Institute of Statistics and Mathematical Economics, School of Economics, University of Karlsruhe, Kollegium am Schloss, Bau II, 20.12, R210, Postfach 6980, D-76128, Karlsruhe, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Asset and liability management is the simultaneous consideration of assets and liabilities in strategic investment planning. The asset and liability management models...

With the new cosmological data gathered over the last few years, the inflationary paradigm has seen its predictions largely unchallenged. A recent proposal, called the ekpyrotic scenario, was argued to be a viable competitor as it was claimed that the spectrum of primordial perturbations it produces is scale invariant. By investigating closely this scenario, we show that the corresponding spect...

Most CSCL works put forward the fact that learners working together would only need a means of communication. We feel this is not always sufficient. We have focussed on the collaborative activity itself and the way of enhancing collaboration. We have proposed a general framework which gives the teacher the possibility of defining and constructing pedagogical collaborative situations. It is base...

Participatory methods provide an increasingly accepted path to integrated assessment. This paper reflects on the role of two participatory modelling initiatives implemented in a highly conflictive setting: the Mancha Occidental aquifer, Spain. The methodologies are described within the context of the case study, examining their potential relevance to integrated assessment from a conceptual stan...

This article demonstrates that emotion concepts-including the so-called basic ones, such as anger or sadness-can be defined in terms of universal semantic primitives such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘do’, ‘happen’, ‘know’, and ‘want’, in terms of which all areas of meaning, in all languages, can be rigorously and revealingly portrayed. The definitions proposed here take the form of certain prototypical s...

Scenario planning is a method widely used by strategic planners to address uncertainty about the future. However, current methods either fail to address the future behaviour and impact of stakeholders or they treat the role of stakeholders informally. We present a practical decisionanalysis-based methodology for analysing stakeholder objectives and likely behaviour within contested unfolding fu...

Nowadays standard technologies play important roles in enhancing sharability, reusability and interoperability of learning contents. However, there is a lack of pedagogical justification of the contents implemented with the standards. This paper discusses the standardcompliance of our ontology-based modeling framework and how the framework gives theoretical justification to standard-compliant l...

Low-Carbon Technologies (LCTs) play an important role in achieving China’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) targets. According to the result of our scenario analysis, if advanced energy-saving technology, renewable energy, and other measures are promoted and extensively applied, China’s carbon emission will achieve its peaking at around 2027. With proper energy policies, Chin...

This research-in-progress presents a framework, grounded in Coordination theory (Thompson, 1967), to examine coordination as a complementary investment to the business value of Supply Chain Management (SCM) environments. Given that one of the objectives of a SCM is to reduce transaction costs, including coordination costs, this framework proposes that for supply chains to prosper, the technolog...