This study investigates how differences in ownership form—between franchised and company-owned units—affect managerial incentives and competitive pricing in different oligopolistic contexts. We argue that chains may restrict decision making in company-owned units as a commitment device to maintain high prices in concentrated markets and found evidence consistent with this argument. We also foun...

the method for measuring the congestion of Noura et al. [A.A. Noura, F. ‎Hosseinzadeh Lotfi, G.R. Jahanshahloo, S. ‎Fanati Rashidi, R.P. Barnett, A new method for measuring congestion in data envelopment analysis, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 44 (2010) 240-246] ,there is no problem for congestion detection In the case of one input and one output but in higher space is not able to detect co...

     Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is an approach for evaluating performances of Decision Making Units (DMUs). The performances of DMUs are affected by the amount of sources that DMUs used. Usually increases in inputs cause increases in outputs. However, there are situations where increases in one or more inputs generate a reduction in one or more outputs. In such situations there is congesti...

A central question in the study of visual short-term memory (VSTM) has been whether its basic units are objects or features. Most studies addressing this question have used change detection tasks in which the feature value before the change is highly discriminable from the feature value after the change. This approach assumes that memory noise is negligible, which recent work has shown not to b...

In many industrial engineering applications the final decision is based on the evaluation of a number of alternatives in terms of a number of criteria. This problem may become a very difficult one when the criteria are expressed in different units or the pertinent data are difficult to be quantified. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is an effective approach in dealing with this kind of deci...

OBJECTIVE The Tanzanian health system is currently undergoing major reforms. As part of this, a study was commissioned into the delivery of services and care at the Muhimbili National Hospital. One of the main components of this comprehensive study was to measure the extent to which workers in the hospital were satisfied with the tasks they performed and to identify factors associated with low ...

This paper argues that the governance analytical framework (GAF) is a methodology having strong potential for investigation in social policy, particularly in the case of public health. It defines the concept of governance in a pragmatic way as being the processes of interactions between the actors involved in a public affair leading to decision-making or to formulating social norms. It is postu...

Complex cognitive operations such as memory formation and decision-making are thought to be mediated not by single, isolated brain structures but by multiple, connected brain areas. To facilitate studies on the neural communication between connected brain structures, we developed a multi-electrode microdrive for chronically recording ensembles of neurons in two different brain areas simultaneou...

Human intelligence is understood to be a result of collective decisions over a period of time with an objective to enforce a desired objective or activity. The neural understanding of the intelligence is reflective of a simplified behaviour of neurons and its networks. These neurons represent the building blocks of biological intelligence that is a collection of decision making units arranged i...

In this research, efficiency of Iranian forest and rangeland decision making unit was assessed using non-parametric method. Inputs and outputs determined by field research and with applying a Delphi method the final input and output variables selected. Forty five wood-producing units (forestry plans) in three northern Iranian province were studied using Data Envelopment Analysis. The efficiency...