International political debate on how climate change should be mitigated has grown stronger, and one key issue has been burden sharing, i.e. the question of how much each nation should be allowed to emit greenhouse gases. This Thesis examines the outcomes of emission reductions using the TIMES energy system model in four SRES scenarios, proposes a multicriteria approach for evaluating economic ...

This paper investigates the determinants of efficiency and technological progress at US research universities. It relies on a unique panel data set of multiple outputs and inputs from 92 universities covering the period 1981-1998. Over that time span, US universities experienced large increases in industry funding and in academic patenting activity. In this context, the directional distance fun...

Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults search for infor...

Water use efficiency (WUE) reflects the coupling of the carbon and water cycles and is an effective integral trait for assessing the responses of vegetated ecosystems to climate change. In this study, field experiments were performed to examine leaf WUE (WUEleaf) in response to changes in CO2 concentration and other environmental variables, including soil moisture and air temperature. We al...

The current paper develops three different ways to measure the multi-period global cost efficiency for homogeneous networks of processes when the prices of exogenous inputs are known at all time periods. A multi-period network data envelopment analysis model is presented to measure the minimum cost of the network system based on the global production possibility set. We show that there is a rel...

The Kaldor-Hicks criterion (potential Pareto improvement) and the careful treatment of consumer and seller surpluses have fostered a modern revival of an older Marshall-Pigou tradition of welfare economics. That tradition was based on the parsing of a potential change into a change in the size of some "social pie" measured in money (e.g., Pigou's "national dividend") and a change in the distrib...

The performance of a supply chain can be evaluated in either a cross-sectional or a time series manner, and data envelopment analysis is a useful method for both types of evaluation. In this paper we develop an index and indicator of productivity change that can be used with radial and non-radial models for supply chain malmquist index. The supply chain malmquist productivity index (SCMPI) can ...

In the light of new information it is sometimes necessary to change existing beliefs regarding the state of the world. During such a belief revision reasoners have to decide which beliefs to retain and which ones to retract in order to regain consistency within their belief states. Drawn from the conception that spatial belief revision is based on the alteration of mental models, we discuss the...