Bond investing requires decision-making on multiple levels. Some criteria are qualitative, some are quantitative, and there may be conflicting objectives such as avoidance of credit risk versus need for income. Since managers of endowment funds must allocate their assets based on numerous...

The basic ideas of Desirability functions and indices are introduced and compared to other methods of multivariate optimisation. It is shown that gradient based techniques are not in general appropriate to perform the numerical optimisation for Desirability indices. The problems are shown for...

Given the production technology of a multiproduct firm, economists usually try to represent this technology by functions, namely the cost function, the revenue function and the input and output distance functions. In doing so the analysis directs the attention to the (dual)matching of quantities...