Forecasting and planning for inventory management has received considerable attention from the Operational Research (OR) community over the last 50 years because of its implications for decision making, both at the strategic level of an organization and at the operational level. Many influential...

A number of research projects have demonstrated that the efficiency of inventory systems does not relate directly to demand forecasting performance, as measured by standard forecasting accuracy measures. When a forecasting method is used as an input to an inventory system, it should therefore...

This Thesis is about behaviour, a special type of behaviour, the adoption and diffusion of-new ideas and practices - "innovations"- in particular technological-innovations. Successive Governments and'the Media frequently point to historical cases where British inventive skills have failed to...

Decision tree induction is a widely used technique for learning from data which first emerged in the 1980s. In recent years, several authors have noted that in practice, accuracy alone is not adequate, and it has become increasingly important to take into consideration the cost of misclassifying...

Radical Right Parties (RRPs) have traditionally been seen as ‘hard cases’ to forecast, with unstable voter bases affected by short-term influences. Building upon our previous work on forecasting the French Front National’s vote across time, we construct a comparable model for three other...

Traditional accounts of the history of insurance typically treat demand as a function of the availability of new and lower-cost forms of insurance. This paper draws on more recent research to illustrate the dialectical relationship between the demand for and supply of insurance services as the...

The development of a model of interdependence between investment in construction and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, based on a long-term trend, for the developing countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is presented. The study follows previous research undertaken by others who have...

Trust is described as an elusive concept, difficult to describe, understand, and therefore manage. The Trust in Construction project undertook five exploratory case studies in order to understand how trust is formed and the impact this has on project performance. The authors propose a model of...

Risk management (RM) is now widely accepted as an important tool in the management of projects. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with RM facilitators, current practice is explored. The findings provide a number of soft benchmarks. Interest in RM comes largely from educated clients...

We examine the dynamics of Chinese listed SMEs with respect to their post-market viability and growth after going public. The Kaplan–Meier estimation shows that SMEs are more likely to transition to a non-viable state than large firms. Further examination using the Cox model and the random...