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The aim of this study was to develop a value model of wellness service. In this study, those persons who work in health care systems were recruited to participate in interviews for investigating the value of various roles and the effects of these values between the roles. Throughout this study, the flow model, sequence model and cultural model were established to explain the relationship between the different roles, the process being influenced by others, and the effects of other values in wellness-related activities. According to the models, the following features of value in wellness activities could be found: personal, interactive and temporal. Based on the result of this study, the investigating and presenting the relevance of effects between values more completely will be researched in the next study.

This paper contributes to the discussion on value models as decision support in early design. Emerging from data collected through semi-structured interviews with 20 professionals in 3 manufacturing companies, the paper highlights the limitation of current development practices to promote cross-functional knowledge sharing about the stakeholders' lifecycle expectations to be met. This limits the ability to make decisions about aspects of value that are difficult to assess and quantify. The objective of the paper is then to propose the use of value models as 'boundary objects' to increase shared awareness about the design intent, triggering negotiations towards more value-adding design decisions. This role of the value model as a boundary object is studied through design experiments, using a combination of protocol analysis and observation technique on the video-recorded material.

Modern e-service providers rely on service innovation to stay relevant. Once a new service package is designed, implementation-specific aspects such as value (co-)creation and cost/benefit analysis are investigated. However, due to time-to-market or competitive advantage constraints, innovative services are rarely assessed for potential risks of fraud before they are put out on the market. But these risks may result in loss of economic value for actors involved in the e-service’s provision. Our e3fraude3fraud approach automatically generates and prioritizes undesired-able scenarios from a business value model of the e-service, thereby drastically reducing the time needed to conduct an assessment. We provide examples from telecom service provision to motivate and illustrate the utility of the tool.

The Interactive Model-Centric Systems Engineering research effort is interested in developing knowledge necessary to leverage the increasing involvement of computational models in system design. A key activity in such model-centric environments is the selection and usage of models to generate data for decision making. Extending work from prior demonstrations, this paper presents a case study where insights are gained via usage and comparison of multiple models. The results highlight the need to explore how model choice and trade-off can impact the attractiveness of alternative systems. Sixteen tradespaces of cost-benefit data are generated via combined pairwise usage of four alternative evaluative models (performance and cost calculations) and four alternative value models (calculating the “goodness” of different levels of performance and cost). These tradespaces are used to determine attractive Pareto efficient Space Tug vehicles, as well as insights that are less sensitive to model choice. No best model is shown, but rather different models provide insights into different aspects of the system evaluation and valuation activity. Two categories of insights are highlighted: patterns in the structure of the decision problem (i.e., how “value” is defined and what systems might be feasible) and artifacts of the models themselves (i.e., how to mitigate against misleading results due to model abstractions).

The objective of this special issue is to introduce a new theme, the use of game and decision theory in reliability modeling and risk analysis, which was the focus of the First Symposium on Games and Decisions in Reliability and Risk (GDRR) held at the George Washington University on May 27–28, 2009. The issue considered papers presented at the Second Symposium on GDRR ( http://www.mi.imati.cnr.it/conferences/gdrr11.html ), held at the Hotel Villa Carlotta, Belgirate (VB), Lake Maggiore, Italy, on May 19–21, 2011, and also was open to the public for submission of papers relevant to the theme. The contributors to the special issue include Sevillano, Rios Insua, and Rios; Delquié; Foschi and Spizzichino; French; Bhattacharjya and Deleris; Bhattacharjya and Shachter; Lejeune; Cheung and Zhuang; Smith and Dodd; Sri Bhashyam and Montibeller; and Paté-Cornell.

This bachelor's thesis is, as the itself name indicates, concerned with the concept of education of children by their parents - vegetarians, possibly vegans. What is examined is whether they are trying to transfer their own model of values - vegetarianism or veganism onto the child, but also what aspects will influence their future value orientation the most during the course of their primary socialisation. The influence of the informing parent's partner as well as that of grandparents on both sides is considered, further on the influence of the educational institution the child attends is factored in. It is there where the child is confronted with different norms and values than those that the child can be familiar with from the home and parents are then have to resolve the arisen situation. The thesis itself is divided into three main sections which are the following: Theoretical Introduction, Methodology and Research.The first section is dedicated to the theoretical background enabling the confimation of data necessary for the analysis itself. Specifically it outlines the value basis of vegetarianism, explains the difference between vegetarianism and its more radical form veganism. It delineates the influence of family and educational institutions on the latter value orientation of the child....

We model capital flows among Chinese provinces using a theory-based variance decomposition that allows us to gauge the importance of various channels of external adjustments at the regional level: variation in intertemporal prices—domestic and international interest rates and the real exchange rate—and intertemporal variation in quantities (cash flows of output, investment and government spending). We find that our simple framework can account for around 85 percent of the variation in regional capital flows over the 1985-2010 period. Our results suggest that the relative importance of private and state-owned enterprises, a province’s level of integration into the world economy and its sectoral composition play an important role for external adjustment vis-à-vis the rest of China and the world. Specifically, we find strong empirical support for the view that differential access of private and state-owned enterprises to finance is a key driver of China’s surpluses. We discuss implications of our results for global imbalances in capital flows.

The theoretical part of this work presents the financial analysis as a research instrument of the financial health and responds to questions about how, why and for whom the analysis is performed. Gradually, the most important areas of research presented - profitability, activity, solvency and liquidity - and the ratios used to measure them. Special attention is paid bankruptcy and value models. In the practical part, these instruments are applied to analyze the financial situation of the company Beck Boxing Club Praha, s.r.o.. The conclusion is marked by interpretation of the findings.

We study international business cycles and capital flows in the UK, the United States and the Emerging Periphery in the period 1885-1939. Based on the same set of parameters, our model explains current account dynamics under both the Classical Gold Standard and during the Interwar period. We interpret this as evidence for Gold Standard mentality: the expectation formation mechanism with respect to major macroeconomic variables driving the current account - output, exchange rates and interest rates - has remained fundamentally stable between the two periods. Nonetheless, the macroeconomic environment changed: Volatility increased generally, but less so for international capital flows than for GDP. This pattern is consistent with shocks in the Interwar period becoming more persistent and more global.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze recent years of declining Oděvní podnik a.s. Based on the financial analysis, I would like to know where were the main reasons that caused the bankruptcy of the company. To see how the company performed from an operational perspective, I compare its performance with a competing firm Blazek s.r.o. I apply solvent and bankruptcy models, at the monitored company, on which bases I shall consider whether the situation was coming predictable.

The goal of this bachelor thesis is to set up competing position of the company Esonic a.s. in relation to its main competitors by the means of financial analyses. The field of corporation business is industrial automation, taking place mostly in food processing industry. With respect to low competition of the three most significant corporations, which I am going to analyze, this publication should be able to tell about the entire field. The main competitors, which will be compared to the company Esonic, a.s., are Sidat, spol. s.r.o. and ProjectSoft, spol. s.r.o. At the conclusion, I will determine the financial situation of the company Esonic a.s. and provide information about it's competing situation in this business field.

In the healthcare sector, different healthcare providers, such as home care, primary care, and hospital clinics, collaborate in order to increase values for patients, such as better health state, increased knowledge on health conditions, and increased feeling of safety. To govern and evaluate such collaboration, we need a tool to understand how different patient values are related to each other, how values are related to goals, and how values and goals are related to actions planned and carried out among healthcare providers. Thereby, we can measure, analyse and redesign existing actions in order to better achieve desirable values. Furthermore, we also need a tool for finding new innovative goals and actions that better create desirable values. In this paper, we propose such a tool, in the form of a method based on value, goal and action models. Value models depict actors and the valuable resources they exchange as well as the purpose of the resources exchanged. Using these value models as a base, we are able to systematically identify high level goals and more detailed goals, as well as actions supporting these goals. Thereby, we will attain traceability from actions, via goals and values, which the actions realise. A case study from the Swedish healthcare sector is used to ground and apply our proposed method REMS