Eutectic molten salt can be used as the latent thermal energy storage (LTES) medium in solar energy applications. In the present study, eutectic salt (50wt% NaNO3, 50wt% KNO3) with a melting temperature of about 220°C was employed as the PCM for the middle-temperature solar energy application,...

The augmented Lagrangian method is attractive in constraint optimizations. When it is applied to a class of constrained variational inequalities, the sub-problem in each iteration is a nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP). By introducing a logarithmic-quadratic proximal term, the sub-NCP...

In this paper, two types of Levitin–Polyak well-posedness of vector equilibrium problems with variable domination structures are investigated. Criteria and characterizations for two types of Levitin–Polyak well-posedness of vector equilibrium problems are shown. Moreover, by virtue of a gap...

We introduce a geometric model for unjamming the polydisperse hard-disk packing. The unjamming corresponds to a critical packing density which is assumed to happen uniformly throughout the packing. However, this model can be used for prediction of local dilation in packings. Molecular dynamics...

This article examines the choice of health care in Japan for patients suffering from the common cold.

This paper examines the choice of health care for minor aliments in Japan for patients suffering from thirteen different minor aliments. Original data were obtained from a survey conducted by the authors. For the common cold, shoulder/neck pain, backache, constipation/diarrea, asthenopia,...

Models which estimate influenza mortality probably overestimate this mortality because their baseline estimates include only nonepidemic weeks. We present a stochastic frontier estimation model which better reflects influenza mortality.

This article estimates a partially linear model that permits non-linearities of unspecified form in the school quality-earnings relationship. It examines the joint effect of teacher education and pupil-teacher ratios on 1990 earnings using NLSY data. It finds some evidence of non-linearities in...

Zellner and Ryu examined several popular specifications of elasticity of scale that characterizes production functions. This note goes further by combining these functional forms and proposing a model-averaged estimator of elasticity of scale. The methodology used in Bayesin Model Averaging, and...

This research analyses the determinants of demand for medical services in urban areas of Bolivia. It also examines the possible trade-offs between cost recovery and the use of health services for different age, sex, ethic, and income groups. The data are from the third year of the Encuesta...