Cumulative dominance and heuristic performance in binary multi-attribute choice

Working paper 895, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu FabraSeveral studies have reported high performance of simple decision heuristics in multi-attribute decision making. In this paper, we focus on situations where attributes are binary and analyze the performance of Deterministic-Elimination-By-Aspects (DEBA) and similar decision heuristics. We consider non-increasing weights and two probabilistic models for the attribute values: one where attribute values are independent Bernoulli randomvariables; the other one where they are binary random variables with inter-attribute positive correlations. Using these models, we show that good performance of DEBA is explained by the presence of cumulative as opposed to simple dominance. We therefore introduce the concepts of cumulative dominance compliance and fully cumulative dominance compliance and show that DEBA satisfies those properties. We derive a lower bound with which cumulative dominance compliant heuristics will choose a best alternative and show that, even with many attributes, this is not small. We also derive an upper bound for the expected loss of fully cumulative compliance heuristics and show that this is moderate even when the number of attributes is large. Both bounds are independent of the values of the weights.Postprint (author’s final draft

Tight upper bounds for the expected loss of lexicographic heuristics in binary multiattribute choice

Tight upper bounds for the expected loss of the DEBA (Deterministic-Elimination-By-Aspects) lexicographic selection heuristic are obtained for the case of an additive separable utility function with unknown non-negative, non-increasing attribute weights for numbers of alternatives and attributes as large as 10 under two probabilistic models: one in which attributes are assumed to be independent Bernouilli random variables and another one with positive inter-attribute correlation. The upper bounds improve substantially previous bounds and extend significantly the cases in which a good performance of DEBA can be guaranteed under the assumed cognitive limitations.Postprint (published version

SMART MOBILITY IN SMART CITIES

[EN] Cities are currently undergoing a transformation into the Smart concept, like Smartphones or SmartTV. Many initiatives are being developed in the framework of the Smart Cities projects, however, there is a lack of consistent indicators and methodologies to assess, finance, prioritize and implement this kind of projects. Smart Cities projects are classified according to six axes: Government, Mobility, Environment, Economy, People and Living. (Giffinger, 2007) The main objective of this research is to develop an evaluation model in relation to the mobility concept as one of the six axes of the Smart City classification and apply it to the Spanish cities. The evaluation was carried out in the 62 cities that made up in September 2015 the Spanish Network of Smart Cities (RECI- Red Española de Ciudades Inteligentes). This research is part of a larger project about Smart Cities’ evaluation (+CITIES), the project evaluates RECI’s cities in all the axes. The analysis was carried out taking into account sociodemographic indicators such as the size of the city or the municipal budget per inhabitant. The mobility’s evaluation in those cities has been focused in: sustainability mobility urban plans and measures to reduce the number of vehicles. The 62 cities from the RECI have been evaluated according to their degree of progress in several Smart Cities’ initiatives related to smart mobility. The applied methodology has been specifically made for this project. The grading scale has different ranks depending on the deployment level of smart cities’ initiatives.Moreno Alonso, C.; Baucells Aletà, N.; Arce Ruiz, RM. (2016). SMART MOBILITY IN SMART CITIES. En XII Congreso de ingeniería del transporte. 7, 8 y 9 de Junio, Valencia (España). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1209-1219. https://doi.org/10.4995/CIT2016.2015.3485OCS1209121

Energy evaluation of extruded compound foods for dogs by near-infrared spectroscopy

Near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) was used to predictthe chemical composition, the apparent digestibility and the content ofdigestible nutrients and energy of commercial extruded compoundfoods fordogs

Total fatty acid quantification as an estimator of total body fat content in broilers fed unsaturated diets

An experiment was designed to determine the effect of dietary fat unsaturation level on the fat content of the body of broilers, measured as hydrolysed crude fat (CF) and total fatty acid (TFA) content. Ninety-six female broiler chickens were fed with 4 experimental diets (with 15, 34, 45 and 61 g of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA)/kg of diet) for 6 weeks. As dietary PUFA increased from 15 to 61 g PUFA/kg the fat content of the animals decrease was 55% and 15% when measured as CF and TFA content respectively. As we did not find any differences between treatments in crude protein (CP) and ashes (A) content, the total chemical composition (CF, CP and A as a percentage of Dry Matter (DM)) was close to 100% in the animals fed the saturated diets, reaching only 80% when the dietary unsaturation level was maximum. When using TFA instead of CF, the total chemical composition was close to 95% of DM in all treatments.Une expérience a été effectuée pour déterminer l'effet du niveau de la graisse insaturée dans l'aliment sur le contenu de la graisse corporelle des poulets mesuré par la teneur en graisse brute hydrolysée (CF) et par la teneur en acides gras totaux (TFA). Quatrevingt seize femelles broilers ont été alimentés avec 4 régimes expérimentaux (contenant 15, 34, 45 ou 61 g d'acides gras polyinsaturés (PUFA)/kg d'aliment) pendant six semaines. Quand la teneur en PUFA du régime augmente de 15 à 61 g/kg l'engraissement des animaux diminue de 55% et 15% quand il est mesuré par la teneur en CF et TFA respectivement. Comme on n'a pas trouvé de différences entre les traitements pour la teneur en protéines brutes (CP) et en cendres (A), la composition totale chimique (CF, CP et A exprimés en pourcentages de la matière 265 4 'i iHfnTT'ii Tli*nm I sèche (DM)) était près de 100% chez les animaux alimentés avec le régime riche en AG saturés, et seulement de 80% quand le niveau d'insaturation du régime était maximal. En utilisant le TFA au lieu de CF, la composition totale chimique était près de 95 % de la DM pour les 4 traitements

Influence of vegetable oil sources on quality parameters of broiler meat

The use of different vegetable oils in animal nutrition has allowed the producer to obtain highly energetic diets at very low costs, while offering an optimum and well-appreciated product to the consumer. Nowadays, numerous efforts are taken to enrich poultry meat with polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) and, especially, with omega-3 fatty acids, because of the proven benefits on human health (Kinsella et al., 1990; Knapp, 1991). But, up to now there have not been done complementary studies dealing with the influence of such nutritive improvements on the different technological characteristics of poultry meat. Besides this, there also exist few experiments dealing with the influence of the enrichment with PUFA on the subjective parameters of organoleptic quality. Those experiments are usually more related to the use of fish ingredients in animal diets. The aim of the present experiment was to study the effects of different vegetable oils (rapeseed, soybean, sunflower and linseed) on the technical, nutritive and organoleptic quality of chicken meat, and on the profiles of essential fatty acids (EFA) in the cloacal fat and in the tissues