Recent years have seen the development of a number of methods for multiagent planning under uncertainty that scale to tens or even hundreds of agents. However, most of these methods either make restrictive assumptions on the problem domain, or provide approximate solutions without any guarantees on quality. To allow for meaningful benchmarking through measurable quality guarantees on a very gen...

It is essential to understand the consumption pattern of food and how it changes over time to formulate sound economic policies as well as marketing and pricing strategies. In this study, we estimate the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System with six rounds of the Family Income Expenditure Survey exploiting the conditional linearity of the demand system. We find that the Filipino diet has become...

Self-reported measures of life satisfaction may be biased by optimistic or pessimistic dispositions of respondents. In this paper we view life satisfaction as stochastic and estimate a two-tiered quality of life stochastic frontier model to account for upward and downward biases in self-reported quality of life questions. Using the British Household Panel Survey 1995, we interpret the two one-s...

We address the issue of deriving a semantically equivalent optimistic computation from a pessimistic computation by application-independent transformations. Computations are modeled by program dependence graphs (pdgs). The semantics of a computation is de-ned by a mapping from an initial state to a nal state, and is realized by a graph rewriting system. Semantics-preserving transformations are ...

In this article, we investigate the measurement of performance in DMUs in which input and/or output values are given as imprecise data. By imprecise data, we mean that in some cases, we only know that the actual values are inside certain intervals, and in other cases, data are specified only as ordinal preference information. In this article, we present two distinct perspectives for determining...

A retrospective evaluation of attitudinal, behavioural and knowledge change among diverse stakeholder groups was conducted in Limpopo Province of South Africa to assess the effectiveness of a series of values clarification (VC) interventions. Telephone and face-to-face interview (193) results revealed that over two-thirds (70.2%) reported behavioural changes and 93.2% reported increased compass...

This paper studies abstraction and refinement techniques in the setting of multi-valued model checking for the μ-calculus. Two dimensions of abstractions are identified and studied: Abstraction by joining states of the underlying multi-valued Kripke structure as well as abstraction of truth values, for each following both an optimistic and pessimistic account. It is shown that our notion of abs...