The market share of online purchasing is under two percent of total retailspending, which provides an indication that consumers have been slow to adoptonline purchasing. Previous research has shown that consumers perceive risksassociated with purchasing online and these perceptions are likely to...

Commercial rumours are an increasingly prevalent feature of the business environment, and the Web has changed how they are spread. Commercial rumours affect sales and consumer confidence. As soon as a negative rumour begins to spread, sales can fall drastically. The challenge for marketers is to...

This report describes methods for prioritizing the risk importances of maintenances using a Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA). Approaches then are described for quantifying their reliability and risk effects. Two different PRA importance measures, minimal cutset importances and risk reduction...

As the utility industry adapts to meet the changing regulatory and business climate, it is becoming increasingly important for utilities to identify and quantify the risks in various aspects of doing business. To reduce the risk of depending too heavily on one specific type of generation or...

A discrete-time Markov process can be compactly modeled as a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN)--a graphical model with nodes representing random variables and directed edges indicating causality between variables. Each node has a probability distribution, conditional on the variables represented by...

This paper investigates the questions of what statistical information about a memory request sequence is useful to have in making page replacement decisions: Our starting point is the Markov Request Model for page request sequences. Although the utility of modeling page request sequences by the...

A person learns by trial and error if he occasionally tries out new strategies, rejecting choices that are “erroneous” in the sense that they do not lead to higher payoffs. In a game, however, strategies can become erroneous due to a change of behavior by someone else. Such passive errors...

The focus of this thesis is on the application of decision models to the economic evaluation of health care technologies. The primary objective addresses the correct choice of modelling technique, as the attributes of the chosen technique could have a significant impact on the process, as well...

In this paper, we extend the debate concerning Credit Default Swap valuation to include time varying correlation and co-variances. Traditional multi-variate techniques treat the correlations between covariates as constant over time; however, this view is not supported by the data. Secondly, since...