this paper uses the concept of meta-frontier to investigate the relationship between meta technology ratios (mtr) and different varieties in datepalms including; mazafati, rabi and zardan that are produced widely in sistan and baluchestan province of iran. we used a stratified sampling of 300 date farmers of this province in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and estimated a stochastic production frontier usi...

Much work has examined the phenomenon of dispute escalation, whereby concrete measures state actors take edge them closer to war. Less attention been devoted ways in which actors’ perceptions what is at stake a can also change, with important consequences for likelihood conflict. This paper examines inflation – wherein contest over an object or issue assumes ever greater stakes and significance...

This paper investigates the effects of the formation of free trade agreements (FTAs) on trade disputes. We construct a unique and comprehensive dataset on inter-country trade disputes from 1995 to 2007. The dataset covers 110 countries and 1130 trade disputes. We find that the incidences of trade disputes between two countries are positively associated with economic size, economic growth, and t...

Current approaches for the design of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) systems involve the replication of Alternative Dispute Resolution practices such as mediation and negotiation. Though such systems have been found to be popular, there are concerns that these systems fail to take into account judicial practices. In this paper a system that supports disputants' decisions making when engaged in ...

Despite debuting to little fanfare under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), dispute settlement under the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been called the “backbone of the multilateral trading system.” Indeed, whereas GATT dispute settlement could scarcely have seemed more flawed, the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) is widely touted for boosting confidence in an in...

Early forecasting of project dispute resolutions (PDRs) provides decision-support information for resolving potential procurement problems before a dispute occurs. This study compares the performances of classification and ensemble models for predicting dispute handling methods in public–private partnership (PPP) projects. Model analyses use machine learners (i.e., Support Vector Machines (SVMs...

We investigate the novel task of online dispute detection and propose a sentiment analysis solution to the problem: we aim to identify the sequence of sentence-level sentiments expressed during a discussion and to use them as features in a classifier that predicts the DISPUTE/NON-DISPUTE label for the discussion as a whole. We evaluate dispute detection approaches on a newly created corpus of W...