Barriers to industrial energy efficiency: a literature review

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Tasks, cognitive agents, and KB-DSS in workflow and process management

The purpose of this paper is to propose a nonparametric interest rate term structure model and investigate its implications on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities. The nonparametric spot interest rate process is estimated from the observed short-term interest rates following a robust estimation procedure and the market price of interest rate risk is estimated as implied from the historical term structure data. That is, instead of imposing a priori restrictions on the model, data are allowed to speak for themselves, and at the same time the model retains a parsimonious structure and the computational tractability. The model is implemented using historical Canadian interest rate term structure data. The parametric models with closed form solutions for bond and bond option prices, namely the Vasicek (1977) and CIR (1985) models, are also estimated for comparison purpose. The empirical results not only provide strong evidence that the traditional spot interest rate models and market prices of interest rate risk are severely misspecified but also suggest that different model specifications have significant impact on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities.

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

Global Talentship: Toward a Decision Science Connecting Talent to Global Strategic Success

It is widely accepted that global competitive advantage frequently requires managing such complex situations that traditional organization and job structures are simply insufficient. Increasingly, in order to create a flexible and integrated set of decisions that balance local flexibility with global efficiency, organizations must rely on more social, informal and matrix-based shared visions among managers and employees. Research on global strategic advantage, global organizational structures, and even shared mindsets has suggested that dimensions of culture, product and function provide a valuable organizing framework. However, typical decisions about organization structure, HRM practices and talent often remain framed at such a high level as to preclude their solution. We maintain that there is often no logical answer to such questions as, “Should the sales force be local or global?” or “Should product authority rest with the countries or the corporate center?” However, we propose that embedding business processes or value chains within a Culture and Product matrix provides the necessary analytic detail to reveal otherwise elusive solutions. Moreover, by linking this global process matrix to a model that bridges strategy and talent, it is possible to identify global “pivotal talent pools,” and to target organizational and human resource investments toward those talent areas that have the greatest impact on strategic advantage. We demonstrate the Value-Chain, Culture and Product (VCCP) matrix using several examples, and discuss future research and practical implications, particularly for leadership and leadership development

Prioritising the best use of biomass resources: conceptualising trade-offs

02.09.13 KB. Ok to add report to Spiral. Authors hold copyrightUsing biomass to provide energy services is one of the most versatile options for increasing the proportion of renewable energy in the existing system. This report reviews metrics used to compare alternative bio-energy pathways and identifies limitations inherent in the way that they are calculated and interpreted. It also looks at how companies and investors approach strategic decisions in the bio-energy area. Bio-energy pathways have has physical and economic attributes that can be measured or modelled. These include: the capital cost, operating cost, emissions to air, land and water. Conceptually, comparing alternative pathways is as simple as selecting the attributes and metrics you consider to be most important and ranking the alternative pathways accordingly. At an abstract level there is good agreement about which features of bio-energy pathways are desirable, but there is little agreement about which performance metrics best capture all the relevant information about a bio-energy pathway. Between studies there is also a great deal of variation and this impedes comparison. Common metrics describe energetic performance, economic performance, environmental performance (emissions, land and water use), and social and ecological performance. Compound metrics may be used to integrate multiple attributes but their highly aggregate nature may make them difficult to interpret. Insights that may be drawn from the analysis include: