Dissertations / Theses: 'Operation Research/Decision Theory'

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Cook, Edward. "Group Decision-Making." VCU Scholars Compass, 2019. https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/5928.

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The present work explores improvements in group decision-making. It begins with a practical example using state-of-the-art techniques for a complex, high-risk decision. We show how these techniques can reveal a better alternative. Although we created an improved decision process, decision-makers were apt to protect their own organizations instead of the project. This tendency was reduced over the course of the decision-making process but inspired the first conceptual component of this work. The first concept describes the “Cost of Conflict” that can arise in a group decision, using game theory to represent the non-cooperative approach and comparing the outcome to the cooperative approach. We demonstrate that it is possible for the group to settle on a non-Paretto Nash equilibrium. The sensitivity of the decision-maker weights is revealed which led to the second conceptual portion of this work. The second concept applies social network theory to study the influence between decision-makers in a group decision. By examining the number and strength of connections between decision-makers, we build from intrinsically derived weights to extrinsically derived weights by adding the network influences from other decision-makers. The two conceptual approaches provide a descriptive view of non-cooperative decisions where decision-makers still influence each other. These concepts suggest a prescriptive approach to achieving a higher group utility.

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Bartels, Jan-Hendrik. "Anwendung von Methoden der ressourcenbeschränkten Projektplanung mit multiplen Ausführungsmodi in der betriebswirtschaftlichen Praxis Rückbauplanung für Kernkraftwerke und Versuchsträgerplanung in Automobilentwicklungsprojekten /." Wiesbaden : Gabler, 2009. http://sfx.metabib.ch:9003/sfx_locater?sid=ALEPH:DSV01&genre=book&isbn=978-3-8349-8228-5&id=doi:10.1007/978-3-8349-8228-5.

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Salmon, John LaNay. "A methodology for quantitative and cooperative decision making of air mobility operational solutions." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/49039.

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Many complex and interdependent systems engineering challenges involve more than one stakeholder or decision maker. These challenges, such as the definition and acquisition of future air mobility systems, are often found in situations where resources are finite, objectives are conflicting, constraints are restricting, and uncertainty in future outcomes prevail. Air mobility operational models which simulate fleet wide behavior effects over time, in various mission scenarios, and potentially over the entire design life-cycle, are always multi-dimensional, cover a large decision space, and require significant time to generate sufficient solutions to adequately describe the design space. This challenge is coupled with the fact that, in these highly integrated solutions or acquisitions, multiple stakeholders or decision makers are required to cooperate and reach agreement in selecting or defining the requirements for the design or solution and in its costly and lengthy implementation. However, since values, attitudes, and experiences are different for each decision maker, reaching consensus across the multiple criteria with different preferences and objectives is often a slow and highly convoluted process. In response to these common deficiencies and to provide quantitative analyses, this research investigates and proposes solutions to two challenges: 1) increase the speed at which operational solutions and associated requirements are generated and explored, and 2) systematize the group decision-making process, to both accelerate and improve decision making in these large operational problems requiring cooperation. The development of the Air Mobility Operations Design (AirMOD) model is proposed to address the first challenge by implementing and leveraging surrogate models of airlift capability across a wide scenario space. In addressing the second major challenge, the proposed Multi-Agent Consensus Reaching on the Objective Space (MACRO) methodology introduces a process to reduce the feasible decision space, by identifying regions of high probability of consensus reaching, using preference distributions, power relationships, and game-theoretic techniques. In a case study, the MACRO methodology is demonstrated on a large air mobility solution space generated by AirMOD to illustrate plausibility of the overall approach. AirMOD and MACRO offer considerable advantages over current methods to better define the operational design space and improve group decision-making processes requiring cooperation, respectively.

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Angelis, John N. "Decision Models for Growing Firms: Obstacles and Opportunities." online version, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view.cgi?acc%5Fnum=case1228408327.

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Hudson, Joshua. "A Partially Observable Markov Decision Process for Breast Cancer Screening." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Statistik och maskininlärning, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-154437.

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In the US, breast cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer and the most lethal. There are many decisions that must be made by the doctor and/or the patient when dealing with a potential breast cancer. Many of these decisions are made under uncertainty, whether it is the uncertainty related to the progression of the patient's health, or that related to the accuracy of the doctor's tests. Each possible action under consideration can have positive effects, such as a surgery successfully removing a tumour, and negative effects: a post-surgery infection for example. The human mind simply cannot take into account all the variables involved and possible outcomes when making these decisions. In this report, a detailed Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) for breast cancer screening decisions is presented. It includes 151 states, covering 144 different cancer states, and 2 competing screening methods. The necessary parameters were first set up using relevant medical literature and a patient history simulator. Then the POMDP was solved optimally for an infinite horizon, using the Perseus algorithm. The resulting policy provided several recommendations for breast cancer screening. The results indicated that clinical breast examinations are important for screening younger women. Regarding the decision to operate on a woman with breast cancer, the policy showed that invasive cancers with either a tumour size above 1.5 cm or which are in metastasis, should be surgically removed as soon as possible. However, the policy also recommended that patients who are certain to be healthy should have a breast biopsy. The cause of this error was explored further and the conclusion was reached that a finite horizon may be more appropriate for this application.

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Hagtvedt, Reidar. "Applications of Decision Analysis to Health Care." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/22535.

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This dissertation deals with three problems in health care. In the first, we consider the incentives to change prices and capital levels at hospitals, using optimal control under the assumption that private payers charge higher prices if patients consume more hospital services. The main results are that even with fixed technology, investment and prices exhibit explosive growth, and that prices and capital stock grow in proportion to one another. In the second chapter, we study the flow of nosocomial infections in an intensive care unit. We use data from Cook County Hospital, along with numerous results from the literature, to construct a discrete event simulation. This model highlights emergent properties from treating the flow of patients and pathogens in one interconnected system, and sheds light on how nosocomial infections relate to hospital costs. We find that the system is not decomposable to individual systems, exhibiting behavior that would be difficult to explain in isolation. In the third chapter, we analyze a proposed change in diversion policies at hospitals, in order to increase the number of patients served, without an increase in resources. Overcrowding in hospital emergency departments is caused in part by the inability to send patients to main hospital wards, due to limited capacity. When a hospital is completely full, the hospital often goes on ambulance diversion, until some spare capacity has opened up. Diversion is costly, and often leads to waves of diversions in systems of hospitals, a situation that is regarded as highly problematic in public health. We construct and analyze a continuous-time Markov chain model for one hospital. The intuition behind the model is that load-balancing between various hospitals in a metro area may hinder full congestion. We find that a more flexible contract may benefit all parties, through the partial diversion of federally insured patients, when a hospital is very close to full. Discrete event simulation models are run to assess the effect, using data from DeKalb Medical Center, and also to show that in a two-hospital system, more federally insured patients are served using this mechanism.

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Knowles, Bryan A. "In the Face of Anticipation: Decision Making under Visible Uncertainty as Present in the Safest-with-Sight Problem." TopSCHOLAR®, 2016. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1565.

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Pathfinding, as a process of selecting a fixed route, has long been studied in Computer Science and Mathematics. Decision making, as a similar, but intrinsically different, process of determining a control policy, is much less studied. Here, I propose a problem that appears to be of the first class, which would suggest that it is easily solvable with a modern machine, but that would be too easy, it turns out. By allowing a pathfinding to anticipate and respond to information, without setting restrictions on the \structure" of this anticipation, selecting the \best step" appears to be an intractable problem. After introducing the necessary foundations and stepping through the strangeness of “safest-with-sight," I attempt to develop an method of approximating the success rate associated with each potential decision; the results suggest something fundamental about decision making itself, that information that is collected at a moment that it is not immediately “consumable", i.e. non-incident, is not as necessary to anticipate than the contrary, i.e. incident information. This is significant because (i) it speaks about when the information should be anticipated, a moment in decision-making long before the information is actually collected, and (ii) whenever the model is restricted to only incident anticipation the problem again becomes tractable. When we only anticipate what is most important, solutions become easy to compute, but attempting to anticipate any more than that and solutions may become impossible to find on any realistic machine.

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Rosales, Claudia R. "Technology Enabled New Inventory Control Policies in Hospitals." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1299178847.

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Mishra, Himanshu Kumar. "Ignorance is bliss the information malleability effect /." Diss., University of Iowa, 2006. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/60.

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Calliess, Jan-Peter. "Conservative decision-making and inference in uncertain dynamical systems." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b7206c3a-8d76-4454-a258-ea1e5bd1c63e.

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The demand for automated decision making, learning and inference in uncertain, risk sensitive and dynamically changing situations presents a challenge: to design computational approaches that promise to be widely deployable and flexible to adapt on the one hand, while offering reliable guarantees on safety on the other. The tension between these desiderata has created a gap that, in spite of intensive research and contributions made from a wide range of communities, remains to be filled. This represents an intriguing challenge that provided motivation for much of the work presented in this thesis. With these desiderata in mind, this thesis makes a number of contributions towards the development of algorithms for automated decision-making and inference under uncertainty. To facilitate inference over unobserved effects of actions, we develop machine learning approaches that are suitable for the construction of models over dynamical laws that provide uncertainty bounds around their predictions. As an example application for conservative decision-making, we apply our learning and inference methods to control in uncertain dynamical systems. Owing to the uncertainty bounds, we can derive performance guarantees of the resulting learning-based controllers. Furthermore, our simulations demonstrate that the resulting decision-making algorithms are effective in learning and controlling under uncertain dynamics and can outperform alternative methods. Another set of contributions is made in multi-agent decision-making which we cast in the general framework of optimisation with interaction constraints. The constraints necessitate coordination, for which we develop several methods. As a particularly challenging application domain, our exposition focusses on collision avoidance. Here we consider coordination both in discrete-time and continuous-time dynamical systems. In the continuous-time case, inference is required to ensure that decisions are made that avoid collisions with adjustably high certainty even when computation is inevitably finite. In both discrete-time and finite-time settings, we introduce conservative decision-making. That is, even with finite computation, a coordination outcome is guaranteed to satisfy collision-avoidance constraints with adjustably high confidence relative to the current uncertain model. Our methods are illustrated in simulations in the context of collision avoidance in graphs, multi-commodity flow problems, distributed stochastic model-predictive control, as well as in collision-prediction and avoidance in stochastic differential systems. Finally, we provide an example of how to combine some of our different methods into a multi-agent predictive controller that coordinates learning agents with uncertain beliefs over their dynamics. Utilising the guarantees established for our learning algorithms, the resulting mechanism can provide collision avoidance guarantees relative to the a posteriori epistemic beliefs over the agents' dynamics.

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Clement, Stephen. "USING MAVT TO INCORPORATE PUBLIC PERCEPTION WHEN CHOOSING A NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE." VCU Scholars Compass, 2016. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4635.

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Nuclear energy is a source of carbon free power. With many countries striving to make deep carbon cuts in their energy sectors, nuclear energy could be a large part of the solution. One of the main obstacles standing in the way of the use of nuclear energy is the issue of used nuclear fuel disposal. According to the NEI, the U.S. creates about 2000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel per year and has generated around 76,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel over the last 4 decades. While there are technical problems that need to be solved, it is primarily the public and political opposition to the disposal of used nuclear fuel that stands in the way of progress in this area. This work addresses this issue through Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). To make a decision among ten different fuel cycles, we have brought together five stakeholders: Nuclear Scientists and Engineers, Environmental Scientists, Economists, Political Scientists, and The General Public. Using Multi-Attribute Value Theory (MAVT), we have been able to develop decision models for each stakeholder as well as a model that combines them all and came to the conclusion that of the ten fuel cycles considered, the best decision is to continue to use On Site Dry Cask Storage. This decision is made with small sample sizes but the methodology could be applied at much larger scales and can potentially be used to choose a fuel cycle that encounters much less political and social opposition to its implementation.

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Müller-Bungart, Michael. "Revenue Management with flexible products : models and methods for the broadcasting industry ; 28 tab. /." Berlin : Springer-Verlag, 2007. http://opac.nebis.ch/cgi-bin/showAbstract.pl?u20=9783540723158.

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Van, der Walt Johanna Maria. "Technology for knowledge innovation : a realistic pluralist scientific problem solving capability." Diss., Pretoria : [s.n.], 2005. http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-01232006-155408.

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Gauthier, Jean-Maurice. "A decision-support system for optimal operation of hydropower stations /." Thesis, McGill University, 2000. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=31159.

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Hydro-Quebec utilizes a one-dimensional hydrological model called H2RM to simulate the evolution of flow on harnessed rivers. The model produces reliable results but its application is restricted to so-called 'hydrological domains', that define the flow routing pattern in-between hydroelectric facilities. When many power stations are present on a river, each hydrological domain must be treated separately, then linked to the next one. No information is provided on storage in head reservoirs nor electric production from power stations.
A computer program (shell) has been developed to simulate a complete hydropower system comprising a number of head reservoirs, hydrological domains and power stations. In this program, head reservoir behavior is reproduced by computing a mass balance, flow routing within a hydrological domain is simulated using the H2RM model, and production from each power station is estimated through an optimization procedure.
The shell program can be used as a decision support tool by allowing the comparison between various water management schemes and by displaying stage and discharge at any point of the hydropower system, storage in head reservoirs, and optimal power output from the turbines for the head and flow conditions prevailing at each power station. Examples of application are provided.

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Frank, Adam Harrison. "Inclusive Deliberation (ID): A Case Study Of How Teachers Experience The Decision-Making Process For Change Initiatives Within A School Committee." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1573900707645968.

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Cfir, Dolev. "A model of Border Patrol to support optimal operation of border surveillance sensors." Thesis, Monterey, Calif. : Springfield, Va. : Naval Postgraduate School ; Available from National Technical Information Service, 2005. http://library.nps.navy.mil/uhtbin/hyperion/05Dec%5FCfir.pdf.

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Clothier, Reece Alexander. "Decision support for the safe design and operation of unmanned aircraft systems." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2012. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/51048/1/Reece_Clothier_Thesis.pdf.

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Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) describe a diverse range of aircraft that are operated without a human pilot on-board. Unmanned aircraft range from small rotorcraft, which can fit in the palm of your hand, through to fixed wing aircraft comparable in size to that of a commercial passenger jet. The absence of a pilot on-board allows these aircraft to be developed with unique performance capabilities facilitating a wide range of applications in surveillance, environmental management, agriculture, defence, and search and rescue. However, regulations relating to the safe design and operation of UAS first need to be developed before the many potential benefits from these applications can be realised. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a Risk Management Process (RMP) should support all civil aviation policy and rulemaking activities (ICAO 2009). The RMP is described in International standard, ISO 31000:2009 (ISO, 2009a). This standard is intentionally generic and high-level, providing limited guidance on how it can be effectively applied to complex socio-technical decision problems such as the development of regulations for UAS. Through the application of principles and tools drawn from systems philosophy and systems engineering, this thesis explores how the RMP can be effectively applied to support the development of safety regulations for UAS. A sound systems-theoretic foundation for the RMP is presented in this thesis. Using the case-study scenario of a UAS operation over an inhabited area and through the novel application of principles drawn from general systems modelling philosophy, a consolidated framework of the definitions of the concepts of: safe, risk and hazard is made. The framework is novel in that it facilitates the representation of broader subjective factors in an assessment of the safety of a system; describes the issues associated with the specification of a system-boundary; makes explicit the hierarchical nature of the relationship between the concepts and the subsequent constraints that exist between them; and can be evaluated using a range of analytic or deliberative modelling techniques. Following the general sequence of the RMP, the thesis explores the issues associated with the quantified specification of safety criteria for UAS. A novel risk analysis tool is presented. In contrast to existing risk tools, the analysis tool presented in this thesis quantifiably characterises both the societal and individual risk of UAS operations as a function of the flight path of the aircraft. A novel structuring of the risk evaluation and risk treatment decision processes is then proposed. The structuring is achieved through the application of the Decision Support Problem Technique; a modelling approach that has been previously used to effectively model complex engineering design processes and to support decision-making in relation to airspace design. The final contribution made by this thesis is in the development of an airworthiness regulatory framework for civil UAS. A novel "airworthiness certification matrix" is proposed as a basis for the definition of UAS "Part 21" regulations. The outcome airworthiness certification matrix provides a flexible, systematic and justifiable method for promulgating airworthiness regulations for UAS. In addition, an approach for deriving "Part 1309" regulations for UAS is presented. In contrast to existing approaches, the approach presented in this thesis facilitates a traceable and objective tailoring of system-level reliability requirements across the diverse range of UAS operations. The significance of the research contained in this thesis is clearly demonstrated by its practical real world outcomes. Industry regulatory development groups and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority have endorsed the proposed airworthiness certification matrix. The risk models have also been used to support research undertaken by the Australian Department of Defence. Ultimately, it is hoped that the outcomes from this research will play a significant part in the shaping of regulations for civil UAS, here in Australia and around the world.

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Marchant, Thierry. "Agrégation de relations valuées par la méthode de Borda, en vue d'un rangement: considérations axiomatiques." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/212380.

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Depuis 20 à 30 ans, l'aide multicritère à la décision est apparue. L'expansion de cette nouvelle discipline s'est marquée dans la littérature essentiellement par un foisonnement de nouvelles méthodes multicritères d'aide à la décision et par des applications de celles-ci à des problèmes "réels". Pour la plupart de ces méthodes, il n'y pas ou peu de fondements théoriques. Seul le bon sens a guidé les créateurs de ces méthodes.

Depuis une dizaine d'années, le besoin de bases théoriques solides se fait de plus en plus sentir. C'est dans cette perspective que nous avons réalisé le présent travail. Ceci étant dit, nous n'allons pas vraiment nous occuper de méthodes multicritères à la décision dans ce travail, mais seulement de fragments de méthodes. En effet, les méthodes multicritères d'aide à la décision peuvent généralement être décomposées en trois parties (outre la définition de l'ensemble des alternatives et le choix des critères):

Modélisation des préférences: pendant cette étape, les préférences du décideur sont modélisées le long de chaque critère.
Agrégation des préférences: un modèle global de préférences est construit au départ des modèles obtenus critère par critère à la fin de la phase précédente.
Exploitation des résultats de l'agrégation: du modèle global de préférences issu de la phase 2, on déduit un choix, un rangement, une partition, selon les besoins.

Jusqu'à présent, à cause de la difficulté du problème, peu de méthodes ont été axiomatisées de bout en bout; la plupart des travaux ne s'intéressent qu'à une ou deux des trois étapes que nous venons de décrire.

Nous nous sommes intéressés à une méthode bien connue: la méthode de Borda. Elle accepte comme données de départ des relations binaires. Elle intervient donc après la phase de modélisation des préférences. Le résultat de cette méthode est un rangement. Elle effectue donc les opérations correspondant aux étapes 2 et 3. Dans la suite de ce travail nous appellerons méthode de rangement toute méthode effectuant les étapes 2 et 3 pour aboutir à un rangement. Etant donné que les méthodes de rangement, celle de Borda en particulier, sont utilisées également en choix social, nous puiserons abondamment dans le vocabulaire, les outils et les résultats du choix social. Les résultats présentés seront valides en choix social, mais nous nous sommes efforcés de les rendre aussi pertinents que possible en aide multicritère à la décision.

Dans le chapitre II, après quelques définitions et notations, nous présentons quelques méthodes de rangement classiques, y compris la méthode de Borda, et quelques résultats majeurs de la littérature. Nous généralisons une caractérisation des méthodes de scorage due à Myerson (1995).

Nous nous tournons ensuite vers les relations valuées. La raison en est la suivante: elles sont utilisées depuis longtemps dans plusieurs méthodes multicritères et, depuis peu, elles le sont aussi en choix social (p.ex. Banerjec 1994) car elles permettent de modéliser plus finement les préférences des décideurs confrontés à des informations incertaines, imprécises, contradictoires, lacunaires, Nous commençons donc le chapitre III par des notations et définitions relatives aux relations valuées.

Ensuite, nous présentons quelques méthodes de rangement opérant au départ de relations valuées. C'est-à-dire des méthodes de rangement qui agissent non pas sur des relations nettes, mais sur des relations valuées et qui fournissent comme précédemment un rangement des alternatives. N'ayant trouvé dans la littérature aucune méthode de ce type, toutes celles que nous présentons sont neuves ou des généralisations de méthodes existantes; comme par exemple, les méthodes de scorage généralisées, que nous caractérisons en généralisant encore une fois le résultat de Myerson.

Nous présentons enfin ce que nous appelons la méthode de Borda généralisée, qui est une des généralisations possibles de la méthode de Borda au cas valué. Nous basant sur un article de Farkas et Nitzan (1979), nous montrons que contrairement à ce qui se passait dans le cas particulier envisagé par Farkas et Nitzan (agrégation d'ordres totaux), la méthode de Borda généralisée (et sa particularisation au cas net) n'est pas toujours équivalente à la méthode proximité à l'unanimité. Cette dernière méthode classe chaque alternative en fonction de l'importance des changements qu'il faudrait faire subir à un ensemble de relations pour que l’alternative considérée gagne à l'unanimité. Nous identifions quelques cas où l'équivalence est vraie.

Ensuite, nous reprenons un résultat de Debord (1987). Il s'agit d'une caractérisation de la méthode de Borda en tant que méthode de choix appliquée à des préordres totaux. Nous la généralisons de deux façons au cas de la méthode de Borda en tant que méthode de rangement appliquée à des relations valuées. Lorsqu'on applique la méthode de Borda, on est amené à calculer une fonction à valeurs réelles sur l'ensemble des alternatives.

La valeur prise par cette fonction pour une alternative s'appelle le score de Borda de cette alternative. Ensuite, on range les alternatives par ordre décroissant de leur score de Borda. La tentation est grande - et beaucoup y succombent (peut-être avec raison) d'utiliser le score de Borda non seulement pour calculer le rangement mais aussi pour estimer si l'écart entre deux alternatives est important ou non (voir par exemple Brans 1994). Cette approche n'a, à notre connaissance, jamais été étudiée d'un point de vue théorique. Nous présentons deux caractérisations de la méthode de Borda utilisée à cette fin.

Dans la dernière partie du chapitre III, nous abandonnons la démarche qui visait à caractériser une méthode par un ensemble de propriétés le plus petit possible. Nous comparons 12 méthodes sur base d'une vingtaine de propriétés. Les résultats de cette partie sont résumés dans quelques tableaux.

Ce travail aborde donc la méthode de Borda et sa généralisation au cas valué sous différents angles. Il livre une série de résultats qui, espérons-le, devraient permettre de mieux comprendre la méthode de Borda et peut-être de l'utiliser à meilleur escient. Toutefois, quoique notre objectif ait été de présenter des résultats pertinents en aide multicritère à la décision (et nous avons fait des progrès dans ce sens), il reste du chemin à faire. Nous sommes probablement encore trop proche du choix social. Ceci constitue donc une voie de recherche intéressante, de même que l'étude d'autres méthodes de rangement et l'étude de méthodes complètes d'aide multicritère à la décision: modélisation du problème (identification du ou des décideur(s), des alternatives et des critères), modélisation des préférences, agrégation des préférences et exploitation des résultats de l'agrégation.

Doctorat en sciences appliquées
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Catterall, Miriam. "Focus groups in market research : theory, method and practice." Thesis, University of Ulster, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.369987.

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Wang, Xin. "Bounded Multiattribute Utility in Behavioral Decision Research: Theory, Estimation and Experimental Tests." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1406821794.

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Lounsbury, H. Bruce (Hugh Bruce) Carleton University Dissertation Management Studies. "Options theory as a framework for decision-making in R & D investments." Ottawa, 1992.

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Chiu, Jing-Er. "Applications of bayesian methods to arthritis research /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p3036813.

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Wang, You-Gan. "Contributions to the theory of Gittins indices : with applications in pharmaceutical research and clinical trials." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.293423.

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Lu, Jun. "Bayesian hierarchical models and applications in psychology research /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p3144437.

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So, Moon-tong. "Applications of Bayesian statistical model selection in social science research." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2007. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B39312951.

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Bailey, Bernard C. "Decision Making in the Corporate Boardroom: Designing the Conditions for Effectiveness." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1333570218.

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Rodriguez, Luis Alberto Osés [UNESP]. "Modelo de tomada de decisão integrando teoria das restrições, programação linear e simulação: estudo de caso numa Indústria Siderúrgica." Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/99352.

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Para enfrentar os problemas do atual mundo globalizado e para se manter em atividade, as empresas vêm sendo obrigadas a empregar, em seu dia-a-dia, novos instrumentos de trabalho. A Teoria das Restrições, a Programação Linear Inteira e a Simulação de Sistemas surgem como potenciais ferramentas no auxílio à identificação e à solução dos problemas enfrentados pelas empresas nos dias de hoje. Este trabalho teve por objetivo principal desenvolver um método de planejamento e gerenciamento da produção, integrando essas três ferramentas. O método foi aplicado na linha de produção da Unidade de Cilindros para Laminação da empresa Aços Villares S/A com o intuito de melhorar o fluxo de produção e o cumprimento do prazo de liberação do produto entre as suas diversas áreas. Ao final do trabalho, concluiu-se que o referido método, além de facilitar e simplificar o processo de modelagem permite realizar análises mais aprofundadas do sistema real, em relação às que seriam conseguidas com a utilização das técnicas citadas, isoladamente.
In order to face the issues of the current globalized world and in order to keep working, companies have been pushed to put in practice new working tools. The Theory of Constraints, the Integer Linear Programming and the Systems Simulation appear as potential tools to support problem identification and solution which are faced by companies nowadays. This work aims to develop a planning and management method of production integrating these three tools. The method was applied to the production line at Aços Villares S/A Rolling Mill Roll Unit aiming at improving the production flow and the accomplishment of product liberation deadline among its many areas. At the end of this work, it has been concluded that the referred method, besides facilitating and simplifying the modeling process, it allows to achieve deeper analyses of the real system in relation to those which would be reached with the isolated mentioned techniques.

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28

Zhang, Yanwei. "A hierarchical Bayesian approach to model spatially correlated binary data with applications to dental research." Diss., Connect to online resource - MSU authorized users, 2008.

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Bradley, Marie Agnes. "No man's land : making a map : the contribution of child psychotherapy to decision-making for Looked After Children in transition." Thesis, University of East London, 2014. http://repository.tavistockandportman.ac.uk/1606/.

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The research is a small-scale study of the potential benefits of Child Psychotherapy assessment of Looked After Children in transition, for the child and for the professional network caring for the child where the child psychotherapist-researcher is part of the network working together to plan for the child’s long-term future. The assessments aim to bring specific understanding of the child’s emotional state and emotional needs, of his perception of what has happened in his life and of the ways in which his development has been influenced by these external events and perceptions. The assessments also explore the potential for the work to help the child make sense of his history and of himself and the assessments aim to be a distinct and essential part of the overarching assessment process which informs preparation of the children and their prospective carers for permanent alternative placement. Four latency-aged children in transition were assessed in an inner-city community-based Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service by the clinician-researcher. using Standard child psychotherapy techniques were used with some adaptations of technique to address the children’s transitional status. The assessment framework included in-depth interviews with social workers and foster carers and information from schools. Process recordings of the assessment sessions are the primary data in this enquiry and these are analysed using an adapted version of Grounded Theory methodology. The depth and complexity of the children’s experiences and their internal worlds is strikingly revealed by the assessments, in new and compelling detail. All of the assessments were highly significant in shaping short and long-term provision for the children. The outcome of the study strongly supports the inclusion of child psychotherapy assessment as part of an integrated, multi-disciplinary assessment process for all children in transition. The method of assessment and of analysis of data transfers well to a range of Looked After Children in transition in the study as well as providing an effective basis from which to communicate clearly and effectively across interdisciplinary boundaries: making possible a more truly representative, responsive and integrated map for the future.

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Ng, Irene, Ralph Badinelli, Francesco Polese, Nauta Primiano Di, Helge Löbler, and Sue Halliday. "S-D logic research directions and opportunities." Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2017. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-218383.

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To date, several disciplines have broached the systems view of service and the engineering of service systems. Operations research applied to services began with a rather simplistic, macro view of resource integration in the form of data envelopment analysis (DEA), introduced by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes in 1978 (Banker et al., 1984; Charnes et al., 1994). Micro models of service systems have tended to study the systems’ IT components (Hsu, 2009; Qiu 2009). Engineering, which has always been associated with ‘assembling pieces that work in specific ways’ (Ottino, 2004) and ‘a process of precise composition to achieve a predictable purpose and function’ (Fromm, 2010: 2), has contributed to greater scalability and purposeful control in service systems. However, the agents of the system are usually people whose activities may not easily be controlled by predictable processes and yet are critical aspects of the value-creating system (Ng et al., 2011b). There is need for a new combinative paradigm, such as third-generation activity theory, in which two or more activity systems come into contact, to explore dialogue, exchanging perspectives of multiple actors, resulting in networks or groups of activity systems that are constantly interacting (Marken, 2006; Nardi, 1996, Oliveros et al., 2010). While various systems approaches, such as general systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1962); open systems theory (Boulding, 1956; Katz and Kahn, 1978); and viable systems approach (Barile, 2008; Beer, 1972; Golinelli, 2010), will not be reviewed here (see Ng et al., 2011a for a systems approach to service science), they share common tenets: boundaries, interfaces, hierarchy, feedback and adaptation to which most systems writers would add emergence, input, output and transformation (Kast and Rosenzweig, 1972). These terms may be used as a basis for a research agenda for the consideration of a service system.

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Hayes, Daniel Paul. "Developing an intervention to promote shared decision making in child and youth mental health : integrating theory, research and practice." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2018. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10056246/.

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There is growing national and international interest around the process of shared decision making (SDM) between patients and clinicians. However, research in this area specific to child and youth mental health is still in its infancy. Whilst interventions to improve SDM are being developed in this area, many of them target parents rather than the young people affected. The five studies in this thesis contribute to the understanding of SDM and the development of a theory-led, evidence-based intervention to facilitate SDM with young people, parents and clinicians. Study 1 examined the theory, intervention functions (IFs) and behaviour change techniques (BCTs) that are being used in interventions designed to improve SDM. Across all of these studies, a lack of explicit theory was found. However, five possible IFs and fifteen BCTs that may facilitate SDM were identified. Study 2 explored predictors of SDM from the perspective of young people and parents. For young people, the severity of internalising difficulties and age were found to be predictors of gold standard SDM. For parents, both the severity of internalising and externalising difficulties, as well as ethnicity were predictors of gold standard SDM. Additionally, high levels of service variation were found in reported gold standard SDM for parents and young people. To better understand service variation and predictors of SDM, Studies 3 and 4 explored barriers and facilitators to SDM with clinicians, young people and parents using the Theoretical Domains Framework. For clinicians, 21 barriers and facilitators across ten domains were identified, whilst for young people and parents, 16 barriers and facilitators across eight domains were discovered. To guide intervention development, the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) was employed. Following this process, two decision aids (DAs) and a clinician educational and training package were developed. Both were co-produced in conjunction with the stakeholders at whom the interventions were aimed. Study 5 describes the process of testing the intervention in a London clinic for acceptability and usefulness. For DAs, changes were made to side effects and the diagnostic language on them. Clinicians interviewed after the DAs were embedded in the clinic found them to be both useful and acceptable. However feedback on the educational and training package received a more mixed response regarding its usefulness and acceptability.

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Thomas, Clifford S. "From 'tree' based Bayesian networks to mutual information classifiers : deriving a singly connected network classifier using an information theory based technique." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2623.

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For reasoning under uncertainty the Bayesian network has become the representation of choice. However, except where models are considered 'simple' the task of construction and inference are provably NP-hard. For modelling larger 'real' world problems this computational complexity has been addressed by methods that approximate the model. The Naive Bayes classifier, which has strong assumptions of independence among features, is a common approach, whilst the class of trees is another less extreme example. In this thesis we propose the use of an information theory based technique as a mechanism for inference in Singly Connected Networks. We call this a Mutual Information Measure classifier, as it corresponds to the restricted class of trees built from mutual information. We show that the new approach provides for both an efficient and localised method of classification, with performance accuracies comparable with the less restricted general Bayesian networks. To improve the performance of the classifier, we additionally investigate the possibility of expanding the class Markov blanket by use of a Wrapper approach and further show that the performance can be improved by focusing on the class Markov blanket and that the improvement is not at the expense of increased complexity. Finally, the two methods are applied to the task of diagnosing the 'real' world medical domain, Acute Abdominal Pain. Known to be both a different and challenging domain to classify, the objective was to investigate the optiniality claims, in respect of the Naive Bayes classifier, that some researchers have argued, for classifying in this domain. Despite some loss of representation capabilities we show that the Mutual Information Measure classifier can be effectively applied to the domain and also provides a recognisable qualitative structure without violating 'real' world assertions. In respect of its 'selective' variant we further show that the improvement achieves a comparable predictive accuracy to the Naive Bayes classifier and that the Naive Bayes classifier's 'overall' performance is largely due the contribution of the majority group Non-Specific Abdominal Pain, a group of exclusion.

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Nilsson, Erik. "Examining The Explanatory Potential Of Poliheuristic Theory In The Foreign Policy Decision-Making Of Small States : The Case Of Sweden’s Participation In Operation Unified Protector." Thesis, Försvarshögskolan, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-5837.

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This paper seeks to conduct a first test of the explanatory potential of the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision-making in the context of small states. The case studied is the Swedish decision to contribute to the UN-sanctioned and NATO-led Operation Unified Protector in 2011. The paper conducts a theory-testing Causal Process Tracing (CPT) study drawing on a variety of different sources including news articles, parliamentary records, government bills, official statements and remarks made by key individuals, and secondary sources. The result of the analysis demonstrate the potential validity of the poliheuristic understanding of the decision- making process operating in a small state, but fall short of demonstrating actual validity. The final results are thus more akin to results typically found in a plausibility probe case study, and future research is deemed merited based on the potential validity found.

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Anand, Farminder Singh. "Bayesian framework for improved R&D decisions." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/39530.

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This thesis work describes the formulation of a Bayesian approach along with new tools to systematically reduce uncertainty in Research&Development (R&D) alternatives. During the initial stages of R&D many alternatives are considered and high uncertainty exists for all the alternatives. The ideal approach in addressing the many R&D alternatives is to find the one alternative which is stochastically dominant i.e. the alternative which is better in all possible scenarios of uncertainty. Often a stochastically dominant alternative does not exist. This leaves the R&D manager with two alternatives, either to make a selection based on user defined utility function or to gather more information in order to reduce uncertainty in the various alternatives. From the decision makers perspective the second alternative has more intrinsic value, since reduction of uncertainty will improve the confidence in the selection and further reduce the high downside risk involved with the decisions made under high uncertainty. The motivation for this work is derived from our preliminary work on the evaluation of biorefiney alternatives, which brought into limelight the key challenges and opportunities in the evaluation of R&D alternatives. The primary challenge in the evaluation of many R&D alternatives was the presence of uncertainty in the many unit operations within each and every alternative. Additionally, limited or non-existent experimental data made it infeasible to quantify the uncertainty and lead to inability to develop an even simple systematic strategy to reduce it. Moreover, even if the uncertainty could be quantified, the traditional approaches (scenario analysis or stochastic analysis), lacked the ability to evaluate the key group of uncertainty contributors. Lastly, the traditional design of experiment approaches focus towards reduction in uncertainty in the parameter estimates of the model, whereas what is required is a design of experiment approach which focuses on the decision (selection of the key alternative). In order to tackle all the above mentioned challenges a Bayesian framework along with two new tools is proposed. The Bayesian framework consists of three main steps: a. Quantification of uncertainty b. Evaluation of key uncertainty contributors c. Design of experiment strategies, focussed on decision making rather than the traditional parameter uncertainty reduction To quantify technical uncertainty using expert knowledge, existing elicitation methods in the literature (outside chemical engineering domain) are used. To illustrate the importance of quantifying technical uncertainty, a bio-refinery case study is considered. The case study is an alternative for producing ethanol as a value added product in a Kraft mill producing pulp from softwood. To produce ethanol, a hot water pre-extraction of hemi-cellulose is considered, prior to the pulping stage. Using this case study, the methodology to quantify technical uncertainty using experts' knowledge is demonstrated. To limit the cost of R&D investment for selection or rejection of an R&D alternative, it is essential to evaluate the key uncertainty contributors. Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) is a tool which can be used to evaluate the key uncertainties. But quite often global sensitivity analysis fails to differentiate between the uncertainties and assigns them equal global sensitivity index. To counter this failing of GSA, a new method conditional global sensitivity (c-GSA) is presented, which is able to differentiate between the uncertainties even when GSA fails to do so. To demonstrate the value of c-GSA many small examples are presented. The third and the last key method in the Bayesian framework is the decision oriented design of experiment. Traditional 'Design of Experiment' (DOE) approaches focus on minimization of parameter error variance. In this work, a new "decision-oriented" DOE approach is proposed that takes into account how the generated data, and subsequently, the model developed based on them will be used in decision making. By doing so, the parameter variances get distributed in a manner such that its adverse impact on the targeted decision making is minimal. Results show that the new decision-oriented DOE approach significantly outperforms the standard D-optimal design approach. The new design method should be a valuable tool when experiments are conducted for the purpose of making R&D decisions. Finally, to demonstrate the importance of the overall Bayesian framework a bio-refinery case study is considered. The case study consists of the alternative to introduce a hemi-cellulose pre-extraction stage prior to pulping in a thermo-mechanical pulp mill. Application of the Bayesian framework to address this alternative, results in significant improvement in the prediction of the true potential value of the alternative.

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35

Asseburg, Christian. "A Bayesian approach to modelling field data on multi-species predator prey-interactions." Thesis, St Andrews, 2006. https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/174.

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36

Rodriguez, Luis Alberto Osés. "Modelo de tomada de decisão integrando teoria das restrições, programação linear e simulação : estudo de caso numa Indústria Siderúrgica /." Guaratinguetá : [s.n.], 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/99352.

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Orientador: Fernando Augusto Silva Marins
Banca: Edson Luiz França Senne
Banca: José Arnaldo Barra Montevechi
Resumo: Para enfrentar os problemas do atual mundo globalizado e para se manter em atividade, as empresas vêm sendo obrigadas a empregar, em seu dia-a-dia, novos instrumentos de trabalho. A Teoria das Restrições, a Programação Linear Inteira e a Simulação de Sistemas surgem como potenciais ferramentas no auxílio à identificação e à solução dos problemas enfrentados pelas empresas nos dias de hoje. Este trabalho teve por objetivo principal desenvolver um método de planejamento e gerenciamento da produção, integrando essas três ferramentas. O método foi aplicado na linha de produção da Unidade de Cilindros para Laminação da empresa Aços Villares S/A com o intuito de melhorar o fluxo de produção e o cumprimento do prazo de liberação do produto entre as suas diversas áreas. Ao final do trabalho, concluiu-se que o referido método, além de facilitar e simplificar o processo de modelagem permite realizar análises mais aprofundadas do sistema real, em relação às que seriam conseguidas com a utilização das técnicas citadas, isoladamente.
Abstract: In order to face the issues of the current globalized world and in order to keep working, companies have been pushed to put in practice new working tools. The Theory of Constraints, the Integer Linear Programming and the Systems Simulation appear as potential tools to support problem identification and solution which are faced by companies nowadays. This work aims to develop a planning and management method of production integrating these three tools. The method was applied to the production line at Aços Villares S/A Rolling Mill Roll Unit aiming at improving the production flow and the accomplishment of product liberation deadline among its many areas. At the end of this work, it has been concluded that the referred method, besides facilitating and simplifying the modeling process, it allows to achieve deeper analyses of the real system in relation to those which would be reached with the isolated mentioned techniques.
Mestre

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37

Subasic, Kathleen. "Planning for the future : a grounded theory study of well older adults' decision-making regarding home modifications." Diss., NSUWorks, 2014. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hpd_ot_student_dissertations/32.

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The purpose of this dissertation research was to understand the decision-making process that well older adults use when deciding whether to make a home modification. The researcher also sought to understand the views of well older adults concerning the use of home modification to prevent injury and declines in occupational performance. The researcher used the Person-Environment-Occupation (PEO) model (Law et al., 1996) from occupational therapy and occupational science as the orienting framework. A qualitative grounded theory approach based on that proposed by Strauss and Corbin (1998) was used to structure data collection and analysis. Participants were obtained using purposive and theoretical sampling and were interviewed by the researcher. The 19 participants in this study ranged in age from 65 to 89. Findings from this study include a model of the decision-making process that well older adults used to plan for their futures related to home setting and modification and also a substantive grounded theory. The Theory of Home Modification Decision-Making: Well Older Adults is proposed and explained. Central to the theory are two decision-making processes, including the conditions that influence the decisions. These findings and the theory are discussed relative to the PEO model and existing occupational therapy and gerontology literature. The information gained from this study is beneficial to occupational therapists and Certified Aging-in-Place Specialists to improve and expand their services to the well older adult population.

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38

Bimpli, Iva. "Investigating Ethical Decision Making in Marketing Research: An Exploratory Study Towards the Interaction of Different Moral Agents in Marketing Research." Thesis, University of Bradford, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10454/14401.

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39

Botha, Helet. "Garbage and goals : toward a prescription for research that would lead to a technology of foolishness." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/85777.

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Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The purpose of this thesis is to develop a framework for research that will lead to a “technology of foolishness”, à la James March (1972). This is done by a) analysing the nature and b) evaluating the results of case studies that employ the garbage can theory within the field of organisational decision making. The garbage can is used since it was developed to describe decision making within organised anarchies. These are organisational contexts characterised by ambiguous goals, amongs other traits. Thus, one of the aims of the theory was to describe how decisions are made in the face of goal ambiguity. In this thesis nineteen case studies that were published between 1976 and 2010 are analysed. Only studies where the garbage can theory’s components are brought to bear on the data in a significant way are included in the scope of the study. This means that data has to be structured according to the theory, or that the authors’ conclusions address the theory specifically. It was found that the case studies produce very few insights on goal ambiguity which can be put to use in developing a technology of foolishness. Based on the analysis of the nature of the garbage can theory and the studies in the sample, a new way of doing research on goal ambiguity is put forth. Based on the insights on goal ambiguity that were produced, the themes that need researching are suggested. A core discovery is that although the garbage can in used as a process theory very often, the interpretivist tools that fit within this approach are seldom used. The normative strategy that is put forth includes incorporating the role of active decision making entities into the garbage can theory, or using the garbage can theory in conjunction with a model that does provide for the role of these decision making entities. It is important to note that these entities need not and should not be subjected to the principles of rational choice theory. It is also proposed that the garbage can theory be utilised as a process theory of decision making and that theoretical tools that are appropriate to this kind of theory be used. These tools would form part of theories designed for analysing and understanding organisational narratives. Themes that need to be researched include symbolic expressions (such as metaphors), tactile or visual experiences, the role of intuition and emotional expression in decision making processes, the role of identity (that of the focal decision makers and the people he comes into contact with) and, lastly, the idea that the world is enacted, rather than having to be predicted.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis het ten doel om ŉ raamwerk vir navorsing daar te stel wat sal lei tot die ontwikkeling van ŉ ‘tegnologie vir dwase optrede’, à la James March (1972). Dit word gedoen deur a) die aard en b) die resultate van gevallestudies wat die vullisdromteorie op besluitneming in organisasies toepas, te analiseer. Die vullisdromteorie word gebruik omdat dit ontwikkel is om besluitneming in ‘georganiseerde anargieë’ te beskryf. Georganiseerde anargieë word, onder anadere, gekenmerk deur dubbelisinnige doelwitte. Dus was een van die mikpunte van die model om besluitneming te beskryf wanneer doelwitte dubbelsinnig is. In hierdie tesis word negentien gevallestudies, wat tussen 1976 en 2010 gepubliseer is, bestudeer. Slegs studies waar die komponente van die teorie beduidend in die data neerslag vind, word ingesluit by die omvang van die studie. Dit beteken dat die data volgens die komponente gestruktureer is, of dat die navorsers die evaluering van die teorie eksplisiet by hulle konklusies insluit. Die bevinding is dat die gevallestudies baie min insigte rondom doelwitdubbelsinnigheid bied wat binne die raamwerk van ŉ tegnologie vir dwase optrede pas. Op grond van die analise van die oorhoofse eienskappe van beide die vullisdromteorie en die studies in die steekproef, word daar ’n nuwe normatiewe raamwerk vir die benadering tot navorsing omtrent doelwitdubbelsinnigheid voorgestel. Op grond van die insigte omtrent doelwitdubbelsinnigheid wat wel deeluitmaak van die resultate, word temas vir navorsing voorgestel. ŉ Kern-ontdekking is dat ofskoon die vullisdrom gereëld as ŉ prosesteorie aangewend word, die interpretivistiese instrumente wat tot hierdie benadering hoort, selde gebruik word. Die nuwe normatiewe strategie is dat die vullisdromteorie as sodanig aangepas word dat dit voorsiening maak vir aktiewe besluitnemende entiteite. ŉ Ander werkbare opsie is om die vullisdromteorie te same met ’n teorie wat wel vir hierdie entiteite voorsiening maak, aan te wend. Hierdie entiteite hoef en behoort egter nie gemodelleer te word volgens ’n rasionele keuse teorie nie. Daar word ook voorgestel dat waar die vullisdromteorie aangewend word, dit as ’n prosesteorie vir besluitneming aangewend word en dat teoretiese instrumente wat binne die raamwerk van prosesteorieë pas, benut word. Hierdie instrumente sluit metodes en teorieë wat geskik is vir die analisering en verstaan van narratiewe in organisasies in. Temas wat nagevors moet word is simboliese uitdrukkings (soos metafore), ervarings wat tas- en sigsintuie insluit, die rol van intuïsie en emosionele uitdrukking in die besluitnemingproses, die rol van identiteit (van die fokale besluitnemer sowel as ander entiteite met wie hy in kontak kom) en, laastens, die idee dat die wêreld geskep word deur aksies, eerder as dat dit voorspel hoef te word.

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40

Harris, Patricia A. "Promoting research utilisation and evidence-based decision making amongst healthcare managers : utilising nonrecursive structural equation modelling to develop the theory of planned behaviour." Thesis, Open University, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.424678.

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41

Harris, Patricia Amanda. "Promoting research utilisation and evidence-based decision making amongst healthcare managers : utilising nonrecursive structural equation modelling to develop the theory of planned behaviour." n.p, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/.

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42

So, Moon-tong, and 蘇滿堂. "Applications of Bayesian statistical model selection in social scienceresearch." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B39312951.

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43

Ng, Irene, Ralph Badinelli, Francesco Polese, Nauta Primiano Di, Helge Löbler, and Sue Halliday. "S-D logic research directions and opportunities: the perspective of systems, camplexity and engeneering." Marketing Theory, 2012 June; Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 213-217, 2012. https://ul.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A15287.

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To date, several disciplines have broached the systems view of service and the engineering of service systems. Operations research applied to services began with a rather simplistic, macro view of resource integration in the form of data envelopment analysis (DEA), introduced by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes in 1978 (Banker et al., 1984; Charnes et al., 1994). Micro models of service systems have tended to study the systems’ IT components (Hsu, 2009; Qiu 2009). Engineering, which has always been associated with ‘assembling pieces that work in specific ways’ (Ottino, 2004) and ‘a process of precise composition to achieve a predictable purpose and function’ (Fromm, 2010: 2), has contributed to greater scalability and purposeful control in service systems. However, the agents of the system are usually people whose activities may not easily be controlled by predictable processes and yet are critical aspects of the value-creating system (Ng et al., 2011b). There is need for a new combinative paradigm, such as third-generation activity theory, in which two or more activity systems come into contact, to explore dialogue, exchanging perspectives of multiple actors, resulting in networks or groups of activity systems that are constantly interacting (Marken, 2006; Nardi, 1996, Oliveros et al., 2010). While various systems approaches, such as general systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1962); open systems theory (Boulding, 1956; Katz and Kahn, 1978); and viable systems approach (Barile, 2008; Beer, 1972; Golinelli, 2010), will not be reviewed here (see Ng et al., 2011a for a systems approach to service science), they share common tenets: boundaries, interfaces, hierarchy, feedback and adaptation to which most systems writers would add emergence, input, output and transformation (Kast and Rosenzweig, 1972). These terms may be used as a basis for a research agenda for the consideration of a service system.

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44

Chau, Ka-ki, and 周嘉琪. "Informative drop-out models for longitudinal binary data." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B2962714X.

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45

Walker, Alice Jessica. "Procedural Rationality as a Means for Evidence-Based Management in Conflicted Decision-Making: A Mixed-Methods Study." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1427835243.

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46

Halvord, Erik, and Fagerberg Maja Wassén. "Systematising early evaluation of potential acquisition targets of PE investments : A research model for decision making influenced by information asymmetry." Thesis, KTH, Skolan för industriell teknik och management (ITM), 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-264089.

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Acquisitions are a major part of the growth and evolution of companies within varying markets. They are conducted under various circumstances with differing aims and rationales, and for different purposes. This thesis focuses on acquisitions carried out by serial investors acting in a private equity market. These acquisitions are characterised by a highly competitive nature, where access to a large pipeline of potential targets is believed to be a key success factor. As such, deal origination and sourcing of potential targets become important factors to facilitate a high-paced deal flow. Earlier research suggests that this is well researched with regards to venture capital, but to a large extent lacking within private equity. This thesis analyses and discusses the possibility of systematising early evaluation of potential acquisition targets within private equity. The aim is to suggest a framework that may be utilised, consisting of the criteria deemed important for early evaluation. Through utilising multi criteria decision making, the framework allows for a relative importance between criteria to contribute to assessment, while fuzzy set theory allows for a degree of uncertainty to be incorporated. This thesis is conducted through data collection from a number of professionals within private equity, selected from a non-probability sample. Semi-structured interviews and a 3 pairwise comparison is utilised to allow for analysis and discussion with regards to earlier research and theory, while allowing for comparison between respondents. The results of the thesis indicate that utilising a framework for early evaluation of potential targets may be beneficial. The key dimensions to consider are financial, commercial and market capabilities. However, the criteria constituting the dimensions may be firm or industry specific.
Förvärv är en viktig del av tillväxten och utvecklingen av företag i en rad olika marknader. De genomförs under varierande förutsättningar med olika mål och avsikter, och med olika syften. Denna uppsats fokuserar på förvärv utförda av serieinvesterare på en riskkapitalsmarknad. Dessa förvärv karaktäriseras av en konkurrensutsatt marknad, där tillgång till en bred pipeline av potentiella förvärvsmöjligheter förväntas vara en viktig framgångsfaktor. Således är hantering av leadsgenerering och sourcing av möjliga förvärvsobjekt viktiga faktorer för att främja ett aktivt förvärvsflöde. Tidigare forskning tyder på att detta är ett välutforskat område inom venture capital, men saknas i stor utsträckning inom riskkapital. Denna uppsats analyserar och diskuterar möjligheten att systematisera tidig utvärdering av potentiella förvärvsobjekt inom riskkapital. Avsikten är att föreslå ett ramverk som kan användas, bestående av de kriteria som anses viktiga vid tidig utvärdering. Genom att använda multi criteria decision making möjliggör ramverket en relativ betydelse mellan kriterier att påverka bedömningen, medan fuzzy set-teori möjliggör för en grad av osäkerhet att inkorporeras. Denna uppsats utförs genom datainsamling från ett antal yrkesverksamma inom riskkapital, utvalda från en icke-sannolikhetsprovtagning. Semi-strukturerade intervjuer och en parvis 5 jämförelse används för analys och diskussion i relation till tidigare forskning och teori, och tillåter även jämförelse mellan svarande. Resultaten av denna uppsats indikerar att användande av ett ramverk för tidig utvärdering av potentiella förvärvsobjekt kan vara positiv. De viktigaste dimensionerna att ta i beaktning är finansiella, kommersiella och marknadsmässiga förmågor. Kriterierna som utgör dessa dimensioner kan dock vara bolags- eller industrispecifika.

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47

Lawrence, Penny. "Observing and understanding decision-making in two-year-olds in dialogue." Thesis, University of Winchester, 2017. http://repository.winchester.ac.uk/879/.

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This study critically examines how the decision-making of two-year-old children may take place and may be interpreted in dialogue. The aim is to increase adult understanding of the decision-making experiences of children. The decisions, as perceived by parents and practitioners as participants, are situated within the non-verbal as well as the verbal dialogue of the children and are interpreted through the dialogue of the interpreting adults. Case studies focus on three children drawn from families and settings willing to engage in extensive observation and analysis. The study is conducted with dialogism meta-theory containing a contextual social constructionist approach. The principal research methods are naturalistic video observations of the children over the course of their third year and video analysis sessions with parents and practitioners. I use a second-person approach to observation that acknowledges my presence with the children. Phenomenological principles underpin the interpretation. Multi-modal interaction analysis accesses aspects of the children’s phenomenal minds (here indicating no separation of mind and body), namely their expressions and responses to each other. The children’s dialogue is discussed in terms of Buber’s I-You relation and I-It attitude to the other, and in terms of what the children make relevant in their decisions in and with the world. Questions are raised about how decision-making in dialogue can be understood, discussing in particular the situated nature of this understanding, with the aim of contributing to the processes of observation and understanding in the future. A key contribution of the study is the exploration of mutuality and contextual knowing involving the perceptions of the adults closest to the children, and the contextual continuity of knowing in adults developing professional judgement in situations of uncertainty, and yet of relevance to the children.

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Liang, Yiheng. "Computational Methods for Discovering and Analyzing Causal Relationships in Health Data." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc804966/.

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Publicly available datasets in health science are often large and observational, in contrast to experimental datasets where a small number of data are collected in controlled experiments. Variables' causal relationships in the observational dataset are yet to be determined. However, there is a significant interest in health science to discover and analyze causal relationships from health data since identified causal relationships will greatly facilitate medical professionals to prevent diseases or to mitigate the negative effects of the disease. Recent advances in Computer Science, particularly in Bayesian networks, has initiated a renewed interest for causality research. Causal relationships can be possibly discovered through learning the network structures from data. However, the number of candidate graphs grows in a more than exponential rate with the increase of variables. Exact learning for obtaining the optimal structure is thus computationally infeasible in practice. As a result, heuristic approaches are imperative to alleviate the difficulty of computations. This research provides effective and efficient learning tools for local causal discoveries and novel methods of learning causal structures with a combination of background knowledge. Specifically in the direction of constraint based structural learning, polynomial-time algorithms for constructing causal structures are designed with first-order conditional independence. Algorithms of efficiently discovering non-causal factors are developed and proved. In addition, when the background knowledge is partially known, methods of graph decomposition are provided so as to reduce the number of conditioned variables. Experiments on both synthetic data and real epidemiological data indicate the provided methods are applicable to large-scale datasets and scalable for causal analysis in health data. Followed by the research methods and experiments, this dissertation gives thoughtful discussions on the reliability of causal discoveries computational health science research, complexity, and implications in health science research.

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Dobocan, Claudiu O. "Decisions integration : a critical necessity for special operations /." Thesis, Monterey, Calif. : Springfield, Va. : Naval Postgraduate School ; Available from National Technical Information Service, 2004. http://library.nps.navy.mil/uhtbin/hyperion/04Dec%5FDobocan.pdf.

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50

Schmidt, Katarina, and Alexandra Skerka. "Affärsförhandlingar : en studie av relationsskapande förhandlingar avseende köp- respektive säljsituationer i företag med olika typer av affärsverksamhet." Thesis, Linköping University, Department of Management and Economics, 2003. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-1543.

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Background: The starting point of the thesis is the growing importance of negotiations that serve to establish a relationship between the parties involved as companies’ business activities are getting more complex.

Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to find and to analyze which elements are of importance for parties, when creating a successful negotiation with regard to building long-term relationships, and if those elements differ for sales and procurement negotiations in companies with business activities of various kinds.

Research method: The study was realized with the help of twelve qualitative interviews.

Result: The elements of importance when creating a successful negotiation with regard to building long-term relationships were mainly elements of co-operation and to some extent elements of competition. Complex and public companies did also exhibit particular elements that were of importance for these categories. The elements did not part considerably regarding purchasers, sales representatives or companies with business activities of various kinds. The elements of importance when building long-term relationships were to a great extent dependent on human elements.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Operation Research/Decision Theory'

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