In 1935, Walter Benjamin introduced the aura as the abstract conceptualization of uniqueness, authenticity, and singularity that encompasses an original art object. With the advent of technological reproducibility, Benjamin posits that the aura of an object deteriorates when the original is...

Domain ontologies and conceptual models similarly capture and represent concepts from the real world for inclusion in an information system. This paper examines challenges of conceptual modeling and domain ontology development when mapping to high-level ontologies. The intent is to reconcile...

Manufacturers aim to design product-service systems (PSS) which integrate services with products to attain sustained competitive advantage from a life cycle perspective. PSS design should be customised solutions which are aligned to integrated stakeholders' capabilities, a subject which the...

This paper offers an econometric methodology for the detection of self-organisational change (defined in terms of the presence of time irreversibility, structural change and fundamental uncertainty) in economic precesses that follow logistic diffusion growth paths in historical time. The...

We demonstrate that political geography has value to firms. We do so by exploiting shocks to political maps that occur around redistricting cycles in the United States. These keep some firms in Congressional districts that are largely unchanged at one extreme and reassign other firms to entirely...

In this paper, we consider the strategic asset allocation of an insurance company. This task can be seen as a special case of portfolio optimization. In the 1950s, Markowitz proposed to formulate portfolio optimization as a bicriteria optimization problem considering risk and return as...

What determines political candidates' election prospects' We match roll call votes of candidates for the majority elected upper house of parliament who were previously in the lower house with revealed preferences of their constituency. Thereby, we obtain a direct measure of past congruence....

As the public debate over stem cell research continues, the observable voting behaviour in Switzerland offers a unique opportunity to compare the voting behaviour of politicians with that of voters. In this paper, by analysing the outcomes of a referendum on a liberal new bill regulating such...