BACKGROUND Return to work after gynaecological surgery takes much longer than expected, irrespective of the level of invasiveness. In order to empower patients in recovery and return to work, a multidisciplinary care program consisting of an e-health intervention and integrated care management including participatory workplace intervention was developed. METHODS/DESIGN We designed a randomize...

Modern portfolio theory is based on a rational investor choosing the proportions of assets in a portfolio so as to minimize risk and maximize the expected return. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of different stochastic search heuristics to the problem of finding the optimum portfolio. We compare their performance on two problems with known solutions. 1. Portfolio Optimization Gi...

What percentage of their portfolio should investors allocate to alternative investment vehicles? The only available answers to the above question are set in a static meanvariance framework, with no explicit accounting for uncertainty on the active manager’s ability to generate abnormal return. In this paper we consider the problem of an investor who can choose between the riskfree security and ...

The television game show, The Weakest Link, involves contestants making a sequence of decisions over time. Given the rules of the game and the process for accrual of payoffs over time, a number of authors have recognized that this show serves as a laboratory for assessment of human decision-making. To this end, by comparing theoretically derived gaming strategies with those actually used by the...

I exploit the potential of latent class models for proposing an innovative framework for financial data analysis. By stressing the latent nature of the most important financial variables, expected return and risk, I am able to introduce a new methodological dimension in the analysis of financial phenomena. In my proposal, (i) I provide innovative measures of expected return and risk, (ii) I sug...

Groundwater management in China has been facing challenges from both climate change and urbanization and is considered as a national priority nowadays. However, unprecedented uncertainty exists in future scenarios making it difficult to formulate management planning paradigms. In this paper, we apply modern portfolio theory (MPT) to formulate an optimal stage investment of groundwater contamina...

In an intensifying competition banks are forced to develop and implement enterprise wide integrated risk-return management systems. Financial risks have to be limited and managed from a bank wide portfolio perspective. Risk management rules must be accomplished from internal and regulatory points of view. Expected returns need to be maximized subject to these constraints, leading to a generaliz...

Conventional theory suggests that fiat money will have value in capitalpoor economies. We demonstrate that fiat money may also have value in capital-rich economies, if the price of capital is excessively volatile. Excess asset-price volatility is generated by news ; information that has no social value, but is privately useful in forming forecasts over the short-run return to capital. One advan...