Search

Ecosystem engineers (EEs) strongly influence ecosystems by affecting the abiotic properties of a system to which many biota respond. EEs can, thus, be pivotal species in restoration by helping to move systems toward desired states much faster and more efficiently than direct human intervention on the abiotic state.For EEs to play a central, purposeful role in restoration, it is important to identify guiding principles about how the EEs may best be selected and incorporated.I discuss three important aspects to determine (a) where the utility for EEs is high; (b) where EEs can most easily establish, are easy to handle and scaling‐up their use is possible; and (c) how to recognize and value multiple, coupled and trait‐dependent engineering functions of EEs.Understanding these aspects of EEs should help guide purposeful and efficient choices in our approach to restoration. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper optimizes human resource management from the perspective of marginal utility. The utility function proposes the subtraction function of consumption, which represents the law of diminishing marginal utility. The Lagrange multiplier method solves the maximum utility problem. In human resource management, utility and marginal utility are redefined, and the probability density function and distribution function of exponential distribution are used as the index’s marginal utility and utility functions, respectively. Human resource management optimization models I and II were constructed based on the marginal utility, and the models and model parameters were solved. This paper applies the human resource management model to Company R as an example. The calculation shows that the total investment of the current index resources of Company R is 2.55 million yuan, and the total utility calculation is 0.8306. Under the optimization of human resource management based on Model I, the expected value of company R reached 0.8631 while maintaining the unchanged index resource input, an increase of 3.91%. The optimization based on Model II resulted in the index resource input being 2.3285 million yuan, with an unchanged total utility that was reduced by 8.69%.

That wealth has diminishing marginal utility is a fact of life, and that people be sensitive to their current level of wealth when deciding whether to pursue additional wealth is a requirement of rational choice. A series of experiments, spanning diverse contexts, reveal marginal-utility neglect —that people are rather insensitive to their current wealth when deciding how much effort to expend to acquire a monetary reward (e.g. how long to walk to claim a voucher). Moreover, the experiments demonstrate that a marginal-utility-prompting manipulation, which prompts people to consider their current wealth and their need for the reward given their current wealth, produces a significant sensitization effect—making financially richer (vs. less rich) individuals less (vs. more) willing to seek the reward. This manipulation is more effective than either prompting people to consider their current wealth alone or consider their need for the reward alone, suggesting that marginal-utility prompting does not merely draw people's attention to their current wealth or merely draw their attention to their need for the reward, but links the two elements. This research elucidates the psychology of marginal utility and yields implications beyond the pursuit of monetary rewards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale epidemics impose significant burdens globally and cause an imbalance of medical supplies among different regions owing to the dissimilarly and unevenly distributed prevalence of the infection. Along with rebalancing the limited medical supplies to meet the demand and supply requirements, ensuring that the supplies are allocated to support the affected regions is also important. Hence, this study focuses on the collaborative medical supply rebalancing and allocating process to balance the demand and supply. The law of diminishing marginal utility is incorporated in this study to quantify the principle of fairness in rebalancing and allocating medical supplies. Accordingly, under uncertainty, a marginal-utility-oriented optimization model is proposed to formulate the rebalancing and allocation of collaborative medical supplies. Because the proposed model is nonlinear and computationally intractable, a linearization approach is adopted to obtain the global optimum that supports decision-making in response to epidemics. Furthermore, a real case study of the United States is implemented, where the sensitivity analysis of critical parameters is conducted on the coronavirus disease 2019. Computational results indicate that additional medical supplies, stock levels, and scenario constructions significantly influence the supply/demand point identification and outgoing/incoming shipments. Moreover, this study not only validates the effectiveness and feasibility of the method but also highlights the importance of incorporating the law of diminishing marginal utility into the collaborative medical supply rebalancing and allocating problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lecturas de Economia is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Facultad de Ciencias Economicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The battery energy storage (BES) is recognized as a key resource for the power fluctuations smoothing, peak load shaving and frequency regulation, and its performance depends heavily on the available capacity. It is meaningful to investigate the influence of the BES capacity on the power system operation cost. This paper focuses on the marginal utility of BES capacity in the day-ahead power system operation cost. Firstly, the day-ahead economic dispatch problem is formulated as a constrained quadratic programming problem, with the consideration of the BES degradation cost. Then, the relationship between the BES-related shadow prices and the marginal electricity price is derived from the KKT conditions of the dispatch problem. Based on it, the marginal utility of BES capacity is modeled to evaluate the effect of BES capacity on the system day-ahead operation cost. Finally, the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed marginal utility can manifest the influence of BSS capacity on the power system operation.

This study aimed to accurately grasp the impact mechanism and change rule of buildings and green spaces on land surface temperature (LST), which is of great significance for alleviating urban heat islands (UHIs) and formulating adaptation measures. Taking Jinan, China, as the study area, combined multisource remote sensing data were used in this study to construct an index system of the influencing factors. We used a spatial regression model to explore the relative contribution of the influencing indicators on LST. We also drew a marginal utility curve to quantify the heating/cooling effect of the leading indicators. The results showed that, firstly, among the 3D building indicators, the leading indicators affecting LST were the degree of spatial convergence (SCD) and the building surface area (BSA). Among the green space indicators, the largest patch index (LPI), green coverage rate (GCR), and edge density (ED) were significantly negatively correlated with LST. Secondly, when we considered the 15 indicators comprehensively, SCD was the most influential indicator, with a contribution of 24.7%, and the contribution of the green space indicators to LST was significantly reduced. Thirdly, among the leading indicators, SCD was positively correlated with LST. When SCD was less than 60%, LST increased by about 0.38 °C for every 10% increase. When GCR > 44%, LST was significantly reduced, and when GCR > 62%, a cooling effect of 1.1 °C was observed. Beyond this threshold, the cooling effect will not improve significantly. This study shows that when 3D buildings are densely distributed and crowded, the cooling effect of green space will be limited to some extent by 3D buildings. The key to mitigating UHIs is to rationally configure and optimize the spatial structure of 3D buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Templestays are a form of cultural tourism in which participants visit a Buddhist temple to experience their culture. Using a choice experiment, the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) is estimated for various attributes of Templestay programs of location, accommodations, and type of meditation. Respondents are willing to pay a premium for private accommodations and to experience the natural mountain settings over an urban setting. The MWTP varies by type of meditation and by how often respondents have participated in a Templestay. For the most physically demanding form of meditation, 108 prostrations, there is weak evidence marginal utility decreases with increasing number of visits. Brewing tea and talking to a monk do not lead to a change in marginal utility. The most spiritually demanding meditation, Seon meditation, shows increasing marginal utility. Seon meditators could benefit from additional stays, as the benefits of this form of meditation can only be achieved through practice and learning from experienced meditators. It is expected that these results will provide information for the diversification of Templestay experience programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Les Cahiers du CREAD is the property of Centre de Rrecherche en Economie Appliquee pour Developpement and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The implementation of systematic conservation plans often involves collaboration among several organizations, so attaining consensus on the plan is an important driver of implementation success. We utilized participatory action research to explore an approach for developing consensus among organizations and facilitating implementation. A real-world challenge was addressed in the Little Karoo, South Africa by creating a spatial decision support system (SDSS) based primarily on weighted multi-criteria GIS overlays, but with an "incremental allocation algorithm" to allow efficient solution sets (i.e., systematic conservation planning). The end-users of the SDSS participated in the choice of criteria, in the selection of model parameter values, and in co-defining their group process. We co-designed a dual-centric weighting process in which the participants developed a set of weights and parameter values for attaining consensus among the organizations, and also a set for yielding the result that is best for biodiversity. The process yielded a consensus on the spatial priorities and, thus, a way forward. The estimated spatial priorities for each organization differed dramatically from each other and from the consensus priorities, indicating that a large discrepancy had been resolved. Our study indicates that the consensus-building and decision-support benefits of participatory multi-criteria overlay approaches merit closer attention in systematic conservation planning. The use of weighted overlays and an incremental allocation algorithm appear to be useful approaches for streamlining the participatory process while maintaining rigor and spatial complementarity. Finally, we uncovered theoretical psychological ramifications of the dual-centric weighting process that are promising and merit testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capability of shifting the electricity generation or consumption to proper time of the day, also defined as energy shift (ES), is the key factor to ensure the power balance, especially under high penetration of variable renewable energy (VRE). However, the ES is not characterized and traded as an independent product in current market mechanisms. In this letter, the marginal utility of an ES is assessed and leveraged to characterize the effective ES, while a novel market scheme is proposed considering the trading of both ES and energy level (EL). The proposed scheme can well integrate ES producers such as virtual power plants that cannot be rewarded sufficiently to actively participate in the current market because they are principally labeled as EL consumers. Finally, the novel concept and mechanism are illustrated by a numerical study and verified to outperform the existing price schemes on integrating the ES resources and VRE.

BACKGROUND: Randomized clinical trials (RCT) in critical care mostly return negative results. The research community discusses strategies to improve RCTs design. METHODS: This paper presents a theoretical framework based on marginal utility to treat the problems of hypothesis generation and treatment effects valuation and presents recently published high-quality studies as instances where such a framework predicts irrelevant findings. RESULTS: Blindness to marginal utility, i.e., inobservance of the marginal utility of the proposed intervention, is common in critical care RCTs. CONCLUSION: Critical care RCTs are usually blind to marginal utility and are, therefore, prone to produce irrelevant findings.

In "Technical Note—Ranking Distributions When Only Means and Variances Are Known," Müller, Scarsini, Tsetlin, and Winkler address the question of ranking distributions when only the first two moments—that is, means and variances—are known. This is important in decision making under uncertainty, with potential applications in economics, finance, statistics, and other areas. Previous results require some assumptions about the shape of the distributions, while this paper's approach is to impose bounds on how much marginal utility can change, thus constraining risk preferences. Such a ranking is consistent with almost stochastic dominance and provides a new connection between the Sharpe and Omega ratios from finance. Consider a choice between two random variables, for which only means and variances are known. Is it possible to rank them by putting some constraints on risk preferences? We provide such a ranking by bounding how much marginal utility can change. Such bounds enable us to rank all distributions with given means and variances by first-order almost-stochastic dominance. We show how our results can be used to compare a risky project and a sure payoff and also provide a new connection between the Sharpe and Omega ratios from finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to accurately grasp the impact mechanism and change rule of buildings and green spaces on land surface temperature (LST), which is of great significance for alleviating urban heat islands (UHIs) and formulating adaptation measures. Taking Jinan, China, as the study area, combined multisource remote sensing data were used in this study to construct an index system of the influencing factors. We used a spatial regression model to explore the relative contribution of the influencing indicators on LST. We also drew a marginal utility curve to quantify the heating/cooling effect of the leading indicators. The results showed that, firstly, among the 3D building indicators, the leading indicators affecting LST were the degree of spatial convergence (SCD) and the building surface area (BSA). Among the green space indicators, the largest patch index (LPI), green coverage rate (GCR), and edge density (ED) were significantly negatively correlated with LST. Secondly, when we considered the 15 indicators comprehensively, SCD was the most influential indicator, with a contribution of 24.7%, and the contribution of the green space indicators to LST was significantly reduced. Thirdly, among the leading indicators, SCD was positively correlated with LST. When SCD was less than 60%, LST increased by about 0.38 °C for every 10% increase. When GCR > 44%, LST was significantly reduced, and when GCR > 62%, a cooling effect of 1.1 °C was observed. Beyond this threshold, the cooling effect will not improve significantly. This study shows that when 3D buildings are densely distributed and crowded, the cooling effect of green space will be limited to some extent by 3D buildings. The key to mitigating UHIs is to rationally configure and optimize the spatial structure of 3D buildings.

Understanding the trade-offs associated with the two operation stages of hydropower generation is critical for guiding efficient reservoir operations. Previous studies showed that the marginal return in Stage 2 is always higher than the marginal cost in Stage 1 if variations in tailwater levels are ignored. However, the tailwater level often raises faster than the reservoir water level, and thus reduces the net hydraulic head of the reservoirs with reaction turbines, especially in large-scale and low-head reservoirs. Therefore, this study considers the variations in tailwater levels and theoretically evaluates the marginal utility of the total power generation (TPG) in the two stages. It is found that the variation of TPG presents diminishing marginal utility and is closely related to the topography characteristics of the reservoir and downstream channels, as well as the relationship between releases in the two stages. The marginal return in Stage 2 might be lower than the marginal cost in Stage 1 when the release in Stage 2 exceeds that in Stage 1 for the reservoirs in which the tailwater level is sensitive to discharge and hydraulic head. This suggests that the carryover storage equalizing the marginal utility in the two stages is optimal, i.e., satisfying the marginal utility principle. Otherwise, the marginal return is always higher than the marginal cost, which suggests that as much carryover storage as possible should be saved. Following these findings, the reservoir states, represented by the storage difference and the total inflow in the two stages, that satisfy the marginal utility principle are identified. Further, the optimal carryover storage under different levels of inflow and storage difference is derived. The theoretical findings are verified with four hydropower plants in China. Results confirm the theoretical findings and show that two-stage hydropower generation coupled with operating rules can greatly improve the performance of hydropower generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why disdain (perfectly) replicated art? If art is valuable because it evokes experiences of beauty, they should be comparable. In chapter 11 of the Elephant in the Brain, Simler and Hanson (S&H) argue we actually care about the extrinsic properties of art—e.g. who made it—to signal our intelligence and taste. Here I defend a different explanation for the evidence cited by S&H: the extrinsic properties of art are central to what constitutes art, play a bigger role fixing the value of art than S&H allow, and the potential for diminishing marginal utility on the value of the intrinsic properties of art—seeing the original Mona Lisa is rare; seeing a copy isn't—explains why we assign such value to the extrinsic properties of art. And thus we have a non-signaling explanation of art consumption, which may or may not complement signaling theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the change of EFL learners' motivation in learning English with the increase of CL time based on marginal utility. Thirty learners from an intact class in Grade 10 were selected through their performance on a piloted sample Preliminary English Test. Learners were assigned to achievers and underachievers groups. The questionnaire of motivation, based on the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB), was given to both groups as a pretest. All participants underwent the same amount of teaching time and same material with the same teacher during seven-week CL, 35 sessions taking 45 minutes each. The same questionnaire was administered again at the end of one week, three-week, five-week and seven-week treatments respectively to both groups and their scores on the questionnaires were compared through an analysis of Paired Samples t-test and ANOVA. The findings showed that after one week CL, both the achievers' and underachievers' motivations were significantly improved compared with those in pretest; after three-week CL, the underachievers' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and achievers' extrinsic motivation declined significantly compared with those of Week One, while the latter's intrinsic motivation has no significant change; after five-week CL, underachievers' motivation didn't change significantly compared with their motivation in the pretest, which means that the marginal utility took place in underachievers' motivation during three-week to five-week CL; after seven-week CL, the achievers' motivation increased significantly compared with their motivation in the pretest, indicating there was no marginal utility for achievers' motivation during seven-week CL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Evidence-based Healthcare is the property of Journal of Evidence-based Healthcare and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In order to ensure the long-term stable and economic operation of complex system, the system operation process is described and the problems is solved, and a system reliability model and an optimization model for component replacement are constructed. Based on the theory of marginal utility and importance measures, a reliability guarantee strategy for complex system based on cost-benefit importance is presented, which aims to find a component preventive replacement sequence with minimum maintenance cost on the constraints of system reliability lower threshold and running time. When the system reliability drops to a preset threshold, the cost-benefit importance of each component is calculated, the component with the greatest cost-benefit importance to replace is selected, and then iterate until the operation task is completed to form an optimal component replacement sequence. The feasibility of the present strategy is verified by taking a complex system which can be equivalent to a series-parallel system as an example. The present strategy has certain reference significance of ensuring the reliable operation of some high-end equipment safety-critical systems.

Energy efficiency is the major concern in hierarchical wireless sensor networks(WSNs), where the major energy consumption originates from radios for communication. Due to notable energy expenditure of long-range transmission for cluster members and data aggregation for Cluster Head (CH), saving and balancing energy consumption is a tricky challenge in WSNs. In this paper, we design a CH selection mechanism with a mobile sink (MS) while proposing relay selection algorithms with multi-user multi-armed bandit (UM-MAB) to solve the problem of energy efficiency. According to the definition of node density and residual energy, we propose a conception referred to as a Virtual Head (VH) for MS to collect data in terms of energy efficiency. Moreover, we naturally change the relay selection problem into permutation problem through employing the two-hop transmission in cooperative power line communication, which deals with long-distance transmission. As far as the relay selection problem is concerned, we propose the machine learning algorithm, namely MU-MAB, to solve it through the reward associated with an increment for energy consumption. Furthermore, we employ the stable matching theory based on marginal utility for the allocation of the final one-to-one optimal combinations to achieve energy efficiency. In order to evaluate MU-MAB, the regret is taken advantage to demonstrate the performance by using upper confidence bound (UCB) index. In the end, simulation results illustrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed solutions for saving and balancing energy consumption.

This lecture examines the nature of the changing focus of economics during the 19th century, which is often referred to as the 'marginal revolution'. The change is characterised as a focus on the theory of exchange, and the beginnings of welfare economics. Attention is given to early contributions by J.S. Mill, Cournot, and Whewell, and the 'neoclassical economists, Jevons, Marshall, Walras and Edgeworth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ten studies are used to document that time is valued in accordance with a doublekinked value function. There is a zone of indifference for small time gains (losses), increasing marginal utility (disutility) for moderate time gains (losses), and diminishing marginal utility (disutility) for large time gains (losses). Moderate amounts of time exhibit increasing marginal utility (disutility) because larger blocks of time provide a more diverse set of usage opportunities. It is only when it is difficult to imagine how more (less) time would be beneficial (detrimental) that there is diminishing marginal utility (disutility) for time. Thus time valuation shows increasing marginal utility when there is a time deficit, but diminishing marginal utility when there is a time surplus. These findings have implications for how other resources might be valued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]