Far-sighted Strategy Research Articles

Specifics of applying operational and combat measures and tools in counterintelligence operations under the conditions of the ongoing Russian military aggression

The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has faced the challange to sophisticate actual and fundamentally new approaches, methods and means of countering threats to national security under conditions of the ongoing full-scale invasion of Russian troops and occupation the territory of Ukraine. The imposition of martial law in Ukraine has considerably expanded the range of practical tasks performed by the bodies and departments of the Security Service of Ukraine. The conditions of the intelligence activities, specific features of counterintelligence activities during the war have been forming new approaches of counterintelligence operations. These factors set and manage new operational and combat tasks for the Security Service of Ukraine. Moreover, SSU is an authorized body in the sphere of counterintelligence activities, that performs tasks of preventing, detecting and analyzing threats to the national security of Ukraine and make challenges to the vital interests of the state. The accomplishment of thesre tasks is plausible on the basis of efficient and prompt identification and threats prevention to the national security of Ukraine, identifying the sources of threats, origin and consequences in order to successfully select methods and means to counter them. The application peculiarities of the operational and combat methods and means by the counterintelligence units of the Security Service of Ukraine during the execution of operational and combat missions in the conditions of the ongoing Russian military aggression against Ukraine are considered in the study. It has been determined that under martial law the counterintelligence units have developed a set of measures to counteract the Russian special services activities as a result of the special tasks that are under provisions of the Security Service of Ukraine. This was accomplished due to the efficiency and enemy goals identification, thoroughly selected methods and forms to prevent intelligence and subversive activities, using appropriate means to overcome the enemy. Mainly, the Security Service of Ukraine adjusts to modern realities, changes, supplements and improves its methods of activity. The Security Service of Ukraine develops a far-sighted strategy, amends its skills with new tactical techniques, creates and uses cutting-edge operational and combat tools and methods, which are transformed and sophisticated in the conditions of war. All these measures prevent threats to national security posed by the enemy. These methods are successfully applied by the counterintelligence units of the Security Service of Ukraine during the execution of operational and combat tasks, and require further theoretical justification.

Multi-Period Portfolio Optimization under Cash-In Strategies

Portfolio optimization has been crucial in its applications to finance. Investors allocate capital in terms of various assets and wisely adjust each proportion in quest of higher returns and lower risks. However, common optimization strategies are usually short- sighted, lacking the ability of gaining higher returns over a long period. This paper addresses Multi-Period Portfolio Optimization problem in more applicable settings to provide efficient strategies. Firstly, a summary of conclusions from former works and scholars is given. Since most previous works assume self-financing conditions, this work extends this constraint and considers more complex cash-in and cash-out situations. It also derives the expression of the optimal policy for trading at each period as well as the objective functions. Finally, numerical experiments are done under both self-financing and cash-in situations to prove the validity of conclusions. This work has profound implications in finance because it adopts conditions more consistent with real-world scenarios and provides more farsighted strategies. Moreover, the solution offers a prototype for similar optimization in other fields like electrical engineering and stochastic processes.

A Study of the Spirit of Moving to Northern Shaanxi and Its Value of the Times from Four Dimensions

Mao Zedong and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China resolutely led the army and the people to northern Shaanxi when the KMT broke the peace agreement and threatened Yan'an, creating a soul-stirring legendary history and creating a great spirit of fighting in northern Shaanxi to win the KMT opposition. Victory is bound to be closely related to far-sighted strategy, the United army and people, and noble will. It is a symbol of this spirit and has far-reaching value in the unprecedented changes in the past century, as long as people live, there is hope for everything, and the concern for the people, the sharing of joys and sorrows, the fear of hardships and dangers, the contempt for strong enemies, self-reliance and innovation.

A holistic view and evaluation of health and safety at work: Enabling the assessment of the overall burden

The social burden of unsafe and unhealthy workplaces is extremely high, with more than a billion victims of work-related illnesses per year, but a unified and comparable view of workers’ unsafe and unhealthy loads is still missing. This paper proposes a holistic approach that enables the comparison of Health and Safety (H&S) matters by quantifying the expected damage through a unique consistent indicator (R), that is, the average number of potential lost days of a worker in a working configuration. Evaluating risks of working configurations and then defining the overall company risks, enables decision-makers to quantitatively assess the burden to make well-grounded decisions for far-sighted strategies enhancing H&S. This study proposes a four-step process that finally returns the overall risk level (R) in terms of number of lost days. These steps are structured in a way that can be implemented regardless of any contexts’ features; their actual implementation, instead, will require a quantification that is assumed to be context – country at least – dependent because it will be grounded on potentially different available datasets. An example is provided in the paper, that fits the four-step process into the Italian context, by combining three types of risks – impact, cutting, and noise – under the same indicator (R). The approach has great potential for future applications in real working contexts. The four-step process has the potential to be used as a practical tool to assess the economic impact of the actual risk load over the years.

Competitive pricing and innovation investment strategies of green products considering firms' farsightedness and myopia

AbstractWith the deterioration of ecological environment and the improvement of consumer environmental awareness, a number of firms are actively engaging in product innovation to enhance product greenness. In this paper, we develop a differential game involving two competing firms, each of which produces and sells one green product to end consumers. The two firms carry out innovation investments to improve customers' perceived product greenness and also determine their own retail prices. Each firm's demand is linearly dependent on its own retail price and innovation investment, the rival's retail price and innovation investment, and the customer perceived product greenness. The objective of our study is to examine the impacts of the competing firms' farsighted and myopic behaviors regarding the consumer perceived product greenness on their pricing and innovation investment strategies and profits. We find the following interesting results. First, when one firm is farsighted and the other is myopic, the latter obtains more profits than the former if one firm's innovation investment has a relatively small direct effect on the other's demand, that is, there is a free‐riding for the myopic firm. Second, when the intensity of competition regarding the two firms' innovation investments is not strong, competing with a farsighted rival can make a firm better off. Third, the scenario that the two firms adopt farsighted strategies can achieve an equilibrium, whereas acting myopic strategies can bring more profits for both of them under some conditions, which leads to a prisoner's dilemma. These results still hold under separable multiplicative demand between retail prices and innovation investments.

Ceramics investigation: research questions and sampling criteria

Ceramics are a key indicator for the study of cultural heritage: – A valuable technological indicator because (a) ceramics mark the passage from the simple exploitation to the complex control of fire; (b) they represent the first pyrotechnological product of a certain complexity; and (c) they are able of triggering the development of other technologies such as those involving the processing of metal and glass. – A valuable socio-economic indicator because (a) ceramics are brought into the houses of both poor and wealthy families; (b) they provide evidence of trade routes and cultural exchange; and (c) they are able to pass on significant information about the evolution of aesthetic taste as well as dietary habits through the centuries. – A valuable chronological indicator because (a) their comparative study can provide accurate dating; (b) they can provide absolute dates by thermo-luminescence testing; and (c) they enable the dating of other materials found in stratigraphic association. In this framework, research questions are discussed according to the different steps of a typical research project in progress: from the individuation of the archaeological site or area, to the selection of the ceramic types to be investigated and the samples to be taken for the analyses. It is proposed that research questions should contribute to the reconstruction of a “big picture” covering wide and complex issues such as the circulation of a specific type of goods within large geographic areas and/or the diachronic evolution of production technology. It can be demonstrated that farsighted strategy in research planning can provide material for preliminary articles that satisfy professional obligations to publish periodically while also laying the groundwork for truly important contributions to the field. The distinct fields of provenance, technology, function, use, chronology and conservation are briefly reviewed in order to provide an introductory framework to the following contributions of this Topical Collection. As for research design, the aim here is to reaffirm the importance of typology and contextualization as the basis for all studies undertaken. Finally, it is demonstrated that true multidisciplinary collaboration, rather than working in silos according to different specializations, provides the best approach to obtaining accurate and meaningful results.

Farsighted Manipulation and Exploitation in Networks

Economic agents with an increased sophistication sometimes use their advantage to exploit their more naive counterparts. In public goods games played on networks, such an agent will attempt to manipulate as many of his neighbors as possible to produce the public good. We study the exploitation of a myopic population by a single farsighted player in such games. We show the existence and payoff-uniqueness of optimal farsighted strategies in every network structure. In the long run, the farsighted player’s effects are only felt locally. A simple dependence-withdrawal strategy reaches the optimal outcome for every network if the starting state is unfavorable, and reaches it for every starting state if the farsighted player is linked to all opponents. We characterize the lower and upper bounds of long-run payoffs the farsighted player can attain in a given network and make comparative statics with respect to adding a new link. The farsighted player always benefits from linking to more opponents (sociability) and is always harmed by his neighbors linking to each other (jealousy).

Leadership Influence on Quality Enhancement of Community Colleges

This study was conducted as an attempt to see the influence of educational leadership on employees for motivating them in quality enhancement mission. The assumption behind it was the need of creative and innovative leadership for motivated and efficient team spirit in quality education. The research questions were centralized in the leadership perceptions and their strategic efforts for imparting quality education. The philosophical and theoretical support of transformational leadership theory and continuous improvement approach strengthened the research. The researcher adopted interpretive research paradigm with in- depth interview and field observation as primary sources and various printed documents as the secondary sources. The basic data were generated from twelve participants of three different community colleges. The perceived data were presented and interpreted under various themes via perceptions and efforts in quality enhancement, leadership influence on employees, human resource development and mobilization for institutional strength and shifting threats into opportunities. The findings hint varied and insufficient attempts of leaders for addressing growing needs of these colleges. The concluding remarks further encourage college leaders in general and community college leaders in particular to plan and implement farsighted strategies to cope with the ever widening challenges in academia.

Territorios de diferencia: la ontología política de los “derechos al territorio”

This article presents the rudiments of a political ontology approach to the ethno-territorial struggles in Latin America. Such struggles, it is argued, constitute strategies of the defence of relational worlds, and the knowledge developed in them by communities and activists embodies a far-sighted strategy for the perseverance and fostering of the pluriverse.

Analyzing Positioning Strategies in Sponsored Search Auctions Under CTR-Based Quality Scoring

Quality score (QS) plays a critical role in sponsored search advertising (SSA) auctions, and in practice is closely correlated to the historical click-through rate (CTR) of an advertisement. The CTR-QS correlation may impose great influence on advertisers’ positioning strategies of selecting the targeting slots in the sponsored list. In the literature, however, QS is implicitly assumed to be an independent variable and exogenously assigned by Web search engines, so that little theoretical or managerial insights can be offered to help understand the positioning dynamics in SSA auctions with CTR-QS correlation. We strive to bridge this research gap in this paper. Based on a discrete time-dependent optimal control model, which explicitly captures the relationship between the historical CTR and QS, we determine the optimal strategy for revenue-maximizing advertisers’ QS-based positioning decisions through a policy-iteration-based numerical approximation method. We also investigate two practically-used heuristic strategies, namely the greedy and farsighted positioning strategies, aiming to examine and help understand advertisers’ real-world positioning dynamics. Our analysis indicates that both the optimal and greedy positioning strategies lead advertisers to monotonically increase or decrease their targeting slots over time, which may cause a polarization trend emerging in SSA markets. Meanwhile, the farsighted positioning strategy can accelerate the polarization. Our simulations show that both the greedy and farsighted strategies have good revenue performance. Our findings indicate that advertisers should monotonically adjust their targeting positions to maximize their revenue in CTR-QS correlated SSA auctions. Our findings also highlight the need for Web search engine companies to set a lowered weight for historical CTRs or use position-normalized CTRs in their QS measurements, so as to suppress the polarization trend.

Corruption as a systemic phenomenon: Political system, structure of government, institutions, policies

The subject of these considerations is the institutional reality in Serbia, as a general backdrop and a determinant of corruption. It is demonstrated that Serbia, being ethnically, religiously and culturally heterogeneous, is predestined to be extremely differentiated in the political sense, too. Serbia is therefore equally preordained to be governed by extremely inefficient coalition governments formed by and leaning on extraordinarily wide political coalitions, rarely comprising less than ten parties. Coalition governments take a long time and lots of efforts to form, they have difficulties in reaching mutually acceptable and consistent courses of action, they face hazards of their internal conflicts. In addition, they are forced to satisfy a wide multitude of frequently opposed interests. They are easy to dismiss and very uncertain and volatile in their acts and policy orientations. Each coalition partner can blackmail the rest of the government and can, within wide limits, obtain whatever is highlighted as a 'legitimate'requirement. The legislature, executive and judiciary branches of government are not functionally separated and the mechanism of checks and balances does not operate. Power is vertically divided instead, with parties as members of the ruling coalition holding all layers of all three powers within segments of governments which are assigned to them by the coalition compact. For instance, the party which has agriculture within its command, controls all institutions associated with agriculture at all hierarchical levels of political and administrative control. The parties in government have extremely strong power position: they cannot be dispensed with by the government and can even hardly be criticized. On the other hand, the government as a whole is sadly inefficient in performing its functions and vacillating in its policy stands. In sum, it is strong where its strength is not socially desirable and weak where its potency and resilience are mostly needed. In such institutional circumstances - with far from completed regulatory structure and institutional vacua pervading all over - the struggle against corruption is uneven and hazardous, while the existing institutions created to fight it have to design well thought out and farsighted strategies in order to achieve any success.

Genetic engineering technologies for Ethiopian agriculture: Prospects and challenges

Genetic engineering (GE) technologies can contribute to improve crop productivity and quality in Ethiopia. Adoption of commercialized insect resistance and herbicide tolerance technologies can help to protect major crops such as cotton, maize, sorghum and small cereals from their main insect pests or prevent heavy weed-inflicted loss. Moreover, key production constraints such as bacterial wilt of enset, late blight of potato, drought stress on crops like maize and wheat, lodging resistance on tef as well as low nutritive quality of native crops like enset and grasspea can be addressed by strengthening domestic GE research capacity and international collaboration. Cognizant of this potential, the Ethiopian government has made significant investment in modern biotechnology capacity building in the last decade. There has also been specific interest by cotton sector to boost its productivity by adopting insect resistance (Bt) technologies. However, the GE regulatory system based on the existing biosafety law is so stringent that it is not possible for the country to access useful technologies from abroad as well as initiate domestic GE research. Consequently, no GE experiment is approved so far, leaving the country at risk of missing out on the global GE revolution. To catch up and  harness the benefits of GE technologies, the country needs to create conducive regulatory environment, strengthen domestic GE capacity and devise a farsighted strategy.

Can cooperation with the BRICs and other Growth Markets help EU member states exit the crisis?

This article explores potential differences in the level and speed of adjustment to the new centres of economic growth (BRICs and other Growth Markets) between the industrial member states (EU-15) and the new members of the European Union (NMS). It seeks to examine whether such differences can be attributed to differences in policies and the countries' crisis exit strategies. It establishes that the NMS have been more successful in adjusting to the new centres of economic growth (more by way of exports than inward FDI), but not if Russia, easily the biggest partner of the NMS, is excluded from the analysis. It therefore cannot be claimed that this success was the result of far-sighted strategies.

Regulatory Authorities Expect Innovative Drug Delivery Systems (DDS)

The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) and the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) are responsible for appropriately implementing regulations and providing necessary instructions and advice so that patients have access to safer, more effective drugs. These responsibilities are essential missions of the MHLW/PMDA, although restrictions on drug use or development might be considered to be purely regulatory matters. In the genomic drug discovery era of the 21st century, it is expected that new, innovative drugs will be developed, although the reality can be slightly disturbing. The number of approvals of new molecular entities (NMEs) is only approximately 20 per year both in Japan and the USA and may reach an even lower level. In light of current drug development trends, drug delivery systems (DDS) for targeted therapy or personalized medicines as well as NMEs should be explored more proactively. To promote the development and evaluation of innovative DDS, the MHLW/PMDA considers it important to communicate smoothly among industry-government-academia from the very early stage of development. To promote this, the MHLW/PMDA launched regulatory affairs consultations on R&D strategy for drugs in July 2011. Innovative DDS require not only cutting-edge technology or materials but also extensions of existing pharmaceutical technology. It is most important for innovative DDS to benefit patients in practical clinical settings. The MHLW/PMDA encourages the relevant parties to develop a far-sighted strategy with this goal in mind.

Dynamic Slotting and Pricing Decisions in a Durable Product Supply Chain

We consider a supply chain in which a manufacturer sells an innovative durable product to an independent retailer over its life cycle. We assume that the product demand follows a Bass-type diffusion process, and it is determined by the market influences, retail price of the product, and shelf space allocated to it. We consider the following retailer profit optimization strategies: (i) the myopic strategy of maximizing the current-period profit and(ii) the far-sighted strategy of maximizing the life-cycle profit. We characterize the optimal dynamic shelf-space allocation and retail pricing policies for the retailer and wholesale pricing policies for the manufacturer. We also compute these policies. Surprisingly, we find that the manufacturer, and sometimes even the retailer, is better of with a myopic retailer strategy in some cases.

Farsighted strategies in the formation of a communication network

I examine the formation of a specific communication network, a variant of the two-way flow model, in which agents have farsighted strategies. I show that the likelihood to form efficient networks tends to zero for sufficiently large network sizes.