Rain-fed maize production in semi-arid areas of the Loess Plateau in China is constrained by low temperatures and water limitations during the early growth stage. Traditionally, gravel mulching was an effective strategy to increase soil temperature and moisture and, therefore, crop production;...

Global warming is predicted to have adverse effects on crop productivity and will present an enormous challenge to sustainable development and food security, especially in dryland regions. Prior studies have identified that adapted crop cultivars could effectively act to offset the effects of...

Boron-doped ZnO (BZO) films deposited by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) generally act as transparent conductive oxide films in hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells and exhibit a high external quantum efficiency (EQE) performance in the short-wavelength region....

Marketers disclose quality information directly to potential consumers using a variety of communication channels. This study investigates how competition may influence duopoly firms' incentive to voluntarily reveal quality information. We show that firms in competitive markets reveal less...

In the crowd security research area a primary concern is to identify the macro state of crowd behaviors to prevent disasters and to supervise the crowd behaviors. The entropy is used to describe the macro state of a self-organization system in physics. The entropy change indicates the system...

To improve the productivities of an automated container terminal, it is important to schedule different types of handling equipment in an integrated way. A mixed-integer programming model, which considers various constraints related to the integrated operations between different types of...

This paper provides an exploratory study of price dispersion in the grocery market and checks for the consistency of the evidence on this price dispersion with the existing theories of price dispersion due to costly consumer search, competition, and consumer heterogeneity in the context of the...