The rank reversal problem in multi-criteria decision making : a literature review

Despite the importance of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques for constructing effective decision models, there are many criticisms due to the occurrence of a problem called rank reversal. Nevertheless, there is a lack of a systematic literature review on this important subject which involves different methods. This study reviews the pertinent literature on rank reversal, based on 130 related articles published from 1980 to 2015 in international journals, which were gathered and analyzed according to the following perspectives: multicriteria technique, year and journal in which the papers were published, co-authorship network, rank reversal types, and research goal. Thus our survey provides recommendations for future research, besides useful information and knowledge regarding rank reversal in the MCDM field

Masking Femininity: Women and Power in Shakespeare\u27s Macbeth, As You Like It, and Titus Andronicus

This paper analyzes the power that Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, Rosalind from As You Like It, and Tamora from Titus Andronicus assert and answers the questions of how women assert power in Shakespeare and the role gender plays in power

A fuzzy asymmetric TOPSIS model for optimizing investment in online advertising campaigns

The high penetration of the Internet and e-commerce in Spain during recent years has increased companies' interest in this medium for advertising planning. In this context Google offers a great advertising inventory and perfectly segmented content pages. This work is concerned with the optimization of online advertising investments based on pay-per-click campaigns. Our main goal is to rank and select different alternative keyword sets aimed at maximizing the awareness of and traffic to a company's website. The keyword selection problem with online advertising purposes is clearly a multiple-criteria decision-making problem additionally characterized by the imprecise, ambiguous and uncertain nature of the available data. To address this problem, we propose a technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS)-based approach, which allows us to rank the alternative keyword sets, taking into account the fuzzy nature of the available data. The TOPSIS is based on the concept that the chosen alternative should have the shortest distance from the positive ideal solution and the longest distance from the negative ideal solution. In this work, due to the characteristics of the studied problem, we propose the use of an asymmetric distance, allowing us to work with ideal solutions that differ from the maximum or the minimum. The suitability of the proposed model is illustrated with an empirical case of a stock exchange broker's advertising investment problem aimed at generating awareness about the brand and increasing the traffic to the corporative website

Liberalism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany

This is a preprint (author's original) version of the article published in Critical Review 13(1-2):31-53. The final version of the article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913819908443521 (login required to access content). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author.Author's Origina

Hellmut O Pappe(unpublished) Sismondi, Constant and Tocqueville

Hellmut Pappe died in 1998. Since the publication of Sismondi’s Weggenossen (Geneva, 1956), he had been planning a new biography of Sismondi intended both to replace J. R. Salis’s Sismondi, 1775-1842: la vie et l'oeuvre d'un cosmopolite philosophe (1932) and to give a fuller view of Sismondi’s influence, particularly over significant luminaries of nineteenth century European thought. Although Hellmut Pappe continued working until his death, his published work in this field was limited to a number of articles on Sismondi and editions of such works as the ‘Statitique du Departement du Leman’. Among the papers he left to the University of Sussex, however, were transcriptions of Sismondi’s mother and sister’s diaries, three chapters of the biography describing Sismondi’s life up to 1800, and some miscellaneous papers, destined for the second volume of the biography, describing Sismondi’s relationships with his contemporaries. The paper published here comes from the latter collection and appears to have been one of the last papers that Hellmutt Pappe completed. For reasons of brevity, the version of the paper published here omits the final section of the manuscript version, dealing with Sismondi’s view of North America, in addition to several of the more extensive notes. The paper underlines Pappe’s concern to restore Sismondi to the first rank of European political economists and historians

Parental Gifts: Father-Son Dedications and Dialogues in Roman Didactic Literature

published or submitted for publicatio

Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosopher of Immoralism?

This paper intends to show that Friedrich Nietzsche’s approach to morality or ‘immorality’ involves an attempt to see moral beliefs as a product of human psychology, rather than as a set of metaphysical ‘truths’ that are somehow given to, or discoverable by, us. Nietzsche wants to replace the metaphysical (or supernatural) account of morality with a natural one, and his treatment of moral belief-systems, from the perspective of this concern, can be divided into (a) a psychological analysis of the true nature of moral action and agency, and (b) an historical/genealogical tracing of the real origins of moral values. In this paper I am going to focus on the second dimension of Nietzsche’s analysis through references from his polemical texts Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, Gay Science, and Will to Power. I will outline Nietzsche’s historical leitmotif on the morality of ressentiment or slave morality and will show how it figures as a point of departure for his revolutionary transvaluation of values, one that places a new order of morality which is disparagingly called ‘immoralism.’ Next, I will discuss Nietzsche’s treatment of bad conscience and posit that it involves two different stages: one is the present stage of the bad conscience as a feeling of guilt, and the other is an earlier stage. I shall argue that in order for this earlier stage to develop into the level of guilt, he needs another element, namely an indebtedness towards gods, which finds its most striking culmination in the Christian heritage of religious dogmatism. Finally, I will discuss how for Nietzsche Christianity as an ascetic ideal has promoted to preserve a declining life, i.e. a slave morality, for all of humanity

Minkowski Spacetime and QED from Ontology of Time

Classical mechanics, relativity, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics are often depicted as separate realms of physics, each with its own formalism and notion. This remains unsatisfactory with respect to the unity of nature and to the necessary number of postulates. We uncover the intrinsic connection of these areas of physics and describe them using a common symplectic Hamiltonian formalism. Our approach is based on a proper distinction between variables and constants, i.e. on a basic but rigorous ontology of time. We link these concept with the obvious conditions for the possibility of measurements. The derived consequences put the measurement problem of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum mechanical wavefunction into perspective. According to our (onto-) logic we find that spacetime can not be fundamental. We argue that a geometric interpretation of symplectic dynamics emerges from the isomorphism between the corresponding Lie algebra and the representation of a Clifford algebra. Within this conceptional framework we derive the dimensionality of spacetime, the form of Lorentz transformations and of the Lorentz force and fundamental laws of physics as the Planck-Einstein relation, the Maxwell equations and finally the Dirac equation.Comment: 36 pages, 3 figures, several typos corrected, references with title

Law in other contexts: stand bravely brothers! a report from the law wars

This essay argues against the two pillars of current research on law and globalisation, from the perspective of legal theory and political philosophy: first, the distinction between ‘well-ordered’ and ‘not so well-ordered’ societies; second, the sociological model of the subject as pacified, fearful and isolated (to sum up, in harmony). It is argued that mainstream legal theory and political philosophy merely reflects the actual rules of the game of competition, dispute and conflict. In contrast, this essay takes sides with the anthropological and philosophical tradition that conceives the subject as antagonistic and in state of lack, profoundly concerned with the other, whom she imitates and whose standpoint she must be able to share if she is to make sense of the world. Furthermore, it is argued that transitivity or imitation lies at the very origin of conflict and dispute; lack and antagonism remain thus at the core of society, in spite of the surface appearance of harmony that characterises post-modern societies. Because of this, any general theory of law and society that wishes to be relevant at the time of globalisation must make the experience of antagonism and violence, motivated by imitation and envy, and its containment, its object of study. To do this, it must abandon the dualist conception of subjects and societies expressed in the distinction between ‘well-ordered’ (more violent) and ‘not-so-well-ordered’ (less violent) societies that has informed its investigation to this day, in order to declare in the most general terms a critique of violence from the standpoint of the victim, as of a piece with its demand for global social and political justice. Description from publisher website at: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=IJC&volumeId=4&issueId=02&iid=243936

Comparative analysis of multicriteria decision making methods

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresThe main objective of this dissertation is to perform a Comparative Analysis of different Multicriteria Decision Making Methods applied to real-world problems, in order to produce relevant information to enable the incorporation of those methods on computational platforms. The current document presents a simple case study concerning a decision support application targeted for a real problem regarding retrofitting alternatives of a building with energy efficiency impact. The application process was started with the selection of two Multicriteria Decision Making Methods guided by a preexisting framework, and resulted in the choice of AHP and PROMETHEE II methodologies. These two methods were then combined with three different decision maker profiles (Conservative, Moderate and Aggressive) created by means of risk assessment profiling techniques for portfolio allocation. Afterwards, the chosen decision criteria were disposed in a Risk Pyramid according to their inherent level of risk regarding project evaluation. A match was then performed between the decision maker profiles and each criterion, so as to define a proper set of weights for the decision criteria and preference functions, with corresponding preference and indifference thresholds. Finally, three different sets of results (one for each decision maker profile) were produced using appropriate software, and a Sensitivity Analysis was performed over the criteria to understand their influence on the solution. The general conclusion of this Comparative Analysis is that the increase in the preference modelling ability of the methods brings up the least expected alternatives as recommendations for the decision maker. Besides, we have concluded that the decision profiles that allocate bigger weights to the riskiest criteria are the ones that produce the more dispersed set of results within each method application and within each decision maker profile