The epistemological and methodological issues within management sciences constitute a difficult area for theoretical reflection. The main goal of this book is to deepen epistemological and methodological reflection concerned with the foundations of organization and management in order to broaden the methodological awareness of researchers from the field of management sciences. This book does not describe paradigm change; it points out possible evolutional directions for management reflection. The key matter is to convince of the uncertainty and of the contextual nature of the knowledge obtained through management.

This book deals with complex problems in the fields of logistics and supply chain management and discusses advanced methods, especially from the field of computational intelligence (CI), for solving them. The first two chapters provide general introductions to logistics and supply chain management on the one hand, and to computational intelligence on the other hand. The subsequent chapters cover specific fields in logistics and supply chain management, work out the most relevant problems found in those fields, and discuss approaches for solving them. Chapter 3 discusses problems in the field of production and inventory management. Chapter 4 considers planning activities on a finer level of granularity which is usually denoted as scheduling. In chapter 5 problems in transportation planning such as different types of vehicle routing problems are considered. While chapters 3 to 5 rather discuss planning problems which appear on an operative level, chapter 6 discusses the strategic problem of designing a supply chain or network. The final chapter provides an overview of academic and commercial software and information systems for the discussed applications. There appears to be a gap between general textbooks on logistics and supply chain management and more specialized literature dealing with methods for computational intelligence, operations research, etc., for solving the complex operational problems in these fields. For readers, it is often difficult to proceed from introductory texts on logistics and supply chain management to the sophisticated literature which deals with the usage of advanced methods. This book fills this gap by providing state-of-the-art descriptions of the corresponding problems and suitable methods for solving them.

Growing tensions and disagreements over globalization, as well as the role of multinational enterprises in the global economy, and competition among countries, has made the challenge of managing reputation across national institutional environments increasingly complex. Global Aspects of Reputation and Strategic Management addresses these critical strategic issues by exploring how country-level factors influence reputation development and how reputation obtained in one context can be transferred to another. This volume of Research in Global Strategic Management addresses three broad themes - Managing a Global Reputation, National Context and Reputation, and Approaches to Reputation Measurement - and identifies opportunities for future research on global aspects of reputation and strategic management to inspire and strengthen this key area. The complexity resulting from this multi-level exploration of reputation makes illuminating reading for researchers and scholars in the areas of international business, strategy and management, as well as for practitioners wanting to develop and implement an international strategy.

This two-volume collection of key papers by leading scholars provides a comprehensive perspective on the evaluation and performance of risk regulation policies. An analysis of the statistical life provides the basis for an examination of the risk money tradeoffs reflected in individual decisions in the labour, product and housing markets and an investigation of how these concepts can be used to evaluate government regulatory policies, including the newly developed risk-risk analysis approach. The volumes also offer an assessment of the performance of government risk regulations and a comprehensive analysis of the formation of risk beliefs and the role of hazard warnings policies in fostering improved risk decisions. The editors have written an authoritative introduction which presents a review of the selected papers and identifies interesting topics for future research.

It's not what we know, but how we learn. This is the key that Learning to Read the Signs uses in order to evaluate and apply ideas and facts to one's organization life. The book asks the reader to go back to and reclaim pragmatism: an activity of thought involving four parts: Investigation, Hypothesis, Action, and Testing. Pragmatism is a method of interpretation or inquiry which offers to the thoughtful business practitioner a way to better understand the reality in which we operate, to think critically and creatively, and for business people to think together to make the best use of all our perspectives and talents. Questions raised in this book include: What are the signs telling us? Where are we headed and why? Why are things going the way they are? What is our purpose?

Scholarly interest in the areas of sustainability, stakeholder relations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) has increased considerably in recent years. In this volume, we take a step back to consider the fundamental questions that underlie and tie research across these areas together. The chapters in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical perspectives grounded in strategy, economics and sociology, employ various methodological approaches, and offer new arguments on the connections that exist between firms' decisions relating to sustainability, CSR, and the governance of their stakeholder relations. The chapters in this volume highlight that business decisions relating to sustainability and CSR are ultimately decisions about the governance of stakeholder relations, and suggest that future work in these areas should consider more closely both the firms and their stakeholders as strategic actors driving firm decisions.

This book considers the problem of determining how many barrels of crude oil an oil-producing and exporting country should produce annually for export along with several other important problems that decision-makers in the crude oil industry face and discusses procedures for finding optimum solutions for them. It considers the important Objective Functions they need in making these critical decisions, and discusses procedures to find the best solutions. Outputs from the treatment units, in an oil refinery are only semi-finished products; these are blended into finished products like gasoline, diesel oil, etc., meeting various specifications that the marketplace demands. The book discusses models for solving these problems optimally with examples.

This book takes a fresh look at safety decision-making by documenting and examining stories told by front-line managers in three different high-hazard industries: a chemical plant, a nuclear power station and an air-navigation service provider. From Piper Alpha to Deepwater Horizon, accident analysis has stressed the importance of excellent decision-making by those in charge out in the field. Organizations rely critically on the judgement and experience of such senior operations personnel and yet these qualities are undervalued in a business environment that emphasises documentation and measurement. Whilst operational managers are guided by rules, they also draw on their own long experience and can formulate a situation-specific 'line in the sand' to apply the experience of the operating team to complex, real-world situations that rule writers may not have foreseen. This volume refocuses our attention on the people who make these important decisions and the organizational processes that support the best choices. Jan Hayes uses her multi-disciplinary experience to draw together an account of safety decision-making that is both technically robust and yet accessible to academics, practitioners and regulators alike. Readers will see that the stories retold in this book provide a way for operational managers to share their knowledge, experience and expertise - with each other and with us.

This book mainly introduces the latest development of generalized intuitionistic multiplicative fuzzy calculus and its application. The book pursues three major objectives: (1) to introduce the calculus models with concrete mathematical expressions for generalized intuitionistic multiplicative fuzzy information; (2) to introduce new information fusion methods based on the definite integral models; and (3) to clarify the involved approaches bymilitary case. The book is especially valuable for readers to understand how the theoretical framework of generalized intuitionistic multiplicative fuzzy calculus is constructed, not only discrete or continuous but also correlative (generalized) intuitionistic (multiplicative) fuzzy information is aggregated based on the definite integral models and the theory with a military practice is integrated, which would deepen the understanding and give researchers more inspiration in practical decision analysis under uncertainties.

If you have good economic principles, then more than likely, you're making good business decisions. Although economics is sometimes dismissed as a discourse of practical relevance to only a relatively small circle of academicians and policy analysts who call themselves economists, sound economic reasoning benefits any manager of a business, whether they are involved with production and operations, marketing, finance, or corporate strategy. This highly respected text will help you and any business manager with managerial economics, which is the application of microeconomics to business decisions. Inside, you'll learn about the key relationships between price, quantity, cost, revenue, and profit, which are detailed for an individual firm in the form of simple conceptual models. The book includes key elements from the economics of consumer demand and the economics of production. It also discusses economic motivations for expanding a business and contributions from economics for improved organization of large firms, as well as market price-quantity equilibrium, competitive behavior, and the role of market structure on market equilibrium and competition. It concludes by considering market regulation in terms of the generic problems that create the need for regulation and possible remedies for those problems.

The Microeconomics of Wellbeing and Sustainability: Recasting the Economic Process explores the civil economy tradition in economic thought. Gaining increasing consensus worldwide, this alternative-not heterodox-view of the economic process and agents explains how modern economics is placing increasing emphasis on the determinants of subjective wellbeing and environmental sustainability. With support from behavioral economics, this book makes a foundational contribution that will help users better understand and prepare for future economic challenges.

Why are vast sums spent on controlling some risks but not others? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? These are key questions explored in The Government of Risk. This book exposes the components of risk regulation systems and examines their interaction and explanation. The approach employed is of a high policy relevance as well as of considerable theoretical importance.

A New York Times bestseller * A New York Times Notable Book "The tale of how Konnikova followed a story about poker players and wound up becoming a story herself will have you riveted, first as you learn about her big winnings, and then as she conveys the lessons she learned both about human nature and herself." -The Washington Post It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought something to the table, including a Ph.D. in psychology and an acclaimed and growing body of work on human behavior and how to hack it. So Seidel was in, and soon she was down the rabbit hole with him, into the wild, fiercely competitive, overwhelmingly masculine world of high-stakes Texas Hold'em, their initial end point the following year's World Series of Poker. But then something extraordinary happened. Under Seidel's guidance, Konnikova did have many epiphanies about life that derived from her new pursuit, including how to better read, not just her opponents but far more importantly herself; how to identify what tilted her into an emotional state that got in the way of good decisions; and how to get to a place where she could accept luck for what it was, and what it wasn't. But she also began to win. And win. In a little over a year, she began making earnest money from tournaments, ultimately totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She won a major title, got a sponsor, and got used to being on television, and to headlines like "How one writer's book deal turned her into a professional poker player." She even learned to like Las Vegas. But in the end, Maria Konnikova is a writer and student of human behavior, and ultimately the point was to render her incredible journey into a container for its invaluable lessons. The biggest bluff of all, she learned, is that skill is enough. Bad cards will come our way, but keeping our focus on how we play them and not on the outcome will keep us moving through many a dark patch, until the luck once again breaks our way.

Making decisions is a critical part of every executive's job. However we know so little about the often subliminal processes that shape the decisions we make. The Secret Life of Decisions exposes the unchallenged myths and distortions that impact our reasoning ability, raising our awareness of the many traps we can fall into. Meena Thuraisingham and her collaborator, Wolfgang Lehmacher, have drawn from decades of work with leaders showing that even the most talented leaders and teams can end up making sub-optimal decisions. This is rarely because they had poor critical thinking faculties but rather because they did not pay enough attention to the often invisible traps hardwired into our thinking processes, letting through only information that conforms with our current beliefs, mental models and expectations. This leaves many leaders and businesses exposed. Rather than being the rational output of our reasoning abilities, the authors show decision making to be a highly imprecise process. As decision makers we come to the table armed with our own perspectives, preferences, filters, heuristics and biases, influenced by a broad range of social influences many operating subliminally. The Secret Life of Decisions is an essential read for developing and seasoned executives who have to work through increasingly complex and high stakes decisions. It treats choosing wisely and the thinking involved as a skill, which as with many other skills, can be improved with the guided practice and supporting tools provided here. The journey however starts with awareness that comes from outing the 'secret' forces that can sabotage the quality of our decisions.

Based on courses developed by the author over several years, this book provides access to a broad area of research that is not available in separate articles or books of readings. Topics covered include the meaning and measurement of risk, general single-period portfolio problems, mean-variance analysis and the Capital Asset Pricing Model, the Arbitrage Pricing Theory, complete markets, multiperiod portfolio problems and the Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model, the Black-Scholes option pricing model and contingent claims analysis, 'risk-neutral' pricing with Martingales, Modigliani-Miller and the capital structure of the firm, interest rates and the term structure, and others.

Analytics is one of a number of terms which are used to describe a data-driven more scientific approach to management. Ability in analytics is an essential management skill: knowledge of data and analytics helps the manager to analyze decision situations, prevent problem situations from arising, identify new opportunities, and often enables many millions of dollars to be added to the bottom line for the organization. The objective of this book is to introduce analytics from the perspective of the general manager of a corporation. Rather than examine the details or attempt an encyclopaedic review of the field, this text emphasizes the strategic role that analytics is playing in globally competitive corporations today. The chapters of this book are organized in two main parts. The first part introduces a problem area and presents some basic analytical concepts that have been successfully used to address the problem area. The objective of this material is to provide the student, the manager of the future, with a general understanding of the tools and techniques used by the analyst.

In real-life scenarios, service management involves complex decision-making processes usually affected by random or stochastic variables. Under such uncertain conditions, the development and use of robust and flexible strategies, algorithms, and methods can provide the quantitative information necessary to make better business decisions. Decision Making in Service Industries: A Practical Approach explores the challenges that must be faced to provide intelligent strategies for efficient management and decision making that will increase your organization s competitiveness and profitability.
The book provides insight and understanding into practical and methodological issues related to decision-making processes under uncertainty in service industries. It examines current and future trends regarding how these decision-making processes can be efficiently performed for better design of service systems by using probabilistic algorithms as well as hybrid and simulation-based approaches.

Traditionally, many quantitative tools have been developed to make decisions in production companies. This book explores how to use these tools for making decisions inside service industries. Thus, the authors tackle strategic, tactical, and operational problems in service companies with the help of suitable quantitative models such as heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms, simulation, or queuing theory.

Generally speaking, decision making is a hard task in business fields. Making the issue more complex, most service companies problems are related to the uncertainty of the service demand. This book sheds light on these types of decision problems. It provides studies that demonstrate the suitability of quantitative methods to make the right decisions. Consequently, this book presents the business analytics needed to make strategic decisions in service industries.

Computing has become essential for the modeling, analysis, and optimization of systems. This book is devoted to algorithms, computational analysis, and decision models. The chapters are organized in two parts: optimization models of decisions and models of pricing and equilibria.

Meta-analysis, decision analysis, and cost-effectiveness analysis are the cornerstones of evidence-based medicine. These related quantitative methods have become essential tools in the formulation of clinical and public policy based on the synthesis of evidence. All three methods are taught with increasing frequency in medical schools and schools of public health and in health policy courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. This book is a lucid introduction, and will serve the needs of students taking introductory courses that cover these topics. It will also be useful to clinicians and policymakers who need to understand the quantitative underpinnings of the methods in order to best apply the information that derives from them. The second edition of this popular book adds new material on cumulative meta-analysis as a method to explore heterogeneity. The coverage of cost-effectiveness analysis has been brought into close alignment with recommendations of the U.S. Public Health Panel on Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health and Medicine. Many of the examples have been replaced with more current examples, and all of the material has been updated to reflect recent advances in the methods and the emergence of consensus about some previously controversial issues. analysis. These three closely related methods have become even more important for synthesizing research since the first edition was published in 1994. And they have gained legitimacy as tools for guiding health policy. In the Second Edition, Petitti has added new material on cumlative meta-analysis and the exploration of heterogeneity, incorporated recommendations for standardizing the conduct of cost-effectiveness analysis, and updated the rest of the text.

The authors of this book argue that firms succeed or fail in their industries according to the degree that they are able to change what they do to meet changing market decisions. The authors present a framework for managing the process of organizational transformation, and the tools that are necessary to manage that change.

Working through 7 practical steps, you will be able to identify and reduce your biggest risks so you can get evidence-based confidence to move forward:

• Do you have a new product or business idea but don’t know where to start?
• Do you want to know if your idea works before you’ve wasted too much time or money?
• Do you want to harness the power of lean thinking to move quicker and faster?

In the last few years, competition has become increasingly more complex, variable and dynamic, as can be seen in phenomena like globalization and technological acceleration. To cope with the dynamism and uncertainty of competition, enterprises need capabilities that enable them to respond to competition, as well as to improve their analytical skills and knowledge in order to better manage new strategic projects.

Strategic analysis uses both quantitative and qualitative tools to understand both competitive contexts and available company resources. In Strategic Analysis: Processes and Tools, author Andrea Beretta Zanoni develops a theory of strategic analysis and offers models for the application of strategic analysis tools during all phases of the process including planning and decision-making, the development of control, and the formulation of a strategic diagnosis.

Under intense scrutiny for the last few decades, Multiple Objective Decision Making (MODM) has been useful for dealing with the multiple-criteria decisions and planning problems associated with many important applications in fields including management science, engineering design, and transportation. Rough set theory has also proved to be an effective mathematical tool to counter the vague description of objects in fields such as artificial intelligence, expert systems, civil engineering, medical data analysis, data mining, pattern recognition, and decision theory.

Rough Multiple Objective Decision Making is perhaps the first book to combine state-of-the-art application of rough set theory, rough approximation techniques, and MODM. It illustrates traditional techniques-and some that employ simulation-based intelligent algorithms-to solve a wide range of realistic problems. Application of rough theory can remedy two types of uncertainty (randomness and fuzziness) which present significant drawbacks to existing decision-making methods, so the authors illustrate the use of rough sets to approximate the feasible set, and they explore use of rough intervals to demonstrate relative coefficients and parameters involved in bi-level MODM. The book reviews relevant literature and introduces models for both random and fuzzy rough MODM, applying proposed models and algorithms to problem solutions.

Given the broad range of uses for decision making, the authors offer background and guidance for rough approximation to real-world problems, with case studies that focus on engineering applications, including construction site layout planning, water resource allocation, and resource-constrained project scheduling. The text presents a general framework of rough MODM, including basic theory, models, and algorithms, as well as a proposed methodological system and discussion of future research.

This introduction to the field of hyper-heuristics presents the required foundations and tools and illustrates some of their applications. The authors organized the 13 chapters into three parts. The first, hyper-heuristic fundamentals and theory, provides an overview of selection constructive, selection perturbative, generation constructive and generation perturbative hyper-heuristics, and then a formal definition of hyper-heuristics. The chapters in the second part of the book examine applications of hyper-heuristics in vehicle routing, nurse rostering, packing and examination timetabling. The third part of the book presents advanced topics and then a summary of the field and future research directions. Finally the appendices offer details of the HyFlex framework and the EvoHyp toolkit, and then the definition, problem model and constraints for the most tested combinatorial optimization problems. The book will be of value to graduate students, researchers, and practitioners.

This book is comprised of international author perspectives from the 2016 Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics (AAPAE) conference, hosted by the University of South Australia in Adelaide. The volume brings to life a number of the conference themes including corporate social responsibility, culture, academic integrity, vulnerability, health, military ethics, education, leadership, sustainability and philosophy and addresses concerns of many leading applied ethicists.