Distressed firm valuation: traditional approaches and a binomial option pricing perspective

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Examining the decision-relevance of climate model information for the insurance industry

The insurance industry is becoming increasingly exposed to the adverse impacts of climate variability and climate change. In developing policies and adapting strategies to better manage climate risk, insurers and reinsurers are therefore engaging directly with the climate modelling community to further understand the predictive capabilities of climate models and to develop techniques to utilise climate model output. With an inherent interest in the present and future frequency and magnitude of extreme climate-related loss events, insurers rely on the climate modelling community to provide informative model projections at the relevant spatial and temporal scales for insurance decisions. Furthermore, given the high economic stakes associated with enacting strategies to address climate change, it is essential that climate model experiments are designed to thoroughly explore the multiple sources of uncertainty. Determining the reliability of model based projections is a precursor to examining their relevance to the insurance industry and more widely to the climate change adaptation community. Designing experiments which adequately account for uncertainty therefore requires careful consideration of the nonlinear and chaotic properties of the climate system. Using the well developed concepts of dynamical systems theory, simple nonlinear chaotic systems are investigated to further understand what is meant by climate under climate change. The thesis questions the conventional paradigm in which long-term climate prediction is treated purely as a boundary value problem (predictability of the second kind). Using simple climate-like models to draw analogies to the climate system, results are presented which support the emerging view that climate prediction ought to be treated as both an initial value problem and a boundary condition problem on all time scales. The research also examines the application of the ergodic assumption in climate modelling and climate change adaptation decisions. By using idealised model experiments, situations in which the ergodic assumption breaks down are illustrated. Consideration is given to alternative model experimental designs which do not rely on the assumption of ergodicity. Experimental results are presented which support the view that large initial condition ensembles are required to detail the changing distribution of climate under altered forcing conditions. It is argued that the role of chaos and nonlinear dynamic behaviour ought to have more prominence in the discussion of the forecasting capabilities in climate prediction

Economics of western range resource use

This material was digitized as part of a cooperative project between the Society for Range Management and the University of Arizona Libraries.The Journal of Range Management archives are made available by the Society for Range Management and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] for further information.Migrated from OJS platform August 202

Decision support and risk management system for competitive bidding in refurbishment work

This study is concerned with the management of risks in competitive bidding for refurbishment work (lump sum contracts). It investigates the main difficulties and risks faced by contractors when they are making decisions in competitive bidding as a result of the general lack of information both inside and outside a contractor's organisation. A decision support and risk management system model is developed which provides a systematic and objective approach to risk management in competitive bidding for refurbishment work. The model provides a framework whereby both quantitative (tender bid records) and qualitative (risk perception of contractors) information may be obtained to support the decisions of contractors during tendering. The research adopts a combination of both Archival and Opinion research methodologies to build up two main databases consisting of tender bid records and information on the risk perception of contractors during tendering. From the analysis, a decision support and risk management system is developed consisting of six modules namely: (i) Module 1 - Databases of tender bid records and Repertory grid data, (ii) Module 2 - General information of bidding characteristics, (iii) Module 3 - Contractor's analysis, (iv) Module 4 - Competitor's analysis, (v) Module 5 - Bidding models, and (vi) Module 6 - Risk management system. This study has demonstrated that past tender bid records of contractors may be organised in a systematic way to provide invaluable strategic information to enhance the understanding of contractors with respect to their competitive bidding environments, their own bidding performance and the bidding behaviour of their competitors, thereby enabling contractors to manage risks more effectively and efficiently

Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics

This book collects fifteen papers published in s Special Issue of Mathematics titled “Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics”, which was published in 2021. These paper cover a wide range of different tools from Fuzzy Set Theory and applications in many areas of Business Management and other connected fields. Specifically, this book contains applications of such instruments as, among others, Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Neuro-Fuzzy Methods, the Forgotten Effects Algorithm, Expertons Theory, Fuzzy Markov Chains, Fuzzy Arithmetic, Decision Making with OWA Operators and Pythagorean Aggregation Operators, Fuzzy Pattern Recognition, and Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets. The papers in this book tackle a wide variety of problems in areas such as strategic management, sustainable decisions by firms and public organisms, tourism management, accounting and auditing, macroeconomic modelling, the evaluation of public organizations and universities, and actuarial modelling. We hope that this book will be useful not only for business managers, public decision-makers, and researchers in the specific fields of business management, finance, and economics but also in the broader areas of soft mathematics in social sciences. Practitioners will find methods and ideas that could be fruitful in current management issues. Scholars will find novel developments that may inspire further applications in the social sciences

Confronting climate crisis: A framework for understanding the criteria for addressing dangerous climate change

Despite wide acknowledgement of the threats from human-induced climate change to human societies and the wider ecosystem, no comprehensive long-term global agreement to tackle the problem has yet been reached to replace the Kyoto Protocol. In arguing for a replacement, evaluative claims are often made that certain policy proposals are more environmentally effective, equitable or efficient than others. However, these three dominant criteria are subject to a range of interpretations, and can come into conflict with one another. This limits their use for guiding policy. Philosophy can and should play a role in scrutinising alternative conceptions, their justifications and assumptions, and help develop justifiable formulations of the criteria. Existing philosophical contributions have focused on aspects of the equity criterion, but have largely overlooked the other two criteria and have not considered how they should be prioritised overall. This thesis, for the first time, considers and proposes an ordering of these three criteria (focusing on mitigation), drawing on a Green Economic conceptual framework. This places ecological effectiveness first, defining the ecological limits of economic greenhouse gas-emitting activity; equity is then applied second, to define equitable resource sharing of the emissions space; and efficiency last, to imply genuinely efficient use of emissions space in contributing to equitable human well-being. The thesis then examines in detail how each criterion should be interpreted within this context, so that they are mutually consistent. As well as offering a set of ordered evaluative criteria for a climate change mitigation agreement, it aims to highlight the role of the conventional political-economic framework in climate policy debates and draw out the hidden conceptual and ethical assumptions it imports. This thesis also, therefore, aims to further the development of Green Economic thinking and show its relevance to the current substantial threat of dangerous anthropogenic climate change

Physical Layer Techniques for High Frequency Wireline Broadband Systems

This thesis collects contributions to wireline and wireless communication systems with an emphasis on multiuser and multicarrier physical layer technology. To deliver increased capacity, modern wireline access systems such as G.fast extend the signal bandwidth up from tens to hundreds of MHz. This ambitious development revealed a number of unforeseen hurdles such as the impact of impedance changes in various forms. Impedance changes have a strong effect on the performance of multi-user crosstalk mitigation techniques such as vectoring. The first part of the thesis presents papers covering the identification of one of these problems, a model describing why it occurs and a method to mitigate its effects, improving line stability for G.fast systems.A second part of the thesis deals with the effects of temperature changes on wireline channels. When a vectored (MIMO) wireline system is initialized, channel estimates need to be obtained. This thesis presents contributions on the feasibility of re-using channel coefficients to speed up the vectoring startup procedures, even after the correct coefficients have changed, e.g., due to temperature changes. We also present extensive measurement results showing the effects of temperature changes on copper channels using a temperature chamber and British cables. The last part of the thesis presents three papers on the convergence of physical layer technologies, more specifically the deployment of OFDM-based radio systems using twisted pairs in different ways. In one proposed scenario, the idea of using the access copper lines to deploy small cells inside users' homes is explored. The feasibility of the concept, the design of radio-heads and a practical scheme for crosstalk mitigation are presented in three contributions