A spanning heuristic for the unordered and ordered matching identification problem

The matching identification problem (MIP) is a combinatoric search problem related to the fields of learning from examples, boolean functions, and knowledge acquisition. The MIP involves identifying a single “goal” item from a large set of items. Because there is commonly a cost associated with evaluating each guess, the goal item should be identified in as few guesses as possible. As in most search problems, the items have a similar structure, which allows an evaluation of each guessed item. In other words, each guessed item elicits partial information about the goal item, i.e. how similar the guess is to the goal. With this information the goal is more quickly identified.The unordered MIP has been studied by Mehrez and Steinberg (ORSA J. Comput. 7 (1995) 211) in which they proposed two different types of algorithms. The purpose of the present paper is to suggest an improved Spanning Heuristic algorithm. Its improvement increases as the problem size increases. Further results and comparisons are derived for the unordered and ordered cases.This research shows that when the search space is very large, it is better to inquire from items that are known not to be the goal (they have been ruled out by previous guesses), for the purpose of acquiring more information about the goal. As the search space is narrowed, it is better to guess items that have not been ruled out.     

Buchbesprechungen

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Dual Career Couples als eine Variante von Work-Life-Integration

Dual Career Couples as a form of work-life-integrationThe author discusses the situation of dual career couples, when both are university graduates following an own career. Basing on a respective publication she delineates the current, mostly American research and reports on several German research projects, which endeavour to analyse the relation between gender and inequality in dual career couples.     

Von der Supervision zur Mediation und zurück

From supervision to mediation and vice versaMediation in organizations becomes more and more important because of increasing conflicts. The question is, which competencies of the counsellor are necessary, and above all, whether mediation is a particular method. The author explains the method of mediation and illustrates his concept of “patchwork-mediation”. This procedure allows to build a bridge between supervision and mediation.     

The State of the Field in UK Management Research: Reflections of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Panel

This paper reviews the state of the field of the sub-disciplines within UK management research, based upon the submissions of 94 UK higher education institutions to the Business and Management Studies Panel in the UK's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It offers observations on the UK model of the assessment of quality in, and funding of, research conducted in publicly funded higher education institutions.     

Ebert. Wolfgang (2001): Systemtheorien in der Supervision — Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven

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The Determinants of Trust and Credibility in Environmental Risk Communication: An Empirical Study

This study examines a key component of environmental risk communication; trust and credibility. The study was conducted in two parts. In the first part, six hypotheses regarding the perceptions and determinants of trust and credibility were tested against survey data. The hypotheses were supported by the data. The most important hypothesis was that perceptions of trust and credibility are dependent on three factors: perceptions of knowledge and expertise; perceptions of openness and honesty; and perceptions of concern and care. In the second part, models were constructed with perceptions of trust and credibility as the dependent variable. The goal was to examine the data for findings with direct policy implications. One such finding was that defying a negative stereotype is key to improving perceptions of trust and credibility.     

Editorial

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One-dimensional optimal bounded-shape partitions for Schur convex sum objective functions

Consider the problem of partitioning n nonnegative numbers into p parts, where part i can be assigned n_i numbers with n_i lying in a given range. The goal is to maximize a Schur convex function F whose ith argument is the sum of numbers assigned to part i. The shape of a partition is the vector consisting of the sizes of its parts, further, a shape (without referring to a particular partition) is a vector of nonnegative integers (n₁,..., n_p) which sum to n. A partition is called size-consecutive if there is a ranking of the parts which is consistent with their sizes, and all elements in a higher-ranked part exceed all elements in the lower-ranked part. We demonstrate that one can restrict attention to size-consecutive partitions with shapes that are nonmajorized, we study these shapes, bound their numbers and develop algorithms to enumerate them. Our study extends the analysis of a previous paper by Hwang and Rothblum which discussed the above problem assuming the existence of a majorizing shape. This research is partially supported by ROC National Science grant NSC 92-2115-M-009-014.