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The purpose of this article is to help investors build less-concentrated portfolios as well as to construct optimal return-concentration portfolios.

An alternative portfolio objective is proposed where investors care about the level of concentration of their portfolio weights. Minimizing the concentration of portfolio weights leads to the well-known equal-weight portfolio as the optimal choice. Maximizing the trade-off between the portfolio's expected return and the weight concentration produces a novel portfolio with weights proportional to the expected return of each security.

An empirical application with 30 industry portfolios and 1,000 individual stocks finds that both proposed strategies perform well out-of-sample both in terms of the proposed concentration measure but also in terms of more traditional risk-based measures like Sharpe ratios, abnormal returns and market betas.

The optimal risk-concentration portfolio proposed in this paper is a novel result. The portfolio generalizes prior practitioner intuition on focusing on securities with the highest expected returns and the concept of diversification.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the shelf-life of minimally processed pineapple when subjected to the use of different edible coatings.

The pineapples were peeled and cut into cubes. The gums were prepared by dissolving them in distilled water and then heated to total dissolution. After calcium chloride, citric acid and ascorbic acid and glycerol were added in the solutions. The pieces of pineapple were completely submerged in the respective solutions and then drained. Four treatments were obtained, namely: T1 – control treatment (pineapple without coating); T2 – pectin; T3 – tara; T4 – xanthan. The cubes were stored in PET by 12 days at 4±1°C. Analyzes were carried out of mass loss, pH, titratable acidity, soluble solids, microbiological and sensory analysis.

It was possible to observe that the use of evaluated coatings was efficient to maintain the conservation of minimally processed pineapple in all analyzes, when compared with the control sample. The treatment with tara gum showed the best results to those obtained by the other studied gums.

The study may help small-scale establishments to increase the shelf-life of minimally processed pineapple.

Tara gum reduced the mass loss, delayed the microbial growth and maintained the sensorial quality of minimally processed pineapples for a longer time.

A major challenge facing the fresh‐cut industry is maintaining and preserving the quality of minimally processed or fresh‐cut produce. A low temperature regime, although insufficient, has been the main method of overcoming this challenge so far. Thus, methods preserving the quality and extending the shell life of minimally processed or fresh‐cut produce are needed. This paper seeks to propose that honey could be used to preserve the fresh‐like quality of minimally processed pomegranate arils and extend their shelf life.

Manually extracted pomegranate arils were treated with water as control, 10 or 20 per cent diluted honey solution each for five minutes, then held at 4°C for ten days. Changes in organoleptic and visual quality, softening, soluble solids content, pH, absorbance at 446 and 510nm, and total aerobic count were recorded during the ten‐day storage period.

The study found that honey solution dip treatments extended the fresh‐like quality of minimally processed arils by delaying quality loss, microbial development, and pigment changes.

The paper shows that honey dip treatment may be used, depending on commodity, to preserve quality and extend the shelf life of minimally processed or fresh‐cut produce in the food‐processing industry.

The study pays particular attention to minimally processed pomegranate arils, by adapting a potentially safe organic method, the use of honey dips.

This paper aims to update with information about edible coating on minimally processed and fresh fruits, focussing on the composition, active ingredients, antimicrobial concentration and their effect on ripening rate, phytonutrients retention and shelf-life of fruits. In future, the data will be helpful for the processors to select the best coating material and its effective concentration for different fresh and minimally processed fruits.

Major scientific information was collected from Scopus, Web of Science, Mendeley and Google Scholar. Several key words such as postharvest, edible coating, phytonutrients, shelf-life enhancement, bioactive compounds, minimally processed fruits and antimicrobial compounds were used to find the data. Relevant information was collected by using 90 recent research and review articles.

The main findings of this comprehensive review are to improve the quality of fruits, to meet the next-generation food security needs. However, in the process of achieving the goal of improving quality of food produce, embrace of synthetic, non-biodegradable packaging materials have increased, creating serious pollution problem. Amidst several alternatives for replacement of synthetic packaging, the option of biodegradable films and coatings showed promising results.

The paper represents recent information about the edible coating used for the enhancement of shelf-life of fresh and minimally processed fruits.

The poor leadership style is a key obstacle to the effective implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies. To successfully apply the Industry 4.0 technologies, which can enhance the sustainability of firms, senior management needs to be inspiring and transformational. On the other hand, numerous factors can hinder the Industry 4.0 transition and “Circular Supply Chain (CSC)” transformation. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to evaluate the related barriers of CSCs in the era of Industry 4.0 transition.

The current study developed an innovative decision-making approach with the help of the “Combined Compromise Solution (CoCoSo)” method and “Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC)” method on the “q-Rung Orthopair Fuzzy Sets (q-ROFSs).” CRITIC in this combined method was used to predict the importance or weighting degrees of the CSCs barriers in the age of Industry 4.0 transition.

The results of this study found that the absence of knowledge about the Industry 4.0 technologies and circular approaches was the first barrier followed by the problems associated with data security in relationship management in circular flows, the deficiency of knowledge regarding the data management among stakeholders and the lack of awareness about the potential benefits of autonomous systems in labor-oriented “End-of-Life (EOL)” activities for CSCs in the era of Industry 4.0 transition.

A limitation may be that despite the generalizability of the proposed framework, the results may differ when it is implemented in different sectors. By emphasizing the obstacles to sustainable operations of supply chains (SCs) in the context of circular economy (CE) and Industry 4.0, researchers working in the same domain may be encouraged to find ways to remove such obstacles in different settings. As suggested in this study, the priority of various barriers helps researchers suggest effective strategies for the sustainable development of companies within the current dynamic business atmosphere.

The findings of this paper can aid industry practitioners in fixing their attention on the digitization or automation of their systems in the context of sustainability or resource circularity. Note that within the current context of CE, one of the crucial issues is how to conserve the existing resources; the answer to this question can save the environment.

The current paper proposed a new multi-criteria decision-making method using q-ROFSs to analyze, rank and evaluate the CSC barriers in the age of Industry 4.0 transition. To this end, a new decision-making approach with the help of CRITIC and CoCoSo methods on q-ROFSs called q-ROF-CRITIC-CoCoSo was introduced to evaluate the CSCs barriers in the era of Industry 4.0 transition.

Using the American and the French time-use surveys, we examine whether people have a preference for a more diversified mix of activities, in the sense that they experience greater well-being when their time schedule contains many different activities rather than is concentrated on a very small number. This could be due to decreasing marginal utility, as is assumed for goods consumption, if each episode of time is conceived as yielding a certain level of utility per se. With returns to specialization, people would then face a trade-off between efficiency and diversity in choosing how to allocate time. We examine these issues and investigate potential gender differences, considering both instantaneous feelings and life satisfaction.

There are many investigations in design methodologies, but there are also divergences and convergences as there are so many points of view. This study aims to evaluate to corroborate and deepen other researchers’ findings, dissipate divergences and provide directing to future work on the subject from a methodological and convergent perspective.

This study analyzes the previous reviews (about 15 reviews) and based on the consensus and the classifications provided by these authors, a significant sample of research is analyzed in the design for additive manufacturing (DFAM) theme (approximately 80 articles until June of 2017 and approximately 280–300 articles until February of 2019) through descriptive statistics, to corroborate and deepen the findings of other researchers.

Throughout this work, this paper found statistics indicating that the main areas studied are: multiple objective optimizations, execution of the design, general DFAM and DFAM for functional performance. Among the main conclusions: there is a lack of innovation in the products developed with the methodologies, there is a lack of exhaustivity in the methodologies, there are few efforts to include environmental aspects in the methodologies, many of the methods include economic and cost evaluation, but are not very explicit and broad (sustainability evaluation), it is necessary to consider a greater variety of functions, among other conclusions

The novelty in this study is the methodology. It is very objective, comprehensive and quantitative. The starting point is not the case studies nor the qualitative criteria, but the figures and quantities of methodologies. The main contribution of this review article is to guide future work on the subject from a methodological and convergent perspective and this article provides a broad database with articles containing information on many issues to make decisions: design methodology; optimization; processes, selection of parts and materials; cost and product management; mechanical, electrical and thermal properties; health and environmental impact, etc.

This purpose of this study is to structure complex problems to be solved with greater efficiency, optimising the relationship between root causes (RC) relevance of the problem and utilisation of human resources to treat them, minimising the use of manpower in problem-solving activity and thus contributing to greater productivity within organisations.

The authors built an approach under the concepts of theory of constraints and multiattribute and multiobjective decision-making methods that were applied in a real complex problem of the low development of Brazilian space industry, by theoretical perspective. Also, the authors submitted it in a simulation environment to assess in which situations it is successful considering number of problem’s RC, system complexity and number of people in the system.

The approach was successful on the real case, finding the optimal relationship between the RC relevance and the number of people involved to treat them. For certain complex problem inputs configurations, simulation results reveal that the approach is reliable obtaining more than 95% chance of success in finding the optimal relationship, when comparing with traditional prioritising methods.

This approach introduces an unprecedented way to locate and evaluate non-physical constraints within a system, which is used to determine RC relevance, as well as an unprecedented way of defining a single optimal solution for structuring a problem, considering the relevance of RC and the use of human resources. The approach is useful for organisations in general which often need managing complex problems with few resources.

Although mass privatizations in Slovakia had the same starting point as those in the Czech Republic, mass privatisation in Slovakia led to a different ownership structure, which also partly reflects the different industry structure. Proximately to political decision making of the new management is close and explicit. The new structure lends itself to targeted industrial policy.

We examine whether variations in the most fundamental aspects of state corporate income tax regimes affect state economic activity as measured by personal income, gross state product, and total non-farm employment. We focus on a variety of statutory components of state corporate income taxes that apply broadly in most U.S. states and for most multi-state corporate taxpayers. Our econometric strategy consists of a series of fixed effects panel regressions using state-level data from 1996 through 2010. Our results reveal important interaction effects of tax rates and policies, suggesting that policy makers should avoid making decisions about tax rates in isolation. The results demonstrate a relatively consistent negative economic response to the combination of high tax rates with throwback rules and heavy sales factor weights. Combined reporting has no discernible effect on personal income, GSP, or employment after controlling for tax rates, apportionment, and throwback rules. In an effort to gauge the relative impacts of tax policies on the location of economic activity, we also estimate alternative models in which each state’s economic activity is measured as a share of the national economic activity in each year. Statistically significant effects for tax rates, apportionment formulas, and throwback rules in the shares models suggest that at least some of their impact involves the movement of activity across state lines, thereby leaving open the possibility of a zero-sum game among the states.