Systemic Uncertainty Research Articles

Sales-Based Rebate Design

We study rebate mechanisms according to which a monopolist selling a product introduces rebates as function of the volume of buyers. This enables the firm to induce payoff externalities that ordinarily do not exist. The monopoly firm sells an indivisible good to a mass of consumers with uncertain valuations corresponding to two sources of uncertainty: a systemic uncertainty corresponding to the realized quality, and an idiosyncratic uncertainty modeling the diversity of consumers’ tastes. Analyzing the equilibria of the induced global game among the consumers, we show that introducing positive externality via an increasing aggregate reward program reduces the profit. Using variational optimization techniques, we identify several key characteristics of the optimal reward program: the optimal solution is a “full-refund or nothing” policy, fully reimbursing the buyers if the realized quality falls in one of the finitely many refund-eligible intervals. The number of intervals, though finite, grow unboundedly as consumers’ tastes become less diverse and valuations concentrate around the true quality. While finding the optimal reward program is in general an intractable problem, we fully characterize the optimal solution in two important instances: one with constraints on the reward size and the other with bounds on the rate of change of the reward with sales volume. Despite their simple and intuitive structures, the corresponding optimal reward programs asymptotically recover the optimal solution. Our analysis sheds light on the potential role of novel technology-enabled features of crowd-based markets in developing new revenue management strategies.

An optimization approach for observation association with systemic uncertainty applied to electro-optical systems

The observation to observation measurement association problem for dynamical systems can be addressed by determining if the uncertain admissible regions produced from each observation have one or more points of intersection in state space. An observation association method is developed which uses an optimization based approach to identify local Mahalanobis distance minima in state space between two uncertain admissible regions. A binary hypothesis test with a selected false alarm rate is used to assess the probability that an intersection exists at the point(s) of minimum distance. The systemic uncertainties, such as measurement uncertainties, timing errors, and other parameter errors, define a distribution about a state estimate located at the local Mahalanobis distance minima. If local minima do not exist, then the observations are not associated. The proposed method utilizes an optimization approach defined on a reduced dimension state space to reduce the computational load of the algorithm. The efficacy and efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated on observation data collected from the Georgia Tech Space Object Research Telescope.

GIS-based bivariate statistical techniques for groundwater potential analysis (an example of Iran)

Groundwater potential analysis prepares better comprehension of hydrological settings of different regions. This study shows the potency of two GIS-based data driven bivariate techniques namely statistical index (SI) and Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) to analyze groundwater potential in Broujerd region of Iran. The research was done using 11 groundwater conditioning factors and 496 spring positions. Based on the ground water potential maps (GPMs) of SI and DST methods, 24.22% and 23.74% of the study area is covered by poor zone of groundwater potential, and 43.93% and 36.3% of Broujerd region is covered by good and very good potential zones, respectively. The validation of outcomes displayed that area under the curve (AUC) of SI and DST techniques are 81.23% and 79.41%, respectively, which shows SI method has slightly a better performance than the DST technique. Therefore, SI and DST methods are advantageous to analyze groundwater capacity and scrutinize the complicated relation between groundwater occurrence and groundwater conditioning factors, which permits investigation of both systemic and stochastic uncertainty. Finally, it can be realized that these techniques are very beneficial for groundwater potential analyzing and can be practical for water-resource management experts.

Assessment of Probability of Failure of Building Structures in Uncertainty Conditions

When assessing a reliability of building structures, probabilistic models are used that have some random values (RV) as their input. The statistical analysis of these RV inevitably introduces some uncertainties in the assessments of their parameters. In this paper a novel method is given to assess the probability of failure (PoF) of building structures (BS) in the conditions of epistemic uncertainty of the initial data. Epistemic uncertainty is a systemic uncertainty that emerges due to insufficient knowledge about the processes being studied and substitution of them by some approximation models. The uncertainty is accounted for using the Bayesian analysis.

"COUPLED PROCESSES" AS DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES IN SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

ABSTRACT The dynamics of innovation in complex systems industries is becoming an independent research stream. Apart from conventional uncertainties related to commerce and technology, complex-system industries must cope with systemic uncertainty. This paper's objective is to analyze evolving technological paths from one product generation to the next through two case studies in the Brazilian aerospace industry, considering systems integration as an empirical instantiation of dynamic capabilities. A proposed "coupled processes" model intertwines two organizational processes regarded as two levels of dynamic capabilities: new product and technological developments. The model addresses the role of emergent properties in shaping a firm's technological base. Moreover, it uses a technology readiness level to unveil systems integration business tricks and as a decision-making yardstick. The "coupled processes" model is revealed as a set of dynamic capabilities presenting ambidexterity in complex systems industries, a finding that may be relevant for newly industrialized economies.

Catalysing innovation for social impact: The role of social enterprises in the Indian sanitation sector

One of the roles of social entrepreneurship within a national system of innovation (NSI) is to generate and ensure effective adoption of innovations that address underserved needs. However, many such innovations do not achieve the expected social impact. Why? Our paper explores answers to this question by considering access to sanitation as a basic need and ‘toilets’ as an innovation for those who had no prior access to one. We trace the evolution of the Indian sanitation sector and then delve into the process of sanitation coverage in an Indian village. We show that demand for social entrepreneurship is being increasingly satisfied by third party sponsored social enterprises. However, there is systemic uncertainty about the efforts required to catalyze demand and strategic uncertainty about the social enterprise's capabilities and intentions. Long term impact is jointly determined by the true intention of the social enterprise, its capabilities and the nature of contextual challenges. Therefore, forecasting of social change should integrate the incentives within NSI for social entrepreneurship to make high-quality sustained social impact rather than short-lived ones. This will not only depend on the willingness to adopt, but also the monitoring systems, impact analysis and sustainability audits that social entrepreneurship is subject to.

Demarcation and The Created Controversy

The problem of demarcation continues to attract attention, in part because solutions are perceived to have enormous social significance. The civic motivation, however, I argue is in tension with the heterogeneity of the sciences. Philosophers of science would be better employed reflecting on the features, causes, and consequences, of created, scientific controversies. These arise when relevant experts are in broad agreement about what conclusions can sensibly be drawn from available evidence, but the public perceives an expert community deeply divided and conclusions that are plagued by profound and systemic uncertainty. In the second part of the paper I explore this concept further.

Application of maturity assessment tools in the innovation process: converting system's emergent properties into technological knowledge

This paper aims at establishing a theoretical construction between the concept of learning-by-using and the concepts of Technological Readiness Level (TRL) and System Readiness Level (SRL). The concept of learning-by-using reveals that the technical change that takes place in complex systems is given by the sum of small improvements in many different technological disciplines integrated in a specific configuration of this system. This kind of learning results from the iterative combination of scientific and technological knowledge, which is generated by the extensive use of products and their associated production processes. A stock of this combined knowledge might be required to cope with emergent properties of complex systems. The pattern of complex systems evolution involves the balance of technological and scientific frontiers as well as the fulfillment of customer expectation. Every innovation involves systemic uncertainty, which is positively correlated to the magnitude of the change introduced into the complex system. Maturity level of technological solutions allows organizations to assess pragmatically strategic risk exposure of implementing complex system innovation. The concept of SRL represents a proficuous tool to unveil emergent properties, which consider both the TRL of individual elements and how they are integrated into a complex system.

The role of buy-side anchoring bias: Evidence from the real estate market

We examine anchoring bias within the real estate market by evaluating evidence and a priori arguments on the effects of investor sentiment on willingness-to-pay among homebuyers. Based upon a unique dataset which provides the complete histories of transactions in the real estate market, our findings reveal that the anchoring phenomenon prevails regardless of homebuyer's gender. Homebuyers faced with higher systemic uncertainty and out-of-state housing transactions exhibit higher levels of anchoring; the heuristic thinking biased on investors' willingness-to-pay gives rise to the deviations from reasonable housing values.

Cultivation Restrictions for Genetically Modified Plants

Directive (EU) 2015/412 allows Member States to restrict the cultivation of genetically modified seed or propagating material, although their placing on the market has been authorized. This so-called opt-out is meant to resolve the current Member States’ conflict about gene technology by facilitating differences of states concerning cultivation regulations. The concept has at the same time the potential to pioneer a general reorientation of European and even global principles of free trade. Where as trade restrictions on grounds of health and environmental protection could thus far only be justified on a strict scientific basis, a variety of risk perceptions and evaluations are now made acceptable. The article explores what grounds may justify cultivation restrictions beyond those identified in a concrete environmental risk assessment. Two categories are suggested: general environmental concerns weighing systemic effects and uncertainty, and trans-environmental concerns such as the use-value of genetically modified plants, the avoidance of costs resulting from policies of coexistence with conventional plants, the halting of agricultural industrialisation, and ethical considerations. It is further examined if cultivation restrictions based on such grounds are compatible with the EU rules of free movement of goods and relevant WTO agreements. The pertinent report of a WTO-Panel on genetically modified plants is scrutinized for this purpose and a dissenting interpretation developed.

Path dependence in Operational Research—How the modeling process can influence the results

In Operational Research practice there are almost always alternative paths that can be followed in the modeling and problem solving process. Path dependence refers to the impact of the path on the outcome of the process. The steps of the path include, e.g. forming the problem solving team, the framing and structuring of the problem, the choice of model, the order in which the different parts of the model are specified and solved, and the way in which data or preferences are collected. We identify and discuss seven possibly interacting origins or drivers of path dependence: systemic origins, learning, procedure, behavior, motivation, uncertainty, and external environment. We provide several ideas on how to cope with path dependence.

Asymmetric transmission of a bank liquidity shock

We investigate whether banks that receive a positive liquidity shock make up for the reduction in the amount of credit supplied by banks that suffer a negative liquidity shock. For identification, we use the exogenous shock to the Brazilian banking system caused by the international turmoil of 2008 that sparked a run on small and medium banks toward systemically important banks. We find that a reduction in liquidity causes banks to strongly decrease their loan supply, whereas a positive liquidity shock has a small (if any) effect on the loan supply. Our evidence shows that this asymmetric effect of liquidity on the loan supply occurs both at the intensive and the extensive margins. Our findings are consistent with the theories that predict that borrowers face switching costs and that banks tend to hold on to liquidity during periods of systemic uncertainty.

A typology of uncertainty derived from an analysis of critical incidents in medical residents: A mixed methods study.

BackgroundMedical uncertainty is inherently related to the practice of the physician and generally affects his or her patient care, job satisfaction, continuing education, as well as the overall goals of the health care system. In this paper, some new types of uncertainty, which extend existing typologies, are identified and the contexts and strategies to deal with them are studied.MethodsWe carried out a mixed-methods study, consisting of a qualitative and a quantitative phase. For the qualitative study, 128 residents reported critical incidents in their clinical practice and described how they coped with the uncertainty in the situation. Each critical incident was analyzed and the most salient situations, 45 in total, were retained. In the quantitative phase, a distinct group of 120 medical residents indicated for each of these situations whether they have been involved in the described situations and, if so, which coping strategy they applied. The analysis examines the relation between characteristics of the situation and the coping strategies.ResultsFrom the qualitative study, a new typology of uncertainty was derived which distinguishes between technical, conceptual, communicational, systemic, and ethical uncertainty. The quantitative analysis showed that, independently of the type of uncertainty, critical incidents are most frequently resolved by consulting senior physicians (49 % overall), which underscores the importance of the hierarchical relationships in the hospital. The insights gained by this study are combined into an integrative model of uncertainty in medical residencies, which combines the type and perceived level of uncertainty, the strategies employed to deal with it, and context elements such as the actors present in the situation. The model considers the final resolution at each of three levels: the patient, the health system, and the physician’s personal level.ConclusionsThis study gives insight into how medical residents make decisions under different types of uncertainty, giving account of the context in which the interactions take place and of the strategies used to resolve the incidents. These insights may guide the development of organizational policies that reduce uncertainty and stress in residents during their clinical training.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12909-015-0459-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Administration of Medical Contexts with Denotational Mathematics in Ubiquitous Computing Home Environments

Home healthcare promises significant advantages over the traditional hospitalization, provided the support of the contemporary scientific and technological achievements. The ubiquitous computing paradigm suits the home healthcare provided that the dispersed computing devices in the home environment can actively participate in the interpretation of the developed, each time, medical context. Large numbers of disseminated sensors and computing devices, wirelessly and ad-hoc connected, present problems related to energy limitations and the patients' mobility introduce systemic complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The formal description of such systems requires the inclusion of extensive details becoming tedious, if not impractical. Denotational Mathematics provides an alternative formal methodology framework capable to formally describe the constituting components, the performed operations, and the static and dynamic behaviors of complex system. Employing the expressive power of Denotational Mathematics, it is attempted to design a system that develops medically valid contextual contents adequate to support patients hospitalized at home. The formally described design provides the contents of the medical context enriched by the rules of the current state of medical knowledge. Denotational Mathematics provides the means to formally present the conceptual comparison between technically obtained medical contexts against predetermined medical contexts to obtain valid interpretations. The presented design has the ambition to formally describe the required cooperation of discrete ubiquitous computing applications to achieve the development of a commonly interpreted medical context at home.

Contradicciones y desafíos en el capitalismo del siglo XXI. La Segunda Larga Depresión

The history of capitalism has seen Two Great Long-Lasting Crises separated by one century and which have been marked by two Great Capitalist Mutations. The first Great Crisis started in the early 1870s and after a series of big upsets suffered by capitalism (stock market crash, two World Wars, revolu-tions…), a new form of “different” capitalism emerged within its central core in the form of a muta-tion or hybrid whose reproductive mode had to be permanently propped up by the State through Department III or social services (under the so-called “Keynesian” accumulation-regulation model). The Second Great Long-Lasting Crisis started around 1973 and the attempt made to escape it resulted in a mutation in reverse, marked by the State’s permanent attempt at reducing demand, concentrating wealth and partially maintaining consumption through the financialisation of the economy (the combination of credit-growing debt set amidst speculation or the “Keynesian treatment of the price of assets”). The argument that is put forward here is that we are at the sheer limits of the possibilities offered by a neoliberal-financialised (attempt of) growth model that came into being through the second mutation. This situation is reflected by high systemic instability, uncertainty and violent readjustments. This article analyses the many contradictions and challenges that are faced by today’s capitalism; it is suggested that in consequence a further Great Mutation may take place based on a still unclear model of accumulation-regulation. However it can also provide evidence for capitalist decline (a long process of decline

Paradigm shift to enhanced water supply planning through augmented grids, scarcity pricing and adaptive factory water: A system dynamics approach

This paper details a system dynamics model developed to simulate proposed changes to water governance through the integration of supply, demand and asset management processes. To effectively accomplish this, interconnected feedback loops in tariff structures, demand levels and financing capacity are included in the model design, representing the first comprehensive life-cycle modelling of potable water systems. A number of scenarios were applied to Australia's populated South-east Queensland region, demonstrating that introducing temporary drought pricing (i.e. progressive water prices set inverse with availability), in conjunction with supply augmentation through rain-independent sources, is capable of efficiently providing water security in the future. Modelling demonstrated that this alternative tariff structure reduced demand in scarcity periods thereby preserving supply, whilst revenues are maintained to build new water supply infrastructure. In addition to exploring alternative tariffs, the potential benefits of using adaptive pressure-retarded osmosis desalination plants for both potable water and power generation was explored. This operation of these plants for power production, when they would otherwise be idle, shows promise in reducing their net energy and carbon footprints. Stakeholders in industry, government and academia were engaged in model development and validation. The constructed model displays how water resource systems can be reorganised to cope with systemic change and uncertainty.

Taking Waltz Beyond Waltz: Socialization as an Intervening Variable in Structural Realism

Rationalism, pessimism and indeterminacy are three central characteristics of Waltz’s structural realism. Not surprisingly, they are also the aspects that most often come under attack by scholars aiming to either criticize or improve on Waltz’s ideas. Standing out in the former group, constructivists, inspired by Alexander Wendt, advocate a minimal reading of anarchy, where the latter can engender conflict and cooperation alike, depending of what states ‘make of it.’ Attempts to improve on Waltz’s theory, on the other hand, usually concentrate on solving the indeterminacy problem by formulating theories that should explain political outcomes more accurately while retaining most of structural realism’s parsimony. The ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ realism schools are probably the most significant among these developments. Combining acknowledgement of the limits of neorealism with the recognition of the value and richness of this paradigm, this paper aims to reconcile the above theoretical positions (structural realism, constructivism, offensive and defensive realism) building on the work of Waltz himself. To do so we isolate Waltz’s idea of ‘socialization’—one of the ‘transmission belts’ between structure and political outcomes—and turn this concept from a constant factor into an intervening and relational variable which moves along a quantitative (high/low) as well as a qualitative (conflictual/cooperative) dimension. We then place this variable at the center of an enriched version of structural realism, where patterns of foreign policy behavior change according to the degree and type of socialization between groups of states: in the presence of high and cooperative socialization, positive perceptions and friendly behavior prevail; high and conflictual socialization, on the other hand, encourages enmity and mutually aggressive behavior; low socialization, finally, leads to higher systemic uncertainty and to cautious and defensive foreign policies. To assess the empirical validity of our theoretical claims, we conduct a brief analysis of some recent international politics situations in the light of the three behavioral categories described above.

COMPARTMENTAL MODELLING OF SOCIAL DYNAMICS WITH GENERALISED PEER INCIDENCE

A generalised compartmental method for investigating the spread of socially determined behaviour is introduced, and cast in the specific context of societal smoking dynamics with multiple peer influence. We consider how new peer influence terms, acting in both the rate at which smokers abandon their habit, and the rate at which former smokers relapse, can affect the spread of smoking in populations of constant size. In particular, we develop a three-population model (comprising classes of potential, current, and former smokers) governed by multiple incidence transfer rates with linear frequency dependence. Both a deterministic system and its stochastic analogue are discussed: in the first we demonstrate that multiple peer influence not only modifies the number of steady-states and nature of their asymptotic stability, but also introduces a new kind of non-linear "tipping-point" dynamic; while in the second we use recently compiled smoking statistics from the Northeast of England to investigate the impact of systemic uncertainty on the potential for societal "tipping". The generality of our assumptions mean that the results presented here are likely to be relevant to other compartmental models, especially those concerned with the transmission of socially determined behaviours.

PD-based trajectory tracking control in automatic cell injection system

Trajectory tracking technology has been the focus of industrial manipulatory applications for many years, and its research has been found in micromanipulation in bioengineering recently. In this paper, a hybrid vision and force control method is applied to the automatic cell injection. The three-dimensional cell injection process involves the trajectory tracking in free space and the force control in contact space. A PD plus feedforward compensation control method is applied to the trajectory tracking in 3D space. Further, a PD-based robust controller is introduced into trajectory tracking while the systemic uncertainty of the cell injection is additionally considered. Both of the two control methods are theoretically proved to be exponential convergent. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified as compared with other control methods by its application to trajectory tracking problem.

Personality and political orientation: Meta-analysis and test of a Threat-Constraint Model

We synthesized and meta-analyzed 73 studies (N=71,895) examining the associations between Big-Five personality and single-item self-placement measures of political orientation. Openness to Experience (r=−.18) and Conscientiousness (r=.10) were significantly but weakly correlated with political conservatism. The weak Openness-political orientation link was moderated by systemic threat and uncertainty (indexed by nation-wide homicide and unemployment). We propose a Threat-Constraint Model explaining this previously undetected Person×Situation interaction. The model shows that there was a moderately-sized negative correlation between Openness and political conservatism when systemic threat was low (r=−.422) but that this association was negligible at only moderate levels of threat (r=−.066). These findings highlight the economic and societal constraints of personality-political ideology associations.