This paper documents disparities in cognitive development-as measured by a receptive vocabulary test-between children from households with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in two different phases of childhood (before and after early school years) in four developing countries: Peru,...

We examine changes in inequality in socio-emotional skills very early in life in two British cohorts born 30 years apart. We construct socio-emotional scales comparable across cohorts for both boys and girls, using two validated instruments for the measurement of child behaviour. We identify two...

Considerable public resources are devoted to the establishment and operation of business incubators (BIs), which are seen as catalysts for the promotion of entrepreneurship, innovation activities and regional development. Despite the vast amount of research that has focused on the outcomes or...

There is a growing literature that employs nonparametric frontier methods in order to evaluate the performance of investment funds. This paper proposes an integrated approach for analyzing the efficiency and performance of mutual funds. The methodology combines data envelopment analysis (DEA)...

Simple additive weighting is a well-known method for scoring and ranking alternative options based on multiple attributes. However, the pitfalls associated with this approach are not widely appreciated. For example, the apparently innocuous step of normalizing the various attribute data in order...

We present a new interactive procedure for evolutionary multiobjective optimization involving the decision rule preference model in the search for the best compromise solution. As usual in the interactive multiobjective optimization, preference elicitation phases alternate with optimization...

Purpose - The paper aims to propose a practical model for market segment selection and evaluation. The paper carries out a technique of order preference similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) approach to make an operation systematic dealing with multi-criteria decision- making problem....

Sum of Ranking Differences is an innovative statistical method that ranks competing solutions based on a reference point. The latter might arise naturally, or can be aggregated from the data. We provide two case studies to feature both possibilities. Apportionment and districting are two...

In stochastic lot sizing subject to dynamic and random demand, the minimization of operational costs is not the only conceivable objective. Minimizing the tardiness in customer demand satisfaction is no less important. Furthermore, the decision maker is interested in production plan stability....