Chapter one is titled "Social Capital and Group Banking." Lending to the poor is costly due to high screening, monitoring, and enforcement costs. Group lending advocates believe individuals are able to select creditworthy peers, monitor the use of loan proceeds,…

Complex goods and processes require ever more sophisticated and specialized knowledge; harnessing multiple kinds of expertise to execute tasks, solve problems, and develop strategies is increasingly critical to organizations' survival. When specialists come together, however, they often speak in different…

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach for capturing data and rationale, so
that the experience and insights gained while pursuing a major project or endeavor can
be utilized when pursuing future endeavors of a similar nature. The proposed

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In this paper, we study the asset pricing implication of imprecise knowledge about rare events. Modeling rare events as jumps in the aggregate endowment, we explicitly solve the equilibrium asset prices in a pure-exchange economy with a representative agent who…

The general objective of this thesis is the development of an adaptive technique for extracting knowledge in large databases. Nowadays, technology allows storing huge volumes of information. For this reason, the availability of techniques that allow, as a first stage,…

There exists a large amount of knowledge representation models. But most of them have significant limitations at the epistemic level. They do not have explanatory power. Most of them do not have means to represent some functional needs to work…

In an m-machines n-jobs flow-shop sequencing problem each job consists of m operations and each operation requires a different machine, so n jobs have to be processed in the same sequence on m machines. The processing time of each job…

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

(cont.) and (2) a forward approach which achieves optimality at the start and grows the system using an optimization technique. We systematically compare the two staging techniques in the context of telescope arrays and evaluate the hypothesis that the backward…