Title of Document: ELECTRONIC PROGNOSTICS AND HEALTH MANAGEMENT: A RETURN ON INVESTMENT ANALYSIS Kiri Feldman, Master of Science, 2008 Directed By: Dr. Peter Sandborn, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) provides the potential to lower sustainment costs, to improve maintenance decision-making, and to provide product usage feedback in...

In this study we develop implications for the return distribution of firms with embedded strategic growth options. In our model we integrate real option theory with a Cournot-Nash framework where two firms choose output levels endogenously and may have investment-timing differences. Simulations of the returns of the strategic growth option show that traditional option variables, such as the val...

Because Government policy does much to determine the return available to nursing home investment, the profitability of the nursing home industry has been a subject of controversy since Government agencies began paying a large portion of the Nation's nursing home bill. Controversy appears at several levels. First is the rather narrow concern, often conceived in accounting terms, of the appropria...

This study presents a second-order energy return on investment analysis to evaluate the mutual benefits of combining an advanced wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) (with biological nutrient removal) with algal biofuel production. With conventional, independently operated systems, algae production requires significant material inputs, which require energy directly and indirectly, and the WWTP req...

– Diversification of an investment into independently fluctuating assets reduces its risk. In reality, movements of assets are mutually correlated and therefore knowledge of cross-correlations among asset price movements are of great importance. Our results support the possibility that the problem of finding an investment in stocks which exposes invested funds to a minimum level of risk is anal...

The problem of portfolio selection in investment concerns with minimizing the risk for a prespecified level of return. In this paper, the constraint on the level of return is fuzzified and the technique of fuzzy evolutionary programming is employed to select an optimal portfolio of securities with low risk and with highly acceptable level of total return. Experimental results show the method is...

Is there too much or too little private research and development (R&D)? A large empirical literature reports estimates of the rate of return to R&D ranging from 30% to over 100%, supporting the notion that there is too little private investment in research. However, this conclusion is challenged by the new growth theory, which emphasizes a richer description of the connection between R&D and pr...

Many decisions people make can be described as decisions under risk. Understanding the mechanisms that drive these decisions is an important goal in decision neuroscience. Two competing classes of risky decision making models have been proposed to describe human behavior, namely utility-based models and risk-return models. Here we used a novel investment decision task that uses streams of (past...