scholarly journals Judicial impact on bureaucratic decision-making : the case of public procurement and contracting

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Yuan Gao

This study examines whether and how much the bureaucracy responds to the judiciary. Specifically, I utilize cross-sectional, time-series data to analyze the extent to which variation in bureaucratic decision-making regarding affirmative action programs in public contracting across time and U.S. states is explained by the shifting legal environment. Federal agencies are found more likely to adjust minority contract amounts in response to the executive branch. State agencies appear to be somewhat responsive to courts during affirmative action goal-setting, but not in goal attainment. Overall, I did not find enough evidence that indicates significant bureaucratic responsiveness to judicial review. The lack of judicial impact may be further understood from utilitarian, communications and organizational theoretical perspectives.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cephas Paa Kwasi Coffie ◽  
Hongjiang Zhao ◽  
Isaac Adjei Mensah

The financial landscape of sub-Sahara Africa is undergoing major changes due to the advent of FinTech, which has seen mobile payments boom in the region. This paper examines the salient role of mobile payments in traditional banks’ drive toward financial accessibility in sub-Sahara Africa by using panel econometric approaches that consider the issues of independencies among cross-sectional residuals. Using data from the World Development Index (WDI) 2011–2017 on 11 countries in the region, empirical results from cross-sectional dependence (CD) tests, panel unit root test, panel cointegration test, and the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) approach indicates that (i) the panel time series data are cross-sectionally independent, (ii) the variables have the same order of integration and are cointegrated, and (iii) growth in mobile payment transactions had a significant positive relationship with formal account ownership, the number of ATMs, and number of new bank branches in the long-run. The paper therefore confirms that the institutional structure of traditional banks that makes them competitive, irrespective of emerging disruptive technologies, has stimulated overall financial accessibility in the region leading to overall sustainable growth in the financial sector. We conclude the paper with feasible policy suggestions.


Author(s):  
Andrew Q. Philips

In cross-sectional time-series data with a dichotomous dependent variable, failing to account for duration dependence when it exists can lead to faulty inferences. A common solution is to include duration dummies, polynomials, or splines to proxy for duration dependence. Because creating these is not easy for the common practitioner, I introduce a new command, mkduration, that is a straightforward way to generate a duration variable for binary cross-sectional time-series data in Stata. mkduration can handle various forms of missing data and allows the duration variable to easily be turned into common parametric and nonparametric approximations.


Author(s):  
Arini Wahyu Utami ◽  
Jamhari Jamhari ◽  
Suhatmini Hardyastuti

Paddy and maize are two important food crops in Indonesia and mainly produced in Java Island. This research aimed to know the impact of El Nino and La Nina on paddy and maize farmer’s supply in Java. Cross sectional data from four provinces in Java was combined with time series data during 1987-2006. Paddy supply was estimated using log model, while maize supply used autoregressive model; each was estimated using two types of regression function. First, it included dummy variable of El Nino and La Nina to know their influence into paddy and maize supply. Second, Southern Oscillation Index was used to analyze the supply changing when El Nino or La Nina occur. The result showed that El Nino and La Nina did not influence paddy supply, while La Nina influenced maize supply in Java. Maize supply increased when La Nina occurred.


Author(s):  
Josep Escrig Escrig ◽  
Buddhika Hewakandamby ◽  
Georgios Dimitrakis ◽  
Barry Azzopardi

Intermittent gas and liquid two-phase flow was generated in a 6 m × 67 mm diameter pipe mounted rotatable frame (vertical up to −20°). Air and a 5 mPa s silicone oil at atmospheric pressure were studied. Gas superficial velocities between 0.17 and 2.9 m/s and liquid superficial velocities between 0.023 and 0.47 m/s were employed. These runs were repeated at 7 angles making a total of 420 runs. Cross sectional void fraction time series were measured over 60 seconds for each run using a Wire Mesh Sensor and a twin plane Electrical Capacitance Tomography. The void fraction time series data were analysed in order to extract average void fraction, structure velocities and structure frequencies. Results are presented to illustrate the effect of the angle as well as the phase superficial velocities affect the intermittent flows behaviour. Existing correlations suggested to predict average void fraction and gas structures velocity and frequency in slug flow have been compared with new experimental results for any intermittent flow including: slug, cap bubble and churn. Good agreements have been seen for the gas structure velocity and mean void fraction. On the other hand, no correlation was found to predict the gas structure frequency, especially in vertical and inclined pipes.


Author(s):  
Malcolm J. Beynonm

The seminal work of Zadeh (1965), namely fuzzy set theory (FST), has developed into a methodology fundamental to analysis that incorporates vagueness and ambiguity. With respect to the area of data mining, it endeavours to find potentially meaningful patterns from data (Hu & Tzeng, 2003). This includes the construction of if-then decision rule systems, which attempt a level of inherent interpretability to the antecedents and consequents identified for object classification (See Breiman, 2001). Within a fuzzy environment this is extended to allow a linguistic facet to the possible interpretation, examples including mining time series data (Chiang, Chow, & Wang, 2000) and multi-objective optimisation (Ishibuchi & Yamamoto, 2004). One approach to if-then rule construction has been through the use of decision trees (Quinlan, 1986), where the path down a branch of a decision tree (through a series of nodes), is associated with a single if-then rule. A key characteristic of the traditional decision tree analysis is that the antecedents described in the nodes are crisp, where this restriction is mitigated when operating in a fuzzy environment (Crockett, Bandar, Mclean, & O’Shea, 2006). This chapter investigates the use of fuzzy decision trees as an effective tool for data mining. Pertinent to data mining and decision making, Mitra, Konwar and Pal (2002) succinctly describe a most important feature of decision trees, crisp and fuzzy, which is their capability to break down a complex decision-making process into a collection of simpler decisions and thereby, providing an easily interpretable solution.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Pradip Raj Poudel ◽  
Narayan Raj Joshi ◽  
Shanta Pokhrel

A study on effects of climate change on rice (Oryza sativa) production in Tharu communities of Dang district of Nepal was conducted in 2018A.D to investigate the perception and major adaptation strategies followed by Tharu farmers. The study areas were selected purposively. Cross-sectional data was collected using a household survey of 120 households by applying simple random sampling technique with lottery method for sample selection. Primary data were collected using semi-structured and pretested interview schedule, focus group discussion and key informants interview whereas monthly and annual time series data on temperature and precipitation over 21years (1996-2016) were collected from Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, Kathmandu as secondary data. Descriptive statistics and trend analysis were used to analyze the data. The ratio of male and female was found to be equal with higher literacy rate at study area than district. Most of the farmers depended on agriculture only for their livelihood where there was large variation in land distribution. Farmers had better access to FM/radio for agricultural extension information sources. The study resulted that Tharu farmers of Dang perceived all parameters of climate. Temperature and rainfall were the most changing component of climate perceived by farmers. The trend analysis of temperature data of Dang over 21 years showed that maximum, minimum and average temperature were increasing at the rate of 0.031°C, 0.021°C and 0.072°C per year respectively which supports the farmers perception whereas trend of rainfall was decreased with 7.56mm per year. The yearly maximum rainfall amount was increased by 1.15mm. The production of local indigenous rice varieties were decreasing while hybrid and improved rice varieties were increasing. The district rice production trend was increasing which support the farmer’s perception. The study revealed that there were climate change effects on paddy production and using various adaptation strategies to cope in Dang district.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 754
Author(s):  
Miao Gao ◽  
Guo-You Shi

Intelligent unmanned surface vehicle (USV) collision avoidance is a complex inference problem based on current navigation status. This requires simultaneous processing of the input sequences and generation of the response sequences. The automatic identification system (AIS) encounter data mainly include the time-series data of two AIS sets, which exhibit a one-to-one mapping relation. Herein, an encoder–decoder automatic-response neural network is designed and implemented based on the sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) structure to simultaneously process the two AIS encounter trajectory sequences. Furthermore, this model is combined with the bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (Bi-LSTM RNN) to obtain a network framework for processing the time-series data to obtain ship-collision avoidance decisions based on big data. The encoder–decoder neural networks were trained based on the AIS data obtained in 2018 from Zhoushan Port to achieve ship collision avoidance decision-making learning. The results indicated that the encoder–decoder neural networks can be used to effectively formulate the sequence of the collision avoidance decision of the USV. Thus, this study significantly contributes to the increased efficiency and safety of maritime transportation. The proposed method can potentially be applied to the USV technology and intelligent collision-avoidance systems.


Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tongle Zhou ◽  
Mou Chen ◽  
Yuhui Wang ◽  
Jianliang He ◽  
Chenguang Yang

To improve the effectiveness of air combat decision-making systems, target intention has been extensively studied. In general, aerial target intention is composed of attack, surveillance, penetration, feint, defense, reconnaissance, cover and electronic interference and it is related to the state of a target in air combat. Predicting the target intention is helpful to know the target actions in advance. Thus, intention prediction has contributed to lay a solid foundation for air combat decision-making. In this work, an intention prediction method is developed, which combines the advantages of the long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and decision tree. The future state information of a target is predicted based on LSTM networks from real-time series data, and the decision tree technology is utilized to extract rules from uncertain and incomplete priori knowledge. Then, the target intention is obtained from the predicted data by applying the built decision tree. With a simulation example, the results show that the proposed method is effective and feasible for state prediction and intention recognition of aerial targets under uncertain and incomplete information. Furthermore, the proposed method can make contributions in providing direction and aids for subsequent attack decision-making.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
Yazdan Naghdi ◽  
Soheila Kaghazian

Abstract Given the recent fluctuation in the exchange rate and the presence of several factors such as the various economy-political sanctions (mainly embargos on oil and banking), extreme volatility in different economic fields, and consequently the devaluation of national and public procurement -A landmark that is emanating from exchange rate fluctuation - two points should be noted: First, it is essential to review the effect of exchange rate fluctuation on macro economic variables such as inflation and to provide appropriate policies. Second, the existence of this condition provides the chance to study the relation between exchange rate and inflation in a non-linear and asymmetric method. Hence, the present study seeks to use TAR model and, on the basis of monthly time series data over the period March 2002 to March 2014, to analyze the cross-asymmetric and non-linear exchange rate on consumer price index (CPI) in Iran. The results also show the presence of an asymmetric long-term relationship between these variables (exchange rate and CPI). Also, in the Iranian economy, the effect of negative shocks of exchange rate on inflation is more sustainable than the one from positive shocks.


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