Youth A Multicriteria Approach for the Evaluation of the Sustainability of Re-use of Historic Buildings in Venice

The paper presents a multiple criteria model for the evaluation of the sustainability of projects for the economic re-use of historical buildings in Venice. The model utilises the relevant parameters for the appraisal of sustainability, aggregated into three macroindicators: intrinsic sustainability, context sustainability and economic-financial feasibility. The model has been calibrated by a panel of experts and tested on two reuse hypothesis of the Old Arsenal in Venice.multiple criteria valuation, economic reuse, historical building conservation

A Multicriteria Approach for the Evaluation of the Sustainability of Re-use of Historic Buildings in Venice

The paper presents a multiple criteria model for the evaluation of the sustainability of projects for the economic re-use of historical buildings in Venice. The model utilises the relevant parameters for the appraisal of sustainability, aggregated into three macro-indicators: intrinsic sustainability, context sustainability and economic-financial feasibility. The model has been calibrated by a panel of experts and tested on two reuse hypotheses of the Old Arsenal in Venice. The tests have proven the model to be a useful support in the early stages of evaluation of re-use projects, where economic improvements are to be combined with conservation, as it supports the identification of critical points and the selection of projects, thus providing not only a check-list of variables to be considered, but an appraisal of trade-offs between economic uses and requirements of conservation.Economic Reuse, Historical Building Conservation

An Examination of the contribution of off-farm income to the viability and sustainability of farm households and the productivity of farm businesses

End of project reportThe number of farm households in Ireland participating in the off-farm labour market has increased significantly in the last decade. According to the National Farm Survey (NFS), the number of farm households where the spouse and/or operator is working off-farm has increased from 37 per cent in 1995 to 58 per cent in 2007. The important contribution of non-farm income to viability of farm households is highlighted in the results of the Agri-Vision 2015 report, which concluded that the number of economically viable farm businesses is in decline and that a significant proportion of farm households are sustainable only because of the presence of off-farm income. Research conducted by Hennessy (2004) demonstrated that approximately 40 percent of farm households have an off-farm income and that almost 30 percent of the farming population are only sustainable because of off-farm income. Clearly, the future viability and sustainability of a large number of farm households depends on the ability of farmers and their spouses’ to secure and retain gainful off-farm employment. The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (DAFF) have recognised the importance of off-farm income to the sector and they have recommended that future policies focus on farm household viability in all its dimensions, including farm and off-farm income sources (2000).Funded by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Research Stimulus Fundin

Guilbaud's Theorem : An early contribution to judgment aggregation

In a paper published in 1952, the French mathematician Georges-Théodule Guilbaud has generalized Arrow's impossibility result to the "logical problem of aggregation", thus anticipating the literature on abstract aggregation theory and judgment aggregation. We reconstruct the proof of Guilbaud's theorem, which is also of technical interest, because it can be seen as the first use of ultrafilters in social choice theory.Arrow's theorem, aggregation rule, judgment aggregation, logical connexions, simple game, ultrafilter.

Constructing a comprehensive disaster resilience index: The case of Italy

Measuring disaster resilience is a key component of successful disaster risk management and climate change adaptation. Quantitative, indicator-based assessments are typically applied to evaluate resilience by combining various indicators of performance into a single composite index. Building upon extensive research on social vulnerability and coping/adaptive capacity, we first develop an original, comprehensive disaster resilience index (CDRI) at municipal level across Italy, to support the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. As next, we perform extensive sensitivity and robustness analysis to assess how various methodological choices, especially the normalisation and aggregation methods applied, influence the ensuing rankings. The results show patterns of social vulnerability and resilience with sizeable variability across the northern and southern regions. We propose several statistical methods to allow decision makers to explore the territorial, social and economic disparities, and choose aggregation methods best suitable for the various policy purposes. These methods are based on linear and nonliner normalization approaches combining the OWA and LSP aggregators. Robust resilience rankings are determined by relative dominance across multiple methods. The dominance measures can be used as a decision-making benchmark for climate change adaptation and disaster risk management strategies and plans

A fuzzy hierarchical multiple criteria group decision support system - Decider - and its applications

Decider is a Fuzzy Hierarchical Multiple Criteria Group Decision Support System (FHMC-GDSS) designed for dealing with subjective, in particular linguistic, information and objective information simultaneously to support group decision making particularly on evaluation. In this chapter, the fuzzy aggregation decision model, functions and structure of Decider are introduced. The ideas to resolve decision and evaluation problems we have faced in the development and application of Decider are presented. Two real applications of the Decider system are briefly illustrated. Finally, we discuss our further research in this area. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Corruption: Democracy, Autocracy, and Political Stability

The recent empirical literature on corruption has identified a long list of variables that correlate significantly with corruption but only five were distinguished by Leamer’s Extreme Bounds Analysis as robust to various samples, measures of corruption, and regression specifications. Among these five factors that were found to reduce corruption are decades-long tradition of democracy and political stability. In today’s world, however, there are many countries that combine one of these two robust determinants of corruption with the opposite of the other: politically stable autocracies or newly formed and unstable democracies. The central question raised in this paper is: Is it worth, in terms of corruption, for a country to trade stability with autocratic rule for political freedoms but with transitional instability? We find that the answer to this question is in the affirmative - the level of corruption is indeed lower in unstable democracies than in stable dictatorships. Our results are robust to various measures of corruption, alternative regressor indices, and regression specifications.corruption, democracy, autocracy, dictatorship, political stability

The Strategy-Proofness Landscape of Merging

Merging operators aim at defining the beliefs/goals of a group of agents from the beliefs/goals of each member of the group. Whenever an agent of the group has preferences over the possible results of the merging process (i.e., the possible merged bases), she can try to rig the merging process by lying on her true beliefs/goals if this leads to better merged base according to her point of view. Obviously, strategy-proof operators are highly desirable in order to guarantee equity among agents even when some of them are not sincere. In this paper, we draw the strategy-proof landscape for many merging operators from the literature, including model-based ones and formula-based ones. Both the general case and several restrictions on the merging process are considered

Ordering based decision making: a survey

Decision making is the crucial step in many real applications such as organization management, financial planning, products evaluation and recommendation. Rational decision making is to select an alternative from a set of different ones which has the best utility (i.e., maximally satisfies given criteria, objectives, or preferences). In many cases, decision making is to order alternatives and select one or a few among the top of the ranking. Orderings provide a natural and effective way for representing indeterminate situations which are pervasive in commonsense reasoning. Ordering based decision making is then to find the suitable method for evaluating candidates or ranking alternatives based on provided ordinal information and criteria, and this in many cases is to rank alternatives based on qualitative ordering information. In this paper, we discuss the importance and research aspects of ordering based decision making, and review the existing ordering based decision making theories and methods along with some future research directions