Priority Events Determination For The Risk-oriented Management Of Electric Power System

The task of risk-oriented management of the electric power system in conditions of multi-criteria choice is considered. To determine the most effective measures, the implementation of which will reduce the magnitude of the risk of an emergency situation, multi-criteria analysis methods are applied. A comparative analysis of the multi-criteria alternative (ELECTRE) ranking method based on utility theory and the Pareto method, which defines a subset of non-dominant alternatives, is carried out. The Pareto method uses in its algorithm only qualitative characteristics of the advantage and allows only to distinguish a group of competitive solutions with the same degrees of non-dominance. Given the large number of evaluation criteria, the Pareto method is ineffective because the resulting subset of activities is in the field of effective trade-offs, when no element of the set of measures can be improved without degrading at least one of the other elements. The ELECTRE method is a pairwise comparison of multi-criteria alternatives based on utility theory. This method allows to identify a subset of the most effective activities. The number of elements of the resultant subset is regulated by taking into account the coefficients of importance of optimization criteria and expert preferences

Equity in health care delivery and finance

Much has happened in the theory of distributive justice during the last 30 years, in the period, roughly, since Rawls published his magisterial work1. As occurs in most fields following a great contribution, that work has been subjected to critique, amended and ramified, so that what Rawls proposed now appears as an early ancestor of contemporary theories of distributive justice, or equity. In this paper, I locate what I think is the main trend in this developing theory, and then to try to apply the theory to the issue of health.

Cellular automaton for the fracture of disordered media

We study numerically the growth of a crack in an elastic medium under the influence of a travelling shockwave. We describe the implementation of a fast algorithm which is perfectly suited for a data parallel computer. Using large scale simulations on the Connection Machine we generate cracks with more than 10000 sites on a $\scriptstyle 1024 \times 1024$ lattice. We show that the resulting patterns are fractal with a fractal dimension that depends on the chosen breaking criterion and varies between $\scriptstyle 1.$ and $\scriptstyle 2.$Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures (3 included), plain TeX (using vanilla.sty, epsf.tex), HLRZ-preprint 46/9

Labor Market Participation of Chinese Agricultural Households

This work is devoted to the analysis of the different labor market participation regimes of Chinese farm households. Using household data over the period 1986-2000 from the province Zhejiang, we apply a multinomial logit model to empirically examine household, farm, and regional characteristics affecting the probability that farmers employ one of four alternative labor market regimes. Results suggest that labor market decisions are significantly related to several personal, farm, and village attitudes. In addition, we find the more market oriented policy reforms at the end of the 1980s stipulated that households participate in labor markets while the more anti-market reforms during the 1990s led to the opposite and encouraged autarky.China, labor markets, agricultural household, participation, multinomial logit, Consumer/Household Economics, Labor and Human Capital, D13, J24, J43, Q12,

The government economic agenda in a society of unequally rational individuals

What economic roles, if any, should government play? This is still an incompletely analyzed issue that different individuals – depending on their ideologies, rent-seeking opportunities, and analytical abilities – may answer very differently. To advance its analysis, this paper recognizes that human rationality (as empirically testable cognitive abilities) is bounded unequally across individuals, and is therefore a unique scarce resource that markets and government allocate in significantly different ways. The results conflict with ideologies of both socialism and classical liberalism, but agree with two puzzles of recent economic history and with ideological compromises in actual economic policies.unequally bounded rationality, rationality-allocation, markets, government, economic policies

Markets vs. Government when Rationality Is Unequally Bounded: Some Consequences of Cognitive Inequalities for Theory and Policy

Recognizing that human rationality has bounds that are unequal across individuals entails treating it as a special scarce resource, tied to individuals and used for deciding on its own uses. This causes a meta-mathematical difficulty to the axiomatic theories of human capital and resource allocation, and raises a new problem for comparative institutional analysis, allowing it to explain some so far little understood differences between markets and government. The policy implications strengthen the case against national planning, selective industrial policies, and government ownership of enterprises, but weaken the case against paternalism.Rationality; meta-mathematics; institutions; markets; government