Future-proofing the through-life engineering service systems

Future-proofing through-life engineering service systems (TESS) is crucial for ensuring their reliable, long and economical whole lives. The TESS are typically composed of high value industrial products and engineering services organised around them. Future-proofing can broadly be achieved by enabling disruption and change management capabilities. However, understanding of TESS future-proofing is limited, which is also important due to the recent industry 4.0 advancements. This paper contributes by presenting (1) a concept of TESS future-proofing, (2) a framework of TESS future-proofing, and (3) examples of the framework application at: (i) management level via change prediction method (CPM), and (ii) operational level via industrial augmented reality (AR)

Historischer Vergleich von Finanzmarktkrisen

Gegenstand meiner Arbeit ist der historische Vergleich von Finanzmarktkrisen, bei dem ich mich auf die Lateinamerikakrisen der 1980er und 1990er Jahre, der Südostasienkrise 1997 und der Subprimekrise 2007 konzentriere. Zu dem Zeitpunkt ihrer Erscheinung galten diese Krisen jeweils als die schwerwiegendsten Rückschläge marktwirtschaftlicher Entwicklung seit der Weltwirtschaftskrise der 1930er Jahre. Auffällig ist dabei, dass im Verlauf der vorangegangen Prosperität in den betroffenen Regionen, dieselben Merkmale, die auf einen wirtschaftlichen Kollaps hingewiesen haben, in allen drei Fällen gegenwärtig waren, jedoch jedes Mal als verkraftbar argumentiert wurden. Ich möchte zu zeigen versuchen, dass aufgrund dem Produktionswesen marktwirtschaftlicher Gesellschaften innewohnender Wachstumsgrenzen, die einzig beiden Möglichkeiten zur Aufrechterhaltung eben jenes Produktionswesens, trotz der Nutzung makroökonomischer Instrumentarien, darin bestehen, einerseits neue Märkte zu integrieren, die eine Ausweitung der Produktion zulassen (hier gilt es vor allem die Auswirkung durch die Ausnutzung von Strukturunterschieden auf das Wirtschaftswachstum zu betrachten), bzw. den glücklichen Umstand zu erfahren, einen technologischen Fortschritt in dieses System effizient zu implementieren. Ersteres war in der seit den 1970er Jahren zunehmenden Globalisierung und Eliminierung nationaler Wirtschaftsgrenzen zu beobachten, zweites in der mikroelektronischen Revolution, deren Ergebnisse ab Mitte 1990er Jahre zu der Annahme verleiten ließen, eine Produktionswachstumssteigerung im Ausmaß der ersten Industriellen Revolution zu erfahren (Krugman 2009). Nichtsdestotrotz konnte weder die Verdichtung internationaler Märkte noch deren Optimierung in Bereichen Kommunikation und Reaktion systematisch verankerte Wachstumsgrenzen einer Wohlstandsakkumulation, die auf einem, auf Profitmaximierung basierenden Konkurrenzverhältnis besteht, umgehen. Unter historischer Perspektive lässt sich dies an dem Aufstieg und Fall der Emerging Markets als Investitionsobjekt und der Rückkehr verstärkter Investitionstätigkeit in die Vereinigten Staaten, nachzeichnen. Auch die Rolle der Regierungen im Umgang mit von den durch die Krise ausgelösten Rezessionen soll dabei betrachtet werden. Dabei soll auch die Frage beantwortet werden, inwiefern die Staaten sich durch ihre wirtschaftspolitischen Maßnahmen selbst in ihrer Gestalt als Bestandteil des kapitalistischen Wirtschaftswachstumsprozesses wahrgenommen haben und ob in dieser Wahrnehmung auch die strukturelle Beschaffenheit konkurrenzbedingter Mehrwertschöpfung begriffen wurde (Mattick 2012). The subject matter of my thesis is a historical comparison of financial crises since the late 20th century. Thereby I focus on the Latin-American crises during the 1980s and the 1990s, the East Asia crisis in 1997 and the Subprime crisis 2007 in the United States. At the time of their appearance the crises mentioned above proved to be the most harmful crises since the Great Depression in the 1930s. It is eye-catching, that during the time of economic rebound, the same characteristics that announce a financial turmoil were common in each of these regions. In any case these characteristics such as high levels of capital inflows and overvalued assets were thought to be manageable. I would like to show that due to restrictions in output growth, the only way to maintain growth, despite a long history of macroeconomic development, is to incorporate new markets or the implementation of new technologies to create new markets.The former happened since the 1970s by the growing globalization, the exploitation of structural differences between developed and developing countries to gain profits, later appeared during the 1990s due to the microelectronic revolution. The improvement of information and communication technologies led to the belief that the same rise of productivity will be enabled like in the first industrial revolution. Nevertheless, neither the integration of new geographic markets, nor the technological innovations were able to go beyond natural boundaries of growth in a system that is based on maximizing profits, equivalence and competition. The historic perspective shows the rise and fall of the emerging countries as objects of investment and the return of stronger investment activity in the United States. Furthermore the role of governments should be analysed and the part they played in handling the crises. Therefore the question rises whether the countries were able to understand the connections and complexity of the economic turmoil. It should be shown which consequences their political actions had and to which boundaries their possibilities are restricted, concerning that a capitalistic state also follows the principles of profit maximization, equivalence and competition.

Four Essays on Decision and Game Theory

This dissertation consists of four research papers, covering topics from decision and game theory. Chapter 1 presents a game-theoretically well-founded framework for modeling repeated games in continuous time and proves that in the resulting extensive form every strategy profile induces one and only one outcome. We further show that strategies in this framework are equivalent to a class of strategies on which exogenous restrictions have been imposed hereby providing a clarification as to which restrictions on strategies can be allowed in the sense that the resulting strategies can be derived from a well-defined extensive form. Chapter 2 comments on the definition of Extensive Form in Alós-Ferrer and Ritzberger (2008) and shows that one of the properties there needs to be adjusted. It provides counterexamples showing that with the original version of this property some results do not hold as stated and presents a corrected formulation of the property as well as the corrected statement of the results. It further provides proofs for these results under the new formulation. In Chapter 3 we introduce a class of games with a cyclical structure we coin “circulant games” in which both players payoffs are given by circulant matrices. Given that these payoffs are ordered, we are able to determine the exact number of (pure and mixed) Nash equilibria. Our results further allow us to describe the support of each Nash equilibrium strategy. Chapter 4 investigates the preference reversals phenomenon. We present a new, simple process-based model that explains the preference reversal phenomenon and makes novel predictions about the associated decision times in the choice phase. The phenomenon is jointly caused by noisy lottery evaluations and an overpricing phenomenon associated with the compatibility hypothesis. A laboratory experiment confirmed the model’s predictions for both choice data and decision times. Choices associated with reversals take significantly longer than non-reversals, and non-reversal choices take longer whenever long-shot lotteries are selected. A second experiment showed that the overpricing phenomenon can be shut down, greatly reducing reversals, by using ranking-based, ordinally-framed evaluation tasks. This experiment also disentangled the two determinants of the preference reversal phenomenon since noisy evaluations still deliver testable predictions on decision times even in the absence of the overpricing phenomenon

Lifestyle and wellbeing: Exploring behavioral and demographic covariates in a large US sample

Using data from a nationally representative sample of 46,179 US adults from the Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index, we investigate covariates of four subjective mental wellbeing dimensions spanning evaluative (life satisfaction), positive affective (happiness), negative affective (worry), and eudaimonic wellbeing. Negative covariates were generally more strongly correlated with the four dimensions than positive covariates, with depression, poor health, and loneliness being the greatest negative correlates and excellent health and older age being the greatest positive correlates. We reproduce previous evidence for a “midlife crisis” around age 50 across the four wellbeing dimensions. Notably, although salutogenic behaviors (diet, exercise, socializing) correlated with greater wellbeing, there were diminishing benefits beyond thresholds of about four hours a day spent socializing, four days per week of consuming fruits and vegetables, and four days per week of exercising. Findings suggest that wellbeing is easier lost than gained, underscore the influence that relatively malleable lifestyle factors have on wellbeing, and stress the importance of multidimensional measurement for public policy