In this study a directional output distance function which incorporates both desirable and undesirable output is employed to investigate the impact of privatization experienced by the Taiwan Motor Transport Company (TMTC). For the first time, we measure efficiency changes before and after privatization while treating transport risk as a joint but undesirable output. The empirical results demons...

A traditional method to validate protocols by state space exploration is to use forward symbolic execution. One of the main problems of this approach is that to find all undesirable system states one has to generate all reachable states and evaluate all desirable system states as well. The paper discusses an alternative search strategy based on backward symbolic execution. This time we start wi...

Undesirable outputs are often produced together with desirable. This joint production of good and bad outputs bring about a difficulty for productivity measurement. Here we introduce a directional distance function and use it as a component in a new productivity index. This index, as an empirical example shows, seems to solve the problem caused by the joint production of good and bad outputs. P...

OBJECTIVE This study addressed the issue of whether frequent exposure to life events is associated with aggravation or blunting of cardiovascular reactions to acute mental stress. METHODS In a substantial cohort of 585 healthy young adults, systolic and diastolic blood pressure and pulse rate were recorded at rest and in response to a mental arithmetic stress task. Participants indicated, fro...

Planning for electricity generation systems is a very important task and should take environmental and economic factors into account. This paper reviews the existing metrics and methods in evaluating energy sustainability, and we propose a sustainability assessment index system. The input indexes include generation capacity, generation cost, and land use. The output indexes include desirable an...

Overly strict legal standards are commonly thought to discourage parties from engaging in socially desirable activities. It is explained here, however, that excessive legal standards cannot lead to undesirable curtailment of activities when legal standards are enforced by liability for negligence, essentially because parties can choose to be negligent rather than comply. But excessive legal sta...

This study tested the hypothesis that undesirable members are salient in a small group, while desirable members become salient in a larger group. One hundred and forty-five students were randomly assigned to twelve conditions, and read sentences desirably, undesirably, or neutrally describing each member of a college student club. The twelve clubs had one of three group sizes: 13, 39, or 52, an...