The effect of transaction pricing on the adoption of electronic payments: a cross-country comparison

Pricing should speed up the substitution of low cost electronic payments for expensive paper-based transactions and cash. But by how much? Norway has explicitly priced individual payment transactions and rapidly shifted to electronic payments while the Netherlands has experienced the same shift without direct pricing. Controlling for differences between countries, the authors estimate the incremental effect of pricing on the shift to electronic payments. If users strongly value the improved convenience or security of electronic payments, pricing—viewed negatively by most consumers—may not be necessary to ensure rapid adoption of electronic payments. ; Also issued as Payment Cards Center Discussion Paper No. 05-18Electronic funds transfers ; Prices

Environmental and Wildlife Crime in Sweden

This article discusses the nature of environmental and wildlife crime (EWC) in Sweden. A review of the international literature helps to frame the Swedish case study. The novelty of this study lies in using 11 years of police records as well as newspaper articles (Media archives) as a basis for analysis. Geographical Information System (GIS) supports the spatial analysis of EWC at municipal and coordinate levels. Since most EWCs take place outside large urban areas, this study looks closely at the cases of EWC in the rural county of Västernorrland. Findings show an increase in both EWCs recorded by the police and covered by the media in the last decade. EWC-geography varies by crime type: rural areas are in general more prone to unlawful handling of chemicals and to nature and wildlife crimes than are urban areas, where dumping and other minor EWCs are more common. Detection of EWCs is highly dependent on people’s routine activities and accessibility. Drawing upon the Swedish evidence, the article closes with suggestions for improvements in research on environmental and wildlife crimes

Lean leaders inspiring employee engagement in a healthcare setting

Leaders are assumed to play a key role in sustainability of lean work practices. This study focuses on the leaders' impact on employee engagement during the implementation of lean practices. The first part of this exploratory longitudinal study within a Dutch primary healthcare facility is reported. The employees of one team completed a survey and noted, during eight weeks, their sources of engagement in a diary. Additional site visits and interviews were held. Preliminary findings indicate that leaders may strengthen engagement by reducing non-medical workload via lean work practices. The resulting three propositions may guide future research in this field

FIMCAR XV: Fleet Studies

Subject of this study is the development of a generic method to evaluate the characteristics of future vehicle fleets, which assist in vehicle compatibility research. The ever increasing demands for occupant safety have led to improved crashworthiness of vehicles. However, vehicles have become increasingly stiff over the last decades. In combination with a trend of heavier and higher vehicles this results in more aggressive and incompatible vehicles. Also the trend of smaller and lighter vehicles results in a mismatch of vehicles. Compatibility research focuses on improvement of crashworthiness while taking the safety of a possible crash partner into account with the aim to reduce the injury risks off all crash partners. In this regard it is important to conduct research of behaviour on a fleet wide basis. The generic vehicle modelling procedure developed in FIMCAR was used to generate a set of MADYMO models of various vehicles. Due to the limited available data, only three different car models could be made, the Supermini 2, Small Family Car 2 and SUV 4. The created models are tuned with the test data of Full Width Rigid Barrier (FWRB) and checked with test data of Offset Deformable Barrier (ODB) tests. To compensate the limited amount of vehicles additional simulations were ran with variable masses. The available models are used to run two large sets of simulations with various vehicle parameters, like longitudinal stiffness, overlap and speed. These simulations are used to evaluate the performance of the vehicle fleet. For crash severity evaluations the Vehicle Pulse Index (VPI) is used, in which higher VPI values represent a lower crash performance with higher risk of injury

Applying V2V for operational safety within cooperative adaptive cruise control

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control aims to automate a truck longitudinally for following its predecessor at reduced following distances in order to minimize fuel consumption. Short inter vehicle distances can be realised by the use of Vehicle-To-Vehicle communication (V2V). This application should be operational safe, which means to prevent harm to personnel in hazardous situations in case the system is fully operational: the system should avoid collisions with other road participants and with the leading truck. This paper proposes to use V2V communication in a platoon to share information on surrounding traffic participants in order to predict possible hazardous traffic situations continuously, which could be used to ensure functional safety in case of V2V failure. In case these situations can be predicted in time, actions could be taken to avoid collisions. <br/

Applying V2V for operational safety within cooperative adaptive cruise control

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control aims to automate a truck longitudinally for following its predecessor at reduced following distances in order to minimize fuel consumption. Short inter vehicle distances can be realised by the use of Vehicle-To-Vehicle communication (V2V). This application should be operational safe, which means to prevent harm to personnel in hazardous situations in case the system is fully operational: the system should avoid collisions with other road participants and with the leading truck. This paper proposes to use V2V communication in a platoon to share information on surrounding traffic participants in order to predict possible hazardous traffic situations continuously, which could be used to ensure functional safety in case of V2V failure. In case these situations can be predicted in time, actions could be taken to avoid collisions. <br/

Conditional Transfer with Dense Residual Attention: Synthesizing traffic signs from street-view imagery

Object detection and classification of traffic signs in street-view imagery is an essential element for asset management, map making and autonomous driving. However, some traffic signs occur rarely and consequently, they are difficult to recognize automatically. To improve the detection and classification rates, we propose to generate images of traffic signs, which are then used to train a detector/classifier. In this research, we present an end-to-end framework that generates a realistic image of a traffic sign from a given image of a traffic sign and a pictogram of the target class. We propose a residual attention mechanism with dense concatenation called Dense Residual Attention, that preserves the background information while transferring the object information. We also propose to utilize multi-scale discriminators, so that the smaller scales of the output guide the higher resolution output. We have performed detection and classification tests across a large number of traffic sign classes, by training the detector using the combination of real and generated data. The newly trained model reduces the number of false positives by 1.2 - 1.5% at 99% recall in the detection tests and an absolute improvement of 4.65% (top-1 accuracy) in the classification tests.Comment: The first two authors have equal contribution. Accepted at International Conference on Pattern Recognition 2018 (ICPR