Freight transport plays a fundamental role in the economy of every country. The performance of the European transport sector has been in line with the expanding economy. From 1995 to 2004 total European freight transport in the 25 Member States examined grew from 2,967,000 to 3,804,000 million tkm (+28 %). Considering only inland transport, it appears that the considerable growth was almost ent...

In this paper, we present an intuitive and controllable patch-based technique for terrain synthesis. Our method is based on classical patch-based texture synthesis approaches. It generates a new terrain model by combining patches extracted from a given set of exemplars, providing a control performed by a low frequency guide, a categorization of exemplars, and a map for distributing these catego...

Microsimulation based frameworks have become very popular in many research areas including travel demand modeling where activity-based models have been in the center of attention for the past decade. Advanced activity-based models synthesize the entire population of the study region and simulate their activities in a way that they can keep track of agents’ resources as well as their spatial loc...

We characterize probabilistic choice models that have two (or more) fixed ratio scales associated with each choice option. A version of Luce’s choice model with fixed scales and exponents, which we also characterize, is included. The characterizing properties are: Simple scalability, i.e. the choice probabilities depend upon a priori arbitrary combinations of the two scale values attached to ea...

This study examines 2,933 cases of Japanese investment in 27 provinces and regions in China to identify the role that policy determinants had in influencing the sub-national location decision of Japanese firms in China. The empirical results show that the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Opening Coastal Cities (OCCs) were a successful policy instrument initially, as SEZs and OCCs had a strong ...

This paper provides two representation theorems for time preferences. They both cover as special cases a variety of time preference models considered in the experimental and theoretical literatures on intertemporal choice. In particular, similarity relations on time and outcomes, exponential, quasi-hyperbolic and hyperbolic discounting are special cases of the theorems. This approach identi…es ...

We argue in favour of identifying one aspect of rational choice with the tendency to conform to the choice you expect another like-minded, but non-communicating, agent to make and study this idea in the very basic case where the choice is from a non-empty subset K of 2A and no further structure or knowledge of A is assumed.

There are several advantages to viewing ethics as rational choice in this broader sense. It provides a conceptual framework that allows you to analyze complex business decisions that involve multiple stakeholders (as nearly all do). It offers a style of argument that can appeal to all parties, since rational choice, by definition, considers all points of view. It provides a vocabulary with whic...

The classical theory of rational choice is built on several important internal consistency conditions. In recent years, the reasonableness of those internal consistency conditions has been questioned and criticized, and several responses to accommodate such criticisms have been proposed in the literature. This paper develops a general framework to accommodate the issues raised by the criticisms...

The standard reinforcement learning view of the involvement of neuromodulatory systems in instrumental conditioning includes a rather straightforward conception of motivation as prediction of sum future reward. Competition between actions is based on the motivating characteristics of their consequent states in this sense. Substantial, careful, experiments reviewed in Dickinson & Balleine, 12,13...