Construction Safety Risk Modeling and Simulation

By building on a genetic‐inspired attribute‐based conceptual framework for safety risk analysis, we propose a novel approach to define, model, and simulate univariate and bivariate construction safety risk at the situational level. Our fully data‐driven techniques provide construction practitioners and academicians with an easy and automated way of getting valuable empirical insights from attribute‐based data extracted from unstructured textual injury reports. By applying our methodology on a data set of 814 injury reports, we first show the frequency‐magnitude distribution of construction safety risk to be very similar to that of many natural phenomena such as precipitation or earthquakes. Motivated by this observation, and drawing on state‐of‐the‐art techniques in hydroclimatology and insurance, we then introduce univariate and bivariate nonparametric stochastic safety risk generators based on kernel density estimators and copulas. These generators enable the user to produce large numbers of synthetic safety risk values faithful to the original data, allowing safety‐related decision making under uncertainty to be grounded on extensive empirical evidence. One of the implications of our study is that like natural phenomena, construction safety may benefit from being studied quantitatively by leveraging empirical data rather than strictly being approached through a managerial perspective using subjective data, which is the current industry standard. Finally, a side but interesting finding is that in our data set, attributes related to high energy levels (e.g., machinery, hazardous substance) and to human error (e.g., improper security of tools) emerge as strong risk shapers.     

Philosophie als Einübung des Perspektivenwechsels am Beispiel von Platon und Nietzsche

Philosophy as exercising the shift of perspectives, exemplified with Plato and NietzscheIn professional counselling a shift of perspectives is useful to develop new options of thinking and of action in the case of seemingly hopeless situations. Philosophy presents a great variety of concepts and also of models of change processes, which may offer a resource to counsellors. With regard to Plato’s “cave metaphor” and to Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” the author presents a structure of change in three stages. Concerning the practice of counsellors some relevant aspects are derived from these discussions.     

Charisma,Macht und Narzissmus

Charisma, power and narcissism. On the diagnostics of an ambivalent leading qualityManagers are often obviously narcissistic personalities with “charismatic qualities”. The author discusses the background of these qualities and their ambivalence, because behind the brilliance of a successful manager may be a hidden narcissistic problem as the actual motive power. Nevertheless a constructive narcissism is to be distinguished from a destructive one. Charismatic constellations as well as narcissistic dynamics are to be understood not only as an individual problem but as an interactional phenomenon, involving both sides of a relationship. In order to explain these dynamics, the author presents the concepts of “narcissistic collusion” and “expanded self”. It is of great importance to the coach, to be able to analyse and to deal with these relational patterns — and also to preserve oneself from being involved in such narcissistic dynamics.     

A General Formula for Valuing Defaultable Securities

Previous research has shown that under a suitable no‐jump condition, the price of a defaultable security is equal to its risk‐neutral expected discounted cash flows if a modified discount rate is introduced to account for the possibility of default. Below, we generalize this result by demonstrating that one can always value defaultable claims using expected risk‐adjusted discounting provided that the expectation is taken under a slightly modified probability measure. This new probability measure puts zero probability on paths where default occurs prior to the maturity, and is thus only absolutely continuous with respect to the risk‐neutral probability measure. After establishing the general result and discussing its relation with the existing literature, we investigate several examples for which the no‐jump condition fails. Each example illustrates the power of our general formula by providing simple analytic solutions for the prices of defaultable securities.     

A Comparison of Arbitration Procedures for Risk‐Averse Disputants*

We propose an arbitration model framework that generalizes many previous quantitative models of final offer arbitration, conventional arbitration, and some proposed alternatives to them. Our model allows the two disputants to be risk averse and assumes that the issue(s) in dispute can be summarized by a single quantifiable value. We compare the performance of the different arbitration procedures by analyzing the gap between the disputants' equilibrium offers and the width of the contract zone that these offers imply. Our results suggest that final offer arbitration should give results superior to those of conventional arbitration.     

The impact of institutional changes on corporate governance mechanisms in transition economies

We examine how institutional changes affect corporate governance in transition economies. We develop a transition model that specifies three stages of the transition process including the early, intermediate, and late. We develop a framework for assessing the effectiveness of widely recognized corporate governance mechanisms (CGMs) in and across these stages. Our general proposition is that as transition economies move from early, to intermediate, to late stages, effective CGMs tend to be those that are based on state administrative control power, social networks and private orders, and market forces and formal institutions, respectively. Our study has contributions and implications regarding the transition economies and the impacts of institutions on corporate governance.     

An upper bound on the total restrained domination number of a tree

Let G=(V,E) be a graph. A set of vertices S?V is a total restrained dominating set if every vertex is adjacent to a vertex in S and every vertex of $V-\nobreak S$ is adjacent to a vertex in V?S. The total restrained domination number of G, denoted by γ _tr (G), is the smallest cardinality of a total restrained dominating set of G. A support vertex of a graph is a vertex of degree at least two which is adjacent to a leaf. We show that $\gamma_{\mathit{tr}}(T)\leq\lfloor\frac{n+2s+\ell-1}{2}\rfloor$ where T is a tree of order n≥3, and s and ? are, respectively, the number of support vertices and leaves of T. We also constructively characterize the trees attaining the aforementioned bound.