This work deals with the use of comparative law in European legal adjudication. It describes the different forms of the use of comparative law in legal reasoning, argumentation and justification in several national legal orders and in European level legal institutions. The book begins with an inquiry into the nature of comparative law as a legal source. After the description of the empirical study it ends to the general theory of European law and several hard cases of European law are examined. The book is intended for students and researchers in European law but it also contains aspects to...

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The purpose of the book is to develop internal realism, the metaphysical-episte- mological doctrine initiated by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, "Introduction," Many Faces). In doing so I shall rely - sometimes quite heavily - on the notion of conceptual scheme. I shall use the notion in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which, however, has some affinities with the ways the notion has been used during its history. So I shall start by sketching the history of the notion. This will provide some background, and it will also give opportunity to raise some of the...

Optimization is of central importance in all sciences. Nature inherently seeks optimal solutions. For example, light travels through the "shortest" path and the folded state of a protein corresponds to the structure with the "minimum" potential energy. In combinatorial optimization, there are numerous computationally hard problems arising in real world applications, such as floorplanning in VLSI designs and Steiner trees in communication networks. For these problems, the exact optimal solution is not currently real-time computable. One usually computes an approximate solution with various...

Adverse environmental factors can impose stress on plants and influence the expression of the full genetic potential for growth and reproduction. The capability of plants to develop plastic response reactions, to adapt to environmental stress situations, is unique in the biological world. A goal of the research described in this volume is to increase crop productivity, particular in regions where the environment imposes stress. An understanding of the principles involved in plant adaptation to environmental stress will enable optimisation of practices to improve agronomic production and...

Semi-infinite programming (SIP) deals with optimization problems in which either the number of decision variables or the number of constraints is finite. This book presents the state of the art in SIP in a suggestive way, bringing the powerful SIP tools close to the potential users in different scientific and technological fields.
The volume is divided into four parts. Part I reviews the first decade of SIP (1962-1972). Part II analyses convex and generalised SIP, conic linear programming, and disjunctive programming. New numerical methods for linear, convex, and continuously...

In the paper we propose a model of tax incentives optimization for inve- ment projects with a help of the mechanism of accelerated depreciation. Unlike the tax holidays which influence on effective income tax rate, accelerated - preciation affects on taxable income. In modern economic practice the state actively use for an attraction of - vestment into the creation of new enterprises such mechanisms as accelerated depreciation and tax holidays. The problem under our consideration is the following. Assume that the state (region) is interested in realization of a certain investment project, for...

Many questions dealing with solvability, stability and solution methods for va- ational inequalities or equilibrium, optimization and complementarity problems lead to the analysis of certain (perturbed) equations. This often requires a - formulation of the initial model being under consideration. Due to the specific of the original problem, the resulting equation is usually either not differ- tiable (even if the data of the original model are smooth), or it does not satisfy the assumptions of the classical implicit function theorem. This phenomenon is the main reason why a considerable...

Bilevel programming problems are hierarchical optimization problems where the constraints of one problem (the so-called upper level problem) are defined in part by a second parametric optimization problem (the lower level problem). If the lower level problem has a unique optimal solution for all parameter values, this problem is equivalent to a one-level optimization problem having an implicitly defined objective function. Special emphasize in the book is on problems having non-unique lower level optimal solutions, the optimistic (or weak) and the pessimistic (or strong) approaches are...

In complementarity theory, which is a relatively new domain of applied mathematics, several kinds of mathematical models and problems related to the study of equilibrium are considered from the point of view of physics as well as economics. In this book the authors have combined complementarity theory, equilibrium of economical systems, and efficiency in Pareto's sense. The authors discuss the use of complementarity theory in the study of equilibrium of economic systems and present results they have obtained. In addition the authors present several new results in complementarity theory and...