The management of trust in PPPs: the case of a post-earthquake psychological rehabilitation program in China

O sistema de saúde pública na República Popular da China tem vindo a ser sujeito a mudanças significativas. Entre elas, a introdução do sector privado é um fator importante para o sucesso e desenvolvimento do sistema. A conjugação das exigências internas com a situação internacional aumenta a atenção sobre as Parcerias Público Privadas (PPP) cujo sucesso e prossecuçãode objetivos depende não somente da complementaridade dos recursos existentes quer no sector público quer no privado, mas também da confiança mútua e do grau dessa confiança, pelo que, nos últimos anos, o estudo da governação das PPPsse tornou num assunto de interesse para a academia e para a prática. Quando se discute a cooperação inter-organizacional, as principais linhas de investigação existentes são a teoria dos custos de transação e o estudo da confiança. A primeira assume que as pessoas tendem a ser oportunistas, o que aumenta os custos de transação. Contudo, através de arranjos na estrutura de governação e de mecanismos contratuais, todos os parceiros podem obter garantias e deste modo reduzir esses custos. Entretanto, os autores que estudam a confiança, acreditam que ela pode eliminar o oportunismo e aumentar a eficiência da cooperação e indicam um conjunto de fatores que conduzem à confiança. Estas linhas de investigação têm porém alguns constrangimentos e, para os obviar, emergiu recentemente uma linha de investigação integradora. Esta tese defende a gestão da confiança e sugere que as PPPs deverão realçar a fiabilidade dos parceiros e também o facto de a confiança provir de uma boa gestão, deixando de enfatizar os custos de transação. Em comparação com o estudo da confiança em sentido estrito, a gestão da confiança valoriza as ações positivas dos parceiros em detrimento da boa vontade da sua motivação intrínseca, evitando deste modo eventuais insuficiências. No enquadramento teórico a tese analisa a influência de antecedentes tais como os ativos específicos de relacionamento, a reputação da empresa ou a comunicação sobre confiança. Analisa também a influência da confiança nas variáveis consequentesincluindo o desempenho, envolvimento e relações de longo prazo e propondo um modelo teórico para o desenvolvimento da confiança mútua nas PPPs. Tendo como objeto de estudo uma situação de reabilitação psicológica pós terramoto na China, a tese verifica a relação estrutural entre antecedentes e a confiança assim como a relação estrutural entre a confiança e os efeitos da cooperação através de casos de estudo e análise estatística. Propõe hipóteses sobre a relação entre cada antecedente e a confiança e sobre a relação entre a confiança e efeitos cooperativos. A tese discorre ainda sobre o significado dos resultados para a academia e para a prática. Os resultados estatísticos indicam que a arquitetura de gestão da confiança é lógica, apoiada empiricamente e explicada de uma forma adequada. Teoricamente a tese não propõe somente uma arquitetura sistemática de gestão mas também confirma influências intermediárias de fatores psicológicos na gestão. Para a prática a tese fornece referências para relações de risco, determinação da intensidade da gestão e o estabelecimento de formas de cooperação baseadas na confiança, sugerindo futuros estudos sobre riscos inerentes ao estabelecimento de relações e sobre a condução de parcerias dinâmicas.China's public health sector is undergoing significant changes. Introducing private sector into the medical and health system is an important factor to the success and development of medical and health undertaking. As domestic demands intermingle with the international situation, increasing attention is paid to public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the public health sector. The success of PPPs and the accomplishment of the expected targets depend not only on technological and resource complementarity between the public and the private sectors but also on mutual confidence and the degree of trust. Thus the governance of such partnerships has become a subject valued by the academic and practitioner circles. As to the discussion on inter-organizational cooperation, major research orientations fall into two types: transaction cost theory and the study of trust. Transaction cost theory assumes that people tend to be opportunistic, which increases transaction costs. Through arrangements of governance structure and contract mechanisms, all partners can get guarantee and reduce transaction costs. The study of trust believes that trust can suppress opportunism and enhance the efficiency of the cooperation, and points out a number of factors leading to trust. However, both of the two research orientations have their own limitations and a merging trend has emerged in recent years. This thesis proposes the view of trust management and suggests that PPPs shall stress whether a partner is reliable and whether trust can arise from proper management rather than emphasize transaction costs. Compared with the study of trust, trust management values positive actions of partners rather than the goodwill of partners' intrinsic motivation so that it can avoid insufficiency of manageability and attribution errors in the study of trust. On the basis of theoretical study, the thesis analyses the influence of such antecedents as relationship specific assets, corporate reputation and communication on trust and the influence of trust on consequential variables like performance, commitment and long-term relationship, and then proposes a theoretical model of mutual trust in PPPs, the hypothetical relationship between antecedents and trust, and the hypothetical relationship between consequential variables and trust. With post-earthquake psychological rehabilitation as the empirical object, the thesis verifies the structural relationship between antecedents and trust and the structural relationship between trust and cooperation effects through a case study and statistical analysis. It formulates hypotheses on the relationship between each antecedent and trust and hypotheses on the relationship between trust and cooperation effects, and discourses on the theoretical and practical significance and implications of the research findings. The statistical results indicate that the architecture of trust management is logically reasonable, empirically supported, and considerably applicable. Theoretically, the thesis not only proposes a systematic management architecture but also confirms the intermediary influences of psychological factors on management; practically, the thesis provides reference for diagnosis of relationship risks, determination of management intensity and establishment of cooperation confidence. It is suggested that future studies be carried out on connotations of relationship risks, optimal management intensity, management mechanism portfolio, gap of psychological state, partnership perspective and dynamic development of partnerships

Flavored Dark Matter and R-Parity Violation

Minimal Flavor Violation offers an alternative symmetry rationale to R-parity conservation for the suppression of proton decay in supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model. The naturalness of such theories is generically under less tension from LHC searches than R-parity conserving models. The flavor symmetry can also guarantee the stability of dark matter if it carries flavor quantum numbers. We outline general features of supersymmetric flavored dark matter (SFDM) models within the framework of MFV SUSY. A simple model of top flavored dark matter is presented. If the dark matter is a thermal relic, then nearly the entire parameter space of the model is testable by upcoming direct detection and LHC searches.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Multiscale analysis of the effect of debris on fretting wear process using a semi-concurrent method

Fretting wear is a phenomenon, in which wear happens between two oscillatory moving contact surfaces in microscale amplitude. In this paper, the effect of debris between pad and specimen is analyzed by using a semi-concurrent multiscale method. Firstly, the macroscale fretting wear model is performed. Secondly, the part with the wear profile is imported from the macroscale model to a microscale model after running in stage. Thirdly, an effective pad's radius is extracted by analyzing the contact pressure in order to take into account the effect of the debris. Finally, the effective radius is up-scaled from the microscale model to the macroscale model, which is used after running in stage. In this way, the effect of debris is considered by changing the radius of the pad in the macroscale model. Due to the smaller number of elements in the microscale model compared with the macroscale model containing the debris layer, the semi-concurrent method proposed in this paper is more computationally efficient. Moreover, the results of this semi-concurrent method show a better agreement with experimental data, compared to the results of the model ignoring the effect of debris

Mono-Higgs Detection of Dark Matter at the LHC

Motivated by the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, we investigate the possibility that a missing energy plus Higgs final state is the dominant signal channel for dark matter at the LHC. We consider examples of higher-dimension operators where a Higgs and dark matter pair are produced through an off-shell Z or photon, finding potential sensitivity at the LHC to cutoff scales of around a few hundred GeV. We generalize this production mechanism to a simplified model by introducing a Z' as well as a second Higgs doublet, where the pseudoscalar couples to dark matter. Resonant production of the Z' which decays to a Higgs plus invisible particles gives rise to a potential mono-Higgs signal. This may be observable at the 14 TeV LHC at low tan beta and when the Z' mass is roughly in the range 600 GeV to 1.3 TeV.Comment: 11 page

Probing the fermionic Higgs portal at lepton colliders

We study the sensitivity of future electron-positron colliders to UV completions of the fermionic Higgs portal operator $H^\dagger H \bar \chi \chi$. Measurements of precision electroweak $S$ and $T$ parameters and the $e^+e^- \to Zh$ cross section at the CEPC, FCC-ee, and ILC are considered. The scalar completion of the fermionic Higgs portal is closely related to the scalar Higgs portal, and we summarize existing results. We devote the bulk of our analysis to a singlet-doublet fermion completion. Assuming the doublet is sufficiently heavy, we construct the effective field theory (EFT) at dimension-6 in order to compute contributions to the observables. We also provide full one-loop results for $S$ and $T$ in the general mass parameter space. In both completions, future precision measurements can probe the new states at the (multi-)TeV scale, beyond the direct reach of the LHC.Comment: 33 pages, 5 figures. Published versio

FMapping: Factorized Efficient Neural Field Mapping for Real-Time Dense RGB SLAM

In this paper, we introduce FMapping, an efficient neural field mapping framework that facilitates the continuous estimation of a colorized point cloud map in real-time dense RGB SLAM. To achieve this challenging goal without depth, a hurdle is how to improve efficiency and reduce the mapping uncertainty of the RGB SLAM system. To this end, we first build up a theoretical analysis by decomposing the SLAM system into tracking and mapping parts, and the mapping uncertainty is explicitly defined within the frame of neural representations. Based on the analysis, we then propose an effective factorization scheme for scene representation and introduce a sliding window strategy to reduce the uncertainty for scene reconstruction. Specifically, we leverage the factorized neural field to decompose uncertainty into a lower-dimensional space, which enhances robustness to noise and improves training efficiency. We then propose the sliding window sampler to reduce uncertainty by incorporating coherent geometric cues from observed frames during map initialization to enhance convergence. Our factorized neural mapping approach enjoys some advantages, such as low memory consumption, more efficient computation, and fast convergence during map initialization. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method can update the map of high-fidelity colorized point clouds around 2 seconds in real time while requiring no customized CUDA kernels. Additionally, it utilizes x20 fewer parameters than the most concise neural implicit mapping of prior methods for SLAM, e.g., iMAP [ 31] and around x1000 fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art approach, e.g., NICE-SLAM [ 42]. For more details, please refer to our project homepage: https://vlis2022.github.io/fmap/