The cooperative extension service: A model for technology transfer

Since its inception in 1914, the Cooperative Extension Service has been delivering technology effectively to the agricultural community. The history of CES is discussed briefly, and the program's success, in terms of visibility, usage, and economic impact, is documented. Although the extension model has not been applied widely in industries outside of agriculture, some states have experimented with technology-transfer programs fashioned after CES. It is argued that these programs have not acquired the critical mass of resources needed to make them truly effective, and, unless they gain additional support, they should expand their services to increase their value and assess fees for assistance rendered. Gregory D. McFall was, during preparation of this paper, an undergraduate research fellow, majoring in physics, mathematics, and philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He currently is doing graduate work at VPI & SU.     

The application of expert systems to the management of technology

Technology management must be improved if the US is to cope in an aggressively competitive international marketplace. It is becoming increasingly clear that investing in technologically advanced plant and equipment alone is not enough to compete successfully. To raise levels of efficiency and effectiveness in technology management, firms must develop a multi-dimensional approach to solving problems associated with manufacturing process. A way to capture scenarios for decision-making is through expert systems—programs that have wide bases of knowledge in restricted domains and utilize complex inferential reasoning to perform tasks that human beings could accomplish, but less efficiently. These systems contain a great deal of knowledge about a specific problem areas and disciplines. They also allow expertise to be distributed throughout the firms, raising competence levels and the productivity of non-experts.     

Arrow's theorem with social quasi-orderings

The collective rationality requirement in Arrow's theorem is weakened to demanding a social quasi-ordering (a reflexive and transitive but not necessarily complete binary relation). This weakening leads to the existence of a group such that (a) whenever all members of the group strictly prefer one alternative to another then so does society and (b) whenever two members of the group have opposite strict preferences over a pair of alternatives then the pair is socially not ranked. This theorem is then used to provide an axiomatization of the strong Pareto rule. These results are compared and contrasted to Gibbard's oligarchy theorem and Sen's axiomatization of the Pareto extension rule.