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Books > Business & Economics > Business & management > Management & management techniques > Management decision making
This volume highlights the main procedures for assessing the regional risks resulting from dangerous goods storage, and transportation by means of different systems (i.e., road, rail, ship, and pipeline). The information in the book is based on a wide range of references and studies. The main procedural steps involved in quantitative risk analysis for transportation systems are supported by relevant methods of risk assessment, as recognized at an international level. The book gives an overview of the criteria and guidelines applicable to the implementation of risk assessments and management at different stages. Chapter 1 describes the environmental and safety factors to consider when performing a transportation risk analysis for a region. Chapter 2 presents risk definitions and the methodology for analyzing transportation risks in a complex area. Chapter 3 presents general information about truck accidents and their consequences, and reviews the risk presented by road tunnels. Chapter 4 deals with transportation of hazardous materials by rail. Chapter 5 is concerned with the assessment of transportation risks on water ways. Chapter 6 furnishes a description of the transport pipelines for natural gas and petroleum products and describes the situation in Switzerland. Chapter 7 presents a compilation of statistical data related to accidents and the movement of dangerous goods. Chapter 8 is devoted to the description of data bases and computer support for risk assessment. Chapter 9 deals with integrated approaches for regional risk assessment and safety management with special emphasis to the transportation of hazardous materials. Chapter 10 presents several relevant case studies andmiscellaneous information.
A company's reputation is one of its most valuable assets, and reputational risk is high on the agenda at board level and amongst regulators. Rethinking Reputational Risk explains the hidden factors which can both cause crises and tip an otherwise survivable crisis into a reputational disaster. Reputations are lost when the perception of an organization is damaged by its behaviour not meeting stakeholder expectations. Rethinking Reputational Risk lays bare the actions, inactions and local 'states of normality' that can lead to perception-changing consequences and gives readers the insight to recognize and respond to the risks to their reputations. Using case studies, such as BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Volkswagen's emissions rigging scandal, Tesco, AIG, EADS Airbus A380, and Mid-Staffordshire NHS Hospital Trust, and analysis of their failures, this hard-hitting guide also applies lessons drawn from behavioural economics to the behavioural risks that underlie reputation risk. An essential read for risk professionals, business leaders and board members who need to understand and deal with business-critical threats to their reputation, this book presents a new framework that will be invaluable for all involved in safeguarding an organization's reputation.
In practical management, a policy maker often has to make a choice from among various alternatives. Quite often, there are several conflicting criteria to take into account. In addition, some criteria are non-numeric: they can only be expressed as `more' or `less'. The QUALIFLEX method for multicriteria analysis has been developed by the Netherlands Economic Institute to handle such problems. It is designed for use at all levels of decision making, both in the public and private sector. QUALIFLEX has the following features: simultaneous use of qualitative and quantitative data; full flexibility with regard to alternatives and criteria; scores in their own, natural measures; different weighting options for the criteria; sensitivity analysis of the relative weights of the criteria; the result is an optimal ranking of the alternatives. GBP/LISTGBP The Decision Support System QUALIFLEX 2.3 is a fully revised version of the program Micro-Qualiflex. The main improvements are: now user friendly and menu driven; graphical presentation; reversibility and data editing; optional input from (dBase) files.
An insight into the latest results from the world of operations research - a wide-ranging field, as is shown by the book's 24 sections, corresponding to the conference program itself. Although problems of a primarily methodological nature are discussed, the emphasis is placed firmly on practical subjects, such as reports from the fields of healthcare, environmental protection, logistics and traffic engineering. This selection also clearly illustrates the extent to which OR is spreading into and already interwoven in other scientific disciplines.
As its title implies, Advances in Multicriteria Analysis presents the most recent developments in multicriteria analysis and in some of its principal areas of application, including marketing, research and development evaluation, financial planning, and medicine. Special attention is paid to the interaction between multicriteria analysis, decision support systems and preference modeling. The five sections of the book cover: methodology; problem structuring; utility assessment; multi-objective optimisation; real world applications. Audience: Researchers and professionals who are operations researchers, management scientists, computer scientists, statisticians, decision analysts, marketing managers and financial analysts.
One of the most important tasks faced by decision-makers in
business and government is that of selection. Selection problems
are challenging in that they require the balancing of multiple,
often conflicting, criteria. In recent years, a number of
interesting decision aids have become available to assist in such
decisions.
Expected utility provides simple, testable properties of the optimum behavior that should be displayed by risk-averse individuals in risky decisions. Simultaneously, given the existence of paradoxes under the expected utility paradigm, expected utility can only be regarded as an approximation of actual behavior. A more realistic model is needed. This is particularly true when treating attitudes toward small probability events: the standard situation for insurable risks. Non-Expected Utility and Risk Management examines whether the existing results in insurance economics are robust to more general models of behavior under risk.
Planning in a general sense is concerned with the design of communication and decision making mechanisms in organizations where information and choice are decentralized. Non-cooperative planning theory as it is developed in this book treats the incentive aspects hereof. It stresses how strategic behavior and opportunism may impede planning, and how this can be coped with via the organization of communication and decision making, the design of information and control systems, and the development of incentive schemes. In particular, the book contains a thorough investigation of incentive provision in information production.
In a time when the world is facing significant challenges, leaders who work for justice and equity for all people are necessary. Transformative Leadership in Action: Allyship, Advocacy, and Activism challenges the reader to do the essential self-work required of a 21st century leader, and provides the road map to developing the skills necessary to take on increasing public leadership roles to support causes related to justice and equity. Shining a light on unexplored, yet crucial, components of the discussion around the apex of leadership and social justice, Bruce and McKee first investigate the tie between social justice work and leadership competencies grounded in theory. Second, they put forward a pedagogical guide in teaching at this apex-engaging both the instructor and student(s) in unique learning journeys. Offering insight for educators, current leaders, and future leaders, this book is a crucial resource - providing go-to support for engaging in allyship, advocacy, and activism for justice and equity. If you want your learners to be leaders and not just think about leadership, this is the book you need.
With the vision that machines can be rendered smarter, we have witnessed for more than a decade tremendous engineering efforts to implement intelligent sys tems. These attempts involve emulating human reasoning, and researchers have tried to model such reasoning from various points of view. But we know precious little about human reasoning processes, learning mechanisms and the like, and in particular about reasoning with limited, imprecise knowledge. In a sense, intelligent systems are machines which use the most general form of human knowledge together with human reasoning capability to reach decisions. Thus the general problem of reasoning with knowledge is the core of design methodology. The attempt to use human knowledge in its most natural sense, that is, through linguistic descriptions, is novel and controversial. The novelty lies in the recognition of a new type of un certainty, namely fuzziness in natural language, and the controversality lies in the mathematical modeling process. As R. Bellman [7] once said, decision making under uncertainty is one of the attributes of human intelligence. When uncertainty is understood as the impossi bility to predict occurrences of events, the context is familiar to statisticians. As such, efforts to use probability theory as an essential tool for building intelligent systems have been pursued (Pearl [203], Neapolitan [182)). The methodology seems alright if the uncertain knowledge in a given problem can be modeled as probability measures.
The fun and simple problem-solving guide that took Japan by storm
Models and Experiments in Risk and Rationality presents original contributions to the areas of individual choice, experimental economics, operations and analysis, multiple criteria decision making, market uncertainty, game theory and social choice. The papers, which were presented at the FUR VI conference, are arranged to appear in order of increasing complexity of the decision environment or social context in which they situate themselves. The first section Psychological Aspects of Risk-Bearing', considers choice at the purely individual level and for the most part, free of any specific economic or social context. The second section examines individual choice within the classical expected utility approach while the third section works from a perspective that includes non-expected utility preferences over lotteries. Section four, Multiple Criteria Decision-Making Under Uncertainty', considers the more specialized but crucial context of uncertain choice involving tradeoffs between competing criteria -- a field which is becoming of increasing importance in applied decision analysis. The final two sections examine uncertain choice in social or group contexts.
The encounter, in the late seventies, between the theory of triangular norms, issuing frorn stochastic geornetry, especially the works of Menger, Schweizer and Sklar, on the one band, and the theory of fuzzy sets due to Zadeh, 10n the other band has been very fruitful. Triangular norms have proved to be ready-rnade mathematical rnodels of fuzzy set intersections and have shed light on the algebraic foundations of fuzzy sets. One basic idea behind the study of triangular norms is to solve functional equations that stern frorn prescribed axioms describing algebraic properties such as associativity. Alternative operations such as rneans have been characterized in a similar way by Kolmogorov, for instance, and the rnethods for solving functional equations are now weil established thanks to the efforts of Aczel, among others. One can say without overstaternent that the introduction of triangular norms in fuzzy sets has strongly influenced further developrnents in fuzzy set theory, and has significantly contributed to its better acceptance in pure and applied rnathematics circles. The book by Fodor and Roubens systematically exploits the benefits of this encounter in the- analysis of fuzzy relations. The authors apply functional equation rnethods to notions such as equivalence relations, and various kinds of orderings, for the purpose of preference rnodelling. Centtal to this book is the rnultivalued extension of the well-known result claiming that any relation expressing weak preference can be separated into three cornponents respectively describing strict preference, indifference and incomparability.
This work results from my interest in the field of vector optimiza tion. I stumbled first upon this subject in 1982 during my six months visit to the Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione in Pisa, Italy, supported by a fellowship of the (Italian) Consiglio Nationale delle Richerche. I was attracted then by a gap between vector optimiza tion used to serve as a formal model for multiple objective decision problems and the decision problems themselves, the gap nonexis tent in scalar optimization. Roughly speaking, vector optimization provides methods for ranking decisions according to a partial order whereas decision making requires a linear ordering of decisions. The book deals with vector optimization. However, vector opti mization is considered here not only as a topic of research in itself but also as a basic tool for decision making. In consequence, all results presented here are aimed at exploiting and understanding the structure of elements (decisions) framed by a vector optimiza tion problem with the underlying assumption that the results should be interpretable in terms and applicable in the context of decision making. Computational tractability of results is therefore of special concern throughout this book. A unified framework for presentation is offered by the Cone Sep aration Technique (CST) founded on the notion of cone separation."
The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for estimating space-time stochastic properties of local climatic factors reflecting global climate change. Specifically, daily precipitation amount and daily mean temperature are considered and illustrated with application to the state of Nebraska, U. S. A. Furthermore, a drought index with and without global climate change is examined. The magnitude and consequences of regional response to anticipated climatic changes are uncertain (Houghton et al., 1990). Typical questions to be answered are: can time series of hydrological events or 10cal climatic variables such as daily temperature be conditioned in scenarios of future climate change and if so, how can this be utilized ? Can extreme historical drought events be reproduced by a stochastic hydroc1imatological model ? Can such a model be used with General Circu1ation Model (GCM) outputs to evaluate the regional/local effects of climate change scenarios? The approach presented in this paper is an extension of the usual analysis of regional hydrometeorological impacts of climate change: we propose to examine time series of GCM produced daily atmospheric circulation patterns (CP), thought to be relatively accurate GCM output to estimate local climatic factors. The paper is organized as follows. First, daily CPs are classified and analyzed statistically, first for historical and then for GCM produced data. Next, the height of the 500 hPa pressure field is introduced as an additional physically relevant variable influencing local climatic factors within each CP type."
Future Risks and Risk Management provides a broad perspective on risk, including basic philosophical issues concerned with values, psychological issues, such as the perception of risk, the factors that generate risks in current and future technological and social systems, including both technical and organizational factors. No other volume adopts this broad perspective. Future Risks and Risk Management will be useful in a variety of contexts, both for teaching and as a source book for the risk professional needing to be informed of the broader issues in the field.
Decision Theory and Decision Analysis: Trends and Challenges is divided into three parts. The first part, overviews, provides state-of-the-art surveys of various aspects of decision analysis and utility theory. The second part, theory and foundations, includes theoretical contributions on decision-making under uncertainty, partial beliefs and preferences. The third section, applications, reflects the real possibilities of recent theoretical developments such as non-expected utility theories, multicriteria decision techniques, and how these improve our understanding of other areas including artificial intelligence, economics, and environmental studies.
Much has already been written about risk assessment. Epidemiologists write books on how risk assessment is used to explore the factors that influence the distribution of disease in populations of people. Toxicologists write books on how risk assess ment involves exposing animals to risk agents and concluding from the results what risks people might experience if similarly exposed. Engineers write books on how risk assessment is utilized to estimate the risks of constructing a new facility such as a nuclear power plant. Statisticians write books on how risk assessment may be used to analyze mortality or accident data to determine risks. There are already many books on risk assessment-the trouble is that they all seem to be about different sUbjects! This book takes another approach. It brings together all the methods for assessing risk into a common framework, thus demonstrating how the various methods relate to one another. This produces four important benefits: * First, it provides a comprehensive reference for risk assessment. This one source offers readers concise explanations of the many methods currently available for describing and quantifying diverse types of risks. * Second, it consistently evaluates and compares available risk assessment methods and identifies their specific strengths and limitations. Understand ing the limitations of risk assessment methods is important. The field is still in its infancy, and the problems with available methods are disappoint ingly numerous. At the same time, risk assessment is being used.
Recent democratization and the accompanied liberalization of the media in Central and Eastern Europe has brought the devastating environmental impacts of the intensive and careless industrialization of the last 40 years to the surface. Less is known, however, about the social, political and institutional background of environmental risk management which led to the present situation, as well as about recent changes. Environment and Democratic Transition: Policy and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe provides an overview of the mechanism of policy making, the role of the scientific community, the environmental movements, and the public in risk controversies in Central and Eastern Europe from the 1970s until 1991. The book brings together studies by leading social scientists from the East and the West who investigate the economic, legal, institutional, behavioral, social and political aspects of environmental policy. In addition to analyzing past histories, most contributions focus also on challenges, pitfalls and dilemmas that the region's policy makers and environmentalists must face during the period of transition and into the future.
Estimating Device Reliability: Assessment of Credibility is concerned with the plausibility of reliability estimates obtained from statistical models. Statistical predictions are necessary because technology is always pushing into unexplored areas faster than devices can be made long-lived by design. Flawed reliability methodologies can produce disastrous results, an outstanding example of which is the catastrophic failure of the manned space shuttle CHALLENGER in January 1986. This issue is not whether, but which, statistical models should be used. The issue is not making reliability estimates, but is instead their credibility. The credibility questions explored in the context of practical applications include: What does the confidence level associated with the use of statistical model mean? Is the numerical result associated with a high confidence level beyond dispute? When is it appropriate to use the exponential (constant hazard rate) model? Does this model always provide the most conservative reliability estimate? Are the results of traditional random' failure hazard rate calculations tenable? Are there persuasive alternatives? What model should be used to describe the useful life of a device when wearout is absent? When Weibull and lognormal failure plots containing a large number of failure times appear similar, how should the correct wearout model be selected? Is it important to distinguish between a conservative upper bound on a probability of failure and a realistic estimate of the same probability? Estimating Device Reliability: Assessment of Credibility is for those who are obliged to make reliability calculations with a paucity of somewhat corrupt data, by using inexactmodels, and by making physical assumptions which are impractical to verify. Illustrative examples deal with a variety of electronic devices, ICs and lasers.
As desired, the infonnation demand correspondence is single valued at equilibrium prices. Hence no planner is needed to assign infonnation allocations to individuals. Proposition 4. For any given infonnation price system p E . P (F *), almost every a E A demands a unique combined infonnation structure (although traders may be indifferent among partial infonnation sales from different information allocations, etc. ). In particular, the aggregate excess demand correspondence for net combined infonnation trades is a continuous function. Proof Uniqueness fails only if an agent can obtain the same expected utility from two or more net combined infonnation allocations. If this happens, appropriate slight perturbations of personal probability vectors destroy the equality unless the utility functions and wealth allocations were independent across states. Yet, when utilities and wealths don't depend on states in S, no infonnation to distinguish the states is desired, so that the demand for such infonnation structures must equal zero. To show the second claim, recall that if the correspondence is single valued for almost every agent, then its integral is also single valued. Finally, note that an upper hemicontinuous (by Proposition 2) correspondence which is single valued everywhere is, in fact, a continuous function. [] REFERENCES Allen, Beth (1986a). "The Demand for (Differentiated) Infonnation"; Review of Economic Studies. 53. (311-323). Allen, Beth (1986b). "General Equilibrium with Infonnation Sales"; Theory and Decision. 21. (1-33). Allen, Beth (1990). "Infonnation as an Economic Commodity"; American Economic Review. 80. (268-273).
A systematic review of the most current decision models and techniques for disease prevention and treatment Decision Analytics and Optimization in Disease Prevention and Treatment offers a comprehensive resource of the most current decision models and techniques for disease prevention and treatment. With contributions from leading experts in the field, this important resource presents information on the optimization of chronic disease prevention, infectious disease control and prevention, and disease treatment and treatment technology. Designed to be accessible, in each chapter the text presents one decision problem with the related methodology to showcase the vast applicability of operations research tools and techniques in advancing medical decision making. This vital resource features the most recent and effective approaches to the quickly growing field of healthcare decision analytics, which involves cost-effectiveness analysis, stochastic modeling, and computer simulation. Throughout the book, the contributors discuss clinical applications of modeling and optimization techniques to assist medical decision making within complex environments. Accessible and authoritative, Decision Analytics and Optimization in Disease Prevention and Treatment: Presents summaries of the state-of-the-art research that has successfully utilized both decision analytics and optimization tools within healthcare operations research Highlights the optimization of chronic disease prevention, infectious disease control and prevention, and disease treatment and treatment technology Includes contributions by well-known experts from operations researchers to clinical researchers, and from data scientists to public health administrators Offers clarification on common misunderstandings and misnomers while shedding light on new approaches in this growing area Designed for use by academics, practitioners, and researchers, Decision Analytics and Optimization in Disease Prevention and Treatment offers a comprehensive resource for accessing the power of decision analytics and optimization tools within healthcare operations research. |
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