A generic model for the monetary flow in multi-level marketing schemes for virtual goods, so called incentive management systems, is introduced and analysed. It is shown that such schemes can in principle be fair, and it is argued that they can be viably realised if the value of the distributed good is positive. It is shown how the monetary incentive a buyer receives through the scheme can be p...

ness of an element is the ratio of in-degrees over in-degrees plus out-degrees of the element, and ranges from 0 to l (Pieters et al. 1995). Elements with high abstractness scores are

BACKGROUND This paper discusses how hashish produced by the local population of Tyup, Kyrgyzstan became an important source of cash in an agricultural semi-subsistence economy. METHODS The paper is based on a research study conducted between 2009 and 2010 that adopted a mixed-method approach to data collection. I gathered 64 semi-structured interviews, 147 structured interviews and made ethno...

The main purpose of this paper was to introduce an efficient algorithm for fault identification in fruits images. First, input image was de-noised using the combination of Block Matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) and Principle Component Analysis (PCA) model. Afterward, in order to reduce the size of images and increase the execution speed, refined Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm was uti...

The demographic evidence of gender bias in many countries has provided an impetus for finding ways to study the status of women in developing countries. Because of the lack of accurate intra-household data, Deaton (1989) introduced a method for using household expenditure data to infer discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls. Few studies of discrimination using the meth...

Participants in a supply chain of agricultural value-added products face significant challenges. Many of the costly distinctive traits are difficult (if not impossible) to observe even after consumption. A complicating factor, addressed here, is that in some circumstances delivered quality can only be imperfectly learned and/or affected stochastically by producers. In order for markets for thes...

Article history: Received 8 February 2013 Received in revised form 1 April 2014 Accepted 5 April 2014 Available online 13 April 2014 This study uses a theoretically justified gravity model of trade to examine the impact of the ASEAN–China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA) on exports, focusing on trade creation and diversion effects. The model is tested on a sample of 31 countries over the period dat...