Kelvin Lancaster considered a commodity as a bundle of characteristics or a bunch of vectors. The demand for a commodity is therefore a demand for its characteristics. Those characteristics may include time (whether a commodity is old or new), place (its location), positional value (whether it...

This paper has elaborated upon the deleterious effects of outliers and corruption of dataset on estimation of linear regression coefficients by the Ordinary Least Squares method. Motivated to ameliorate the estimation procedure, we have introduced the robust regression estimators based on...

In this paper we construct thirteen different types of composite indices by linear combination of indicator variables (with and without outliers/data corruption). Weights of different indicator variables are obtained by maximization of the sum of squared (and, alternatively, absolute)...

Johan Gielis showed that all closed curves might be considered as some sort of deformed ellipses. He gave a superformula to parameterize such shapes. In this study an attempt has been made to estimate the parameters of Gielis' superformula from empirical data. We use an optimum search algorithm...

This paper gives an outline of evolution of the concept and econometrics of production function, which was one of the central apparatus of neo-classical economics. It shows how the famous Cobb-Douglas production function was indeed invented by von Thunen and Wicksell, how the CES production...

Meghalaya, a state in the North Eastern India, is inhabited by over 2.3 million of population of which 70 percent are Christian, 13 percent are Hindus and a little over 4 percent are Muslims as obtained in the Census 2001. In this study we investigate if numerical dominance of a community leads...

Construction of (composite) indices by the PCA is very common, but this method has a preference for highly correlated variables to the poorly correlated variables in the data set. However, poor correlation does not entail the marginal importance, since correlation coefficients among the...

Ricardo Chacoacute;n generalized Johan Gielis's superformula by introducing elliptic functions in place of trigonometric functions. In this paper an attempt has been made to fit the Chacoacute;n-Gielis curves (modified by various functions) to simulated data. Estimation has been done by the...

This paper aims at comparing the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. Among these test functions, some are new while others are well known in...