying idea is to allow citizens to participate in the allocation of a municipal budget. Many advantages have been suggested for such experiences, including legitimization and more informed and transparent decisions. There are many conceivable variants of such processes. However, in most cases both its design and implementation are carried out in an informal way. In this paper we propose a methodology to design a participatory budget process based on a multicriteria decision making model.     

The relevance of system dynamics to engineering systems design

With the recent advent of new technology using micro computers for the centralised monitoring of information, the scope for totally automatic, real time control of large engineering systems has been advanced. We are entering a period which, retrospectively, may well be seen as the era of control; where for the first time it is both feasible and necessary to design system in terms of the way in which they will be operated, as well as in the traditional terms of their capacity requirements. However, before such comprehensive design can be undertaken compatible advances are required in information usage technology.The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the subject of System Dynamics can be used to assist with this problem, though its capacity to model information feedback and hence to model and test alternative system control rules based on the information retrieved. This type of application in the hard system area of engineering provides a strong contrast to the more usual applications of System Dynamics in softer socio-economic systems.The problem described is taken from the coal mining industry and related to the design of large scale underground conveyor belt systems used for the clearance of coal from mines. The demonstration presented, therefore, concerns research in this field, but has considerable scope for application in the general area of large scale bulk handling system.Of particular importance in the results is an indication of the potential savings in physical capacity which can stem from the careful design and implementation of control in such systems.     

The history and ideas of Marxism: the relevance for OR

Journal of the Operational Research Society - The paper examines the origins of Marxism in Europe in the second half of the 19th century in the context of the industrial and political revolutions...     

Observing,reporting, and deciding in networks of sentences

In prior work [7] we considered networks of agents who have knowledge bases in first order logic, and report facts to their neighbors that are in their common languages and are provable from their knowledge bases, in order to help a decider verify a single sentence. In report complete networks, the signatures of the agents and the links between agents are rich enough to verify any decider?s sentence that can be proved from the combined knowledge base. This paper introduces a more general setting where new observations may be added to knowledge bases and the decider must choose a sentence from a set of alternatives. We consider the question of when it is possible to prepare in advance a finite plan to generate reports within the network. We obtain conditions under which such a plan exists and is guaranteed to produce the right choice under any new observations.     

A bound on powers of linear operators,with relevance to numerical stability

In this note, we formulate a theorem giving bounds on the powers of linear operators, in a general Banach space setting. The relevance of the theorem is illustrated by applying it to the Crank-Nicholson method for the numerical solution of the heat equation. This application yields a stability estimate in the maximum norm which amounts to an improvement over a well-known result of Serdjukova [1].     

The relevance of DEA benchmarking information and the Least-Distance Measure

Efficiency analysis is performed not only to estimate the current level of efficiency, but also to provide information on how to remove inefficiency, that is, to obtain benchmarking information. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was developed in order to satisfy both objectives and the strength of its benchmarking analysis gives DEA a unique advantage over other methodologies of efficiency analysis. This study proposes the use of the Least-Distance Measure in order to obtain the shortest projection from the evaluated Decision Making Unit (DMU) to the strongly efficient production frontier, thus allowing an inefficient DMU to find the easiest way to improve its efficiency. In addition to producing reasonable benchmarking information, the proposed model provides efficiency values which satisfy the general requirements that every well-defined efficiency measure should meet.     

Trim-loss pattern rearrangement and its relevance to the flat-glass industry

An additional restriction upon the conventional two-dimensional trim-loss problem arises in the glass-industry. This restriction imposes limitations upon the positioning of cuts within the stock-plate, relative to other cuts. Two procedures are presented which take an existing pattern and attempt to rearrange it to meet the restrictions. One procedure is a heuristic while the other is a complete enumeration.     

The exact extreme response and the confidence extreme response analysis of structures subjected to uncertain-but-bounded excitations

In this study, the methods for computing the exact bounds and the confidence bounds of the dynamic response of structures subjected to uncertain-but-bounded excitations are discussed. Here the Euclidean norm of the nodal displacement is considered as the measurement of the structural response. The problem of calculating the exact lower bound, the confidence (outer) approximation and the inner approximation of the exact upper bound, and the exact upper bound of the dynamic response are modeled as three convex QB (quadratic programming with box constraints) problems and a problem of quadratic programming with bivalent constraints at each time point, respectively. Accordingly, the DCA (difference of convex functions algorithm) and the vertex method are adopted to solve the above convex QB problems and the quadratic programming problem with bivalent constraints, respectively. Based on the inner approximation and the outer approximation of the exact upper bound, the error between the confidence upper bound and the exact upper bound of dynamic response could be yielded. Specially, we also investigate how to obtain the confidence bound of the dynamic response of structures subjected to harmonic excitations with uncertain-but-bounded excitation frequencies. Four examples are given to show the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.     

The class of microarray games and the relevance index for genes

Nowadays, microarray technology is available to generate a huge amount of information on gene expression. This information must be statistically processed and analyzed, in particular, to identify those genes which are useful for the diagnosis and prognosis of specific diseases. We discuss the possibility of applying game-theoretical tools, like the Shapley value, to the analysis of gene expression data. Via a “truncation” technique, we build a coalitional game whose aim is to stress the relevance (“sufficiency”) of groups of genes for the specific disease we are interested in. The Shapley value of this game is used to select those genes which deserve further investigation. To justify the use of the Shapley value in this context, we axiomatically characterize it using properties with a genetic interpretation. The authors are grateful to two anonymous referees for their extremely helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the VI Spanish Meeting on Game Theory and Practice, July 12–14, 2004, Elche, Spain. S. Moretti gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the EU project NewGeneris, European Union 6th FP (FOOD-CT-2005-016320).     

A hierarchy machine: Learning to optimize from nature and humans

This article proposes a competent hierarchical optimization method called the hierarchical Bayesian optimization algorithm (hBOA). hBOA extends the Bayesian optimization algorithm (BOA) by incorporating three important features for robust and scalable optimization of hierarchical problems: proper decomposition, chunking, and preservation of alternative solutions. Additionally, the article proposes a class of difficult hierarchical problems called hierarchical traps. hBOA is shown to provide a scalable solution to the class of hierarchically decomposable problems and anything easier. Specifically, hBOA can solve hierarchical traps and other nearly decomposable problems in approximately O(n^1.55 log n) to O(n²) function evaluations, where n is the number of decision variables in the problem. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Trends in efficiency in response to regulatory reforms: The case of Indian and Pakistani commercial banks

This paper attempts to estimate trends in the efficiency levels of Indian and Pakistani commercial banks between 1985 and 2003, a time period which encompasses two phases of significant change to the regulation of the financial sector in both countries. Our efficiency estimates show that, during the initial years of the post reform period, a reduction in efficiency is observed for banks in both countries. However, efficiency levels were found to have increased subsequently, suggesting a period of initial adjustment throughout much of the 1990s followed by a subsequent correction in the latter part of the sample period.