Inverse malthusianism and recycling economics: the case of the textile industry

The current use of natural resources in the textile industry leads us to introduce a new economic concept called inverse Malthusianism describing a context in which population grows linearly and resource consumption grows exponentially. Inverse Malthusianism implies an exponential increase in environmental impact that recycling may contribute to reduce. Our main goal is to extend the analysis of materials selection under the principle of equimarginality proposed by Jevons. As a first result, we show the particular circumstances under which policies excluding recycled supplies are never optimal. We also aim to overcome the difficulties of reducing environmental aspects to monetary units. To this end, we propose a multicriteria approach to solve the conventional-recycled materials dilemma considering not only economic but also environmental criteria. Then, we allow producers to enrich their decision-making process with relevant information about the environmental impact of materials selection. Although we use examples of the textile industry to illustrate our results, most of the insights in this paper can be extended to other industries

A multicriteria extension of the efficient market hypothesis

Challenging the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) has been a recurrent topic for researchers and practitioners since its formulation. Hundreds of empirical studies claim to either prove or disprove the EMH by means of a number of heterogeneous methods. Even though the EMH is usually adjusted to a measure of risk, there is a lack of a formal analysis within a multiple-criteria context. In this paper, we propose a extension of the EMH that accommodates the foundations of multiple-criteria decision analysis. To this end, we rely on a family of parametric signed dissimilarity measures to assess multidimensional performance differences. Since normalization is a critical step in our approach to avoid meaningless comparisons, we present two novel theoretical results connecting different normalization techniques. This multicriteria extension provides a common framework on which to add empirical evidence regarding the EMH testing