In a global economy with intense competition, companies face tremendous pressure to become more innovation-driven. With the development of information technologies, many companies are seeking to incorporate novel IT-based approaches in their business practices, such as evaluating emerging...

In this paper, the treasury rates and the credit migrations are jointly modeled by multi-dimensional affine processes. In order to capture the entire information, including credit migrations and default events, we construct non-conservative regular affine processes to model credit migrations and...

We develop a general and efficient method for valuating credit derivatives based on multiple entities in an affine framework. This includes interdependence of market and credit risk, joint credit migration and counterparty default risk of multiple firms. As an application we provide closed form...

Do political decentralisation and inter state competition favour innovation and growth? There has long been a lively debate surrounding this question, going back to David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This book is a new attempt to test its veracity. The existing literature tends to assume that the...

Real estate investment and construction projects have the characteristics of large-scale, long life cycle, technical complexity, multi-units involvement, difficult to organize and implement, and the projects are usually located in wide range. Therefore, it¡¯s necessary to construct the...

Genetic algorithms (GAs) have been fairly successful in a diverse range of optimization problems, providing an efficient and robust way for guiding a search even in a complex system and in the absence of domain knowledge. In this paper, two types of genetic algorithms, real-coded and...

Does the payment scheme have an effect on inventory decisions in the newsvendor problem? Keeping the net profit structure constant, we examine three payment schemes that can be interpreted as the newsvendor's order being financed by the newsvendor herself (scheme O), by the supplier through...

Walking, the simplest form of transportation has many benefits for pedestrians and the society. Yet, pedestrians are a vulnerable group of people and safety concerns are a significant barrier in one's decision to walk. Multiple signal related pedestrian countermeasures have been proposed to...

Microalgal biofuel research in China has made noticeable progress, and algae cultivation for biofuel production is considered to be an important contribution to <em>Greenhouse Gas</em> (GHG) mitigation and energy security. In this paper, the algal biofuel potentiality in China was reviewed from the...