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This report assesses the potential of electricity contract auctions as a procurement option for the World Bank's client countries. It focuses on the role of auctions of electricity contracts designed to expand and retain existing generation capacity. It is not meant to be a 'how-to' manual. Rather, it highlights some major issues and options that need to be taken into account when a country considers moving towards competitive electricity procurement through the introduction of electricity auctions. Auctions have played an important role in the effort to match supply and demand. Ever since the 1990s, the use of long-term contract auctions to procure new generation capacity, notably from private sector suppliers, has garnered increased affection from investors, governments, and multilateral agencies in general, as a means to achieve a competitive and transparent procurement process while providing certainty of supply for the medium to long term. However, the liberalization of electricity markets and the move from single-buyer procurement models increased the nature of the challenge facing system planners in their efforts to ensure an adequate and secure supply of electricity in the future at the best price. While auctions as general propositions are a means to match supply with demand in a cost-effective manner, they can also be and have been used to meet a variety of goals.

When a female is sexually promiscuous, the ejaculates of different males compete for the fertilization of her eggs 1 ; the more sperm a male inseminates into a female, the more likely he is to fertilize her eggs 2 . Because sperm production is limited and costly, theory predicts that males will strategically allocate sperm (1) according to female promiscuity 1 , 3 , 4 , 5 , (2) saving some for copulations with new females 3 , 6 , 7 , and (3) to females producing more and/or better offspring 3 , 8 . Whether males allocate sperm in all of these ways is not known, particularly in birds where the collection of natural ejaculates only recently became possible. Here we demonstrate male sperm allocation of unprecedented sophistication in the fowl Gallus gallus . Males show status-dependent sperm investment in females according to the level of female promiscuity; they progressively reduce sperm investment in a particular female but, on encountering a new female, instantaneously increase their sperm investment; and they preferentially allocate sperm to females with large sexual ornaments signalling superior maternal investment. Our results indicate that female promiscuity leads to the evolution of sophisticated male sexual behaviour.

The paper proposes an assessment and analysis of the dynamics of the state of personnel security and the effectiveness of its management on the basis of integral indicators of the development level, which allows to obtain an equal quantitative assessment of the development dynamics in a certain area in the form of an integrated rating indicator. The study of the components of the diagnostics at the general level of bank personnel safety in the work there was carried out by distinguishing the following system-forming elements on the basis of changing the range of relevant integral indicators, namely: the level of the staff’s competition in the banking market, which can become three states-rigid, regulated and perfect; the commercial bank’s personnel safety, which is classified as high, sufficient, medium and low; the environmental factors’ influence level that can have a destabilizing, neutral and positive impact; the environmental factors’ influence level is classified by the degree of influence-aggressive, moderate, weak.The model implementation selecting the strategy to ensure personnel security is based on the construction of the strategic priorities vector to be built on the appropriate coordinate system based on the calculated estimates for each of the studied components. The strategic priorities vector defines the strategy that is appropriate to choose for a commercial bank with the current level of development and the corresponding degree of influence of all the selected factors. In the direction opposite to the vector of strategic priorities there is a strategy that needs to be implemented to improve security by balancing external factors. Four quadrants of strategic personnel security solutions have been built under four simulated scenarios.The paper proposes a comprehensive approach to modeling the scenarios of strategic changes in the commercial bank’s personnel security, which allows to make a comprehensive analysis at all levels of management in the banking market, in particular, to take into account the overall level of the staff’s competition in the banking market, the level of personnel security of a particular commercial bank and to investigate the personnel management systems’ development level in the area of personnel security on the conditions of external and internal factors of influence and to define scenarios of implementation for changes to be tailored to the subject under consideration, taking into account their particularities, capabilities and competitive advantages

This article examines whether the likelihood and amount of firm charitable giving in response to catastrophic events are related to firm advertising intensity, and whether industry competition level moderates this relationship. Using data on Chinese firms' philanthropic response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, we find that firm advertising intensity is positively associated with both the probability and the amount of corporate giving. The results also indicate that this positive advertising intensity-philanthropic giving relationship is stronger in competitive industries, and firms in competitive industries are more likely to donate. This study thus provides evidence suggesting that even in the wake of catastrophic events, corporate philanthropic giving is strategic.

This paper shows that the effect of different distribution channel structures on product quality depends on the type of consumer heterogeneity and its distribution in a market. When consumer heterogeneity is uniformly distributed either vertically on willingness to pay or horizontally on transaction costs, a manufacturer may provide the same or lower product quality in a decentralized channel than in a centralized channel. In contrast, when consumer heterogeneity follows a more general distribution on willingness to pay, under certain conditions, the manufacturer may provide higher product quality in a decentralized channel than in a centralized channel. Decentralization also may lead to a higher product quality if consumer heterogeneity is uniformly distributed both vertically and horizontally, but not if consumer heterogeneity is uniformly distributed vertically on each of two product-quality attributes. Additionally, competition at the retail level may amplify these findings. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.

Market activity for today’s enterprises means continuing work to better understand the needs of their customers to provide them higher level of satisfaction. Building market advantages using a traditional approach based on material resources becoming less and less likely to increase competitiveness over the long term. The ability to use intangible assets, often more difficult to identify and manage, is becoming a key issue. Proper management of intangible assets can provide the company with unique market advantages that are unique, durable, and difficult to imitate. This study attempts to characterize selected dependencies between the nature of the actions undertaken by enterprises in relation to intellectual capital in the context of the strength of the level of competition in the market.

The diversity of forest tree life strategies is fundamental to species coexistence in mixed stands. Growth rate is one of the most important elements of a species’ life strategy. This aspect has been relatively well recognised in even-aged stands. However, the situation is different in uneven-aged stands, particularly in multi-species stands comprising species with different light demands. In this study, we aimed to compare stem basal area increment (BAI) in regard to five species forming multi-species, uneven-aged deciduous forests in Central Europe as an important element of their growth strategy. Particular attention was paid to the relationship between this feature and tree height and competitive status. These relationships were analysed using a linear mixed model. The BAI was positively correlated with tree height, while a negative correlation was observed between BAI and increasing competitive level. However, the observed variations in the trends of these relationships were not associated with the light demands of the compared species. In general, the majority of the studied species demonstrated similar growth dynamics. This may suggest that the role of this trait in shaping species coexistence is modulated by other life-history strategy components and by specific growth conditions. An exception to this is the most light-demanding species, black alder (Alnus glutinosa (L.) Gaertner), which, contrary to expectations, exhibits a lower basal area increment under uneven-aged conditions.

In this paper, a novel approach for simplifying the obtained if–then rules from decision table by rough set based methods is proposed. This approach can extract main features of objects in different decision classes by remarkable degrees. Using the proposed method, two real world decision-making problems are studied. The first one is for analyzing the main features of Japanese industries. The second is for anatomizing the life situations of senior citizens in Japan. The analysis results show that the proposed method is powerful for piecing out the main features of decision classes in the decision table which has many attributes and objects. The obtained main features can provide deep insight into the situations of objects and are useful for making a decision in the real world.

As project sizes and complexity have increased over the past few decades, the international construction industry has gradually developed into a country-level competition. The international construction industry is heterogeneous and involves different firms from diverse countries; it tends to be dynamic in terms of where firms enter and exit and grow and decay. To maintain the competitiveness of a country, it is essential to understand market structure based on a systematic diagnosis of its recent performance. This study analyzes the revenue structure of top international contractors (TIC’s) to investigate country-specific factors in the international construction industry. Using data from the Engineering News-Record’s (ENR’s) Top 250/225 International Contractors list produced over the last ten-year period (2009–2019), the international revenue performances of TIC’s were analyzed for 12 major countries both statically (market concentration) and dynamically (market mobility and instability). The analysis results show that the competition for TIC’s has become more intense, particularly due to newly industrialized countries (NIC’s), and in most countries, the market position was found to be unstable. This study further classifies 12 countries into four types (high-static, high-dynamic; high-static, low-dynamic; low-static, high-dynamic; and low-static, low-dynamic countries) using both static and dynamic indices. The combination of static and dynamic indices is found to be helpful for understanding the underlying competitive forces and can be utilized as a strategic reference for benchmarking.

Eating disorders encompass a range of mental health conditions characterized by disrupted eating behaviors, often accompanied by attitudes or practices focused on weight management. Certain sports, particularly aesthetic sports, pose a higher risk for these disorders, being more prevalent among elite athletes compared to recreational or non-competitive participants. Objective: This research aims to analyze the potential attitudes and risk behaviors associated with the development of eating disorders among athletes in the Fit Kid discipline, considering factors such as age range and competition level. Additionally, the study aims to identify any correlation between higher weight and BMI and the increased prevalence of eating disorders. Materials & methods: 66 Fit Kid athletes between 11 and 19 years of age participated in this descriptive study. The instrument used to collect the information was the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26) and the data were analysed with the SPSS 28.0 statistical package. Results: The main results reveal a higher level of risky eating attitudes in the highest level of competition and in athletes with a higher BMI and weight.