Against the backdrop of today’s climate of economic globalization and the rapid development of information, this timely book explores the complex concept of competitiveness between cities. The expert contributors illustrate that innovation is a prerequisite for increasing urban...

China’s fuel quality standards and fuel supply management have long been an impediment to improved air quality by hindering the progress of vehicle emission control. This paper summarizes the status of China’s fuel quality standards, fuel supply and vehicle emission standards focusing on the...

A process system is designed for material transformations that produce certain functional chemicals while usually consuming large amounts of energy. Materials in process systems have long been the major focus of investigation to achieve better economic performance. Rising energy prices and...

The field performance of thermal energy storage (TES) systems was compared to the “simulated field performance” of conventional systems. Field data for several TES sites, provided by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), were analysed using a “mean-day” and “peak-day”...

In a simple model of one public good producible from one input, we show that unit-by-unit cost-sharing rules have two properties. First, a unit-by-unit cost-sharing rulealways chooses a core allocation. Second, every allocation in the core will be chosen by at least one unit-by-unit cost-shring...

We consider the classic cake-division problem when the cake is a heterogeneous good represented by an interval in the real line. We provide a mechanism to implement, in an anonymous way, an envy-free and efficient allocation when agents have private information on their preferences. The...

We investigate the relative importance of various bankruptcy predictors commonly used in the existing literature by applying a variable selection technique, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), to a comprehensive bankruptcy database. Over the 1980–2009 period, LASSO...

From in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrant wives in the United States and the Chinese couples in urban China in 2004, researcher found a surprising result in terms of their interpretations of the impact of the male-breadwinner ideal upon perceived marital stability. Over half of the sampled...