The Tragedy of the Commons by G. Hardin is a famous metaphor for social dilemmas in common-pool resource use. In his famous article from 1968 he argued for an abstract common-pool pasture that the pasture must become depleted as herdsmen have higher incentives to add cattle than to remove, due to the shared nature of the common. However, Hardin built his argument on the assumption of purely sel...

This article presents an experiment designed to test the reliability of the benefit function transfer approach using contingent valuation methods. The experiment uses data collected from anglers surveyed across eight contiguous Texas Gulf Coast bay regions over three distinct time periods. Results indicate that the benefit function transfer approach tends to over-estimate benefits, implying tha...

The goal of the TeCoMed project is to send early warnings against forthcoming waves or even epidemics of infectious diseases, especially of influenza, to interested practitioners, pharmacists etc. in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The forecast of these waves i s based on written confirmations of unfitness for work of the main German health insurance company. Since in...

Knowledge has become the main value driver for organizations nowadays. In particular, knowledge-based organizations (KBOs) allocate resources for intangible assets (e.g., R&D) in the rapidly changing and highly competitive environment in order to gain competitive advantages. Therefore, how to evaluate knowledge-based organizations has become one of the most important issues in knowledge managem...

This project presents an agent-based simulation model of protest activity. Agents are located in a two dimensional grid and have limited ability to observe the behavior of other agents in the grid. The model is used to explore questions inspired by research on different theories of individual motivation and the so-called theory of critical mass. The simulations describe individuals who support ...

This paper compares different performance metrics used for value-based management in life and non-life insurance business. The goal is to find a consistent basis for performance measurement at the insurance group level. This is an important task since management techniques used in non-life insurance, such as economic value added (EVA) and risk-adjusted return on capital (RAROC), are at first si...

In many situations, a knowledge source may not give definite hypothesis; it can only express its belief and disbelief in mult iple hypotheses, We present a scheme of uncertainty management in such a system. Disbelief is given a considerable importance in our approach Various experts influence one another and show co-operative behavior by mutual ly changing their confidence factor values. The fi...

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There have been many attempts to reduce the amount of waste packaging through open dumping and burning, recycling, landfill, incineration, etc. However, there has been little attention paid to reuse as the simplest way to reduce waste. In order to motivate consumers to perform reuse behaviour, it is essential to understand how this behaviour can be influenced and what variables predict it. This...

Intelligent computer systems rely on more or less complex computational entities that represent occurrences and events in the real world. Usually, such entities are formed from representational primitives called properties, attributes, features, etc. To reflect varying degrees of uncertainty, originating from human judgement and the intrinsic nature of the world, such property values occur as m...