We introduce situated autonomy and present it as part of the process of action selection. We then discuss the cognitive ingredients of situated autonomy and derive a degree of situated autonomy. 1 Situated Autonomy and Action Selection Autonomous agents have been defined to be agents with self-generated goals using the agent’s motivations [4]. Such agents perform action selection, which is the ...

Although organic rice is a niche market in Pakistan, it has exhibited enormous potential for growth export-oriented production. Since contract farming the leading promoter of production Punjab, improving technical efficiency smallholder farmers through holds sufficient potential. This work examines influence participation on farmers’ using cross-sectional data set 650 respondents. We applied st...

Abstract Background High-yielding variety (HYV) seed breeding has been one key approach to improving agricultural productivity and reduce global hunger poverty. This paper explores the causal relationship between high-yielding rice variety, productivity, farm income household nutrition. A challenge with evaluating impact of changes such as crop varieties on yield is self-selection endogeneity. ...

This paper identifies the main sources of urban increasing returns, after Marshall. The geographical distance across which externalities flow is also examined. We bring to bear on these questions plant-level data organized in the form of a panel across the years 1989 and 1999. Plant-level production functions are estimated across the Canadian manufacturing sector as a whole and for five broad i...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which trust directly affects public support for biotechnology, particularly in applications to food production and genetic modification of crop plants. Unlike previous research in which trust is assumed to be exogenous, this paper posits that trust is endogenously determined. An econometric model is developed that controls for the endogeneit...

We provide a generalization of the Anderson-Rubin (AR) procedure for inference on parameters which represent the dependence between possibly endogenous explanatory variables and disturbances in a linear structural equation (endogeneity parameters). We focus on second-order dependence and stress the distinction between regression and covariance endogeneity parameters. Such parameters have intrin...

A large share of the workforce throughout the developing world is self-employed, and this proportion has increased in recent decades. Assessments of this development vary, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using a long panel dataset from Ghana, we empirically investigate the changing structure of earn...