Cognitive finance: Behavioural strategies of spending, saving, and investing.

Research in economics is increasingly open to empirical results. The advances in behavioural approaches are expanded here by applying cognitive methods to financial questions. The field of "cognitive finance" is approached by the exploration of decision strategies in the financial settings of spending, saving, and investing. Individual strategies in these different domains are searched for and elaborated to derive explanations for observed irregularities in financial decision making. Strong context-dependency and adaptive learning form the basis for this cognition-based approach to finance. Experiments, ratings, and real world data analysis are carried out in specific financial settings, combining different research methods to improve the understanding of natural financial behaviour. People use various strategies in the domains of spending, saving, and investing. Specific spending profiles can be elaborated for a better understanding of individual spending differences. It was found that people differ along four dimensions of spending, which can be labelled: General Leisure, Regular Maintenance, Risk Orientation, and Future Orientation. Saving behaviour is strongly dependent on how people mentally structure their finance and on their self-control attitude towards decision space restrictions, environmental cues, and contingency structures. Investment strategies depend on how companies, in which investments are placed, are evaluated on factors such as Honesty, Prestige, Innovation, and Power. Further on, different information integration strategies can be learned in decision situations with direct feedback. The mapping of cognitive processes in financial decision making is discussed and adaptive learning mechanisms are proposed for the observed behavioural differences. The construal of a "financial personality" is proposed in accordance with other dimensions of personality measures, to better acknowledge and predict variations in financial behaviour. This perspective enriches economic theories and provides a useful ground for improving individual financial services

A review of the leader approach for delivering the rural development programme for England: a report for Defra

This report, commissioned by the Rural Communities Policy Unit at Defra, sets out the findings of a review of the Leader approach in England. The focus of the review is the impact of Leader in contributing to the delivery of the Rural Development Programme (RDP) in England, in order to inform the future Leader approach to delivering rural policy. The research is primarily based on a review of existing literature and in-depth qualitative research with Local Action Groups and other stakeholders involved in delivering or benefiting from the Leader approach. The review focuses on four key issues: 1) Evidence to support the rationale for use of EU resources to enable rural development – justifying intervention for the current programme and informing choices about interventions in the next programme 2) Evidence on the extent to which interventions have been effective to date and where future resources can be targeted 3) Evidence to provide an assessment of the impact of RDPE spend (2007-13) on outcomes – with reference to delivery mechanisms 4) Evidence to support prioritisation of activities to be funded under the next programme mapped against the six EU wide priorities for 2014-2020 and inform decisions about future delivery models

PRIMUS/Informed Cities: Making research work for local sustainability

The final report of a three year European Commission FP7 project

Collecting and using student feedback Date: A guide to good practice

The purpose of this Guide is to help higher education institutions make the best use of their student feedback. This guide is based on a HEFCE funded project undertaken by the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI). The purpose of this Guide is to help higher education institutions make the best use of their student feedback. All institutions collect feedback from their students and in many different forms. They use it to improve the quality of the education they provide. In recent years, there has been a shift in the balance between informal and formal types of student feedback with a greater emphasis on the latter. Now, new devolved forms of national quality assurance promise to give an important role to students and there is also an expectation that information from student feedback will be used to inform the choices of students when applying to higher education. Thus, as the importance attached to student feedback increases, ensuring that feedback is collected effectively and used wisely becomes an increasing priority for higher education institutions. This Guide draws on the experiences of the sector to highlight some of the good practices that exist as well as some of the problems that institutions are experiencing in using student feedback. Its focus is upon the use of student feedback for the purpose of enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. Other purposes are acknowledged but are not the main emphasis of this publication

Health Plan Quality: Factors Influencing Hospital Participation in Health Plans

The professional and popular literatures are full of reports of surveys and studies purporting to rate health plans. Health maintenance organizations and other organizations are surveying member satisfaction. Accreditation of health plans is receiving increased attention. Interest is growing in plans\u27 performance in the areas measured by the Health Plan Employers\u27 Data and Information Set (HEDIS). The factors measured in current ratings and accreditation systems are not important to hospitals for evaluating health plan participation. There are factors in a health plan\u27s performance that are important to and either beneficial or detrimental to hospitals. This paper proposes factors upon which health care plans should be evaluated and rated to measure their business partner quality from the hospital perspective

An Evaluation of Cross-Efficiency Methods, Applied to Measuring Warehouse Performance

In this paper method and practice of cross-efficiency calculation is discussed. The main methods proposed in the literature are tested not on a set of artificial data but on a realistic sample of input-output data of European ware- houses. The empirical results show the limited role which increasing automation investment and larger warehouse size have in increasing productive performance. The reason is the existence of decreasing returns to scale in the industry, resulting in sub-optimal scales and inefficiencies, regardless of the operational performance of the facilities. From the methodological perspective, and based on a multidimensional metric which considers the capability of the various methods to rank warehouses, their ease of implementation, and their robustness to sensitivity analyses, we conclude to the superiority of the classic Sexton et al. (1986) method over recently proposed, more sophisticated methods