NPV-at-Risk Method in Infrastructure Project Investment Evaluation

Strategic capital investment decisions are crucial to a business firm. The decision to invest in privately financed infrastructure projects requires careful consideration, because they are exposed to high levels of financial, political, and market risks. The project appraisal methods should incorporate analysis of these risks. A number of capital-investment decision methods can take risks into account, but each of them focuses on different factors and has its limitations. Thus, a more vigorous method is needed. A systematic classification of existing evaluation methods shows that it is possible to develop a new method—the net-present-value-at-risk (NPV-at-risk) method—by combining the weighted average cost of capital and dual risk-return methods. The evaluation of two hypothetical power projects shows that the NPV-at-risk method can provide a better decision for risk evaluation of, and investment in, privately financed infrastructure projects.     

Entropic Risk Analysis by a High Level Decision Support System for Construction SMEs

The method of entropy has been useful in evaluating inconsistency on human judgments. This paper illustrates an entropy-based decision support system called e-FDSS to the solution of multicriterion risk and decision analysis in projects of construction small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It is optimized and solved by fuzzy logic, entropy, and genetic algorithms. A case study demonstrated the use of entropy in e-FDSS on analyzing multiple risk criteria in the predevelopment stage of SME projects. Survey data studying the degree of impact of selected project risk criteria on different projects were input into the system in order to evaluate the preidentified project risks in an impartial environment. Without taking into account the amount of uncertainty embedded in the evaluation process; the results showed that all decision vectors are indeed full of bias and the deviations of decisions are finally quantified providing a more objective decision and risk assessment profile to the stakeholders of projects in order to search and screen the most profitable projects.     

Evaluation in gynecology and obstetrics. Propositions for routine evaluation of professional practices

All the scientific prerequisites for auditing Gynaecology-Obstetrics clinics are currently available. Nevertheless, it is often difficult to usefully evaluate routine decision making. The aim of this paper was to offer matter for thought concerning the choice of methods and themes to be used in evaluating routine management in Gynaecology-Obstetrics clinics. Several methods are discussed, including monitoring synthetic indicators and complex evaluation of routine decision making (relationship between recruitment, practices and results). Details of this latter method were presented with several examples: prematurity prevention, perinatal mortality and morbidity, screening tests and antenatal diagnosis, cesarean section.     

Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process Risk Assessment Approach for Joint Venture Construction Projects in China

Research and practice show that construction joint venture (JV) activities in China are opportunities that can bring potential benefits but at the same time may generate many risks. While research has studied these risks and presented useful advice for managing individual risks, the methodologies used to analyze the risks were mainly qualitatively based, and there is a gap in using the quantitative method that can integrate a risk expert’s knowledge to assess the risks associated with JV projects. This paper sets up a hierarchy structure of the risks and then develops a fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) model for the appraisal of the risk environment pertaining to the JVs to support the rational decision making of project stakeholders. An empirical case study is used to demonstrate the application of the proposed fuzzy AHP model. It is concluded that the fuzzy AHP model is effective in tackling the risks involved in JV projects. The information presented in this paper should be shown to all parties considering JV business opportunities in China, and the proposed approach should be applicable to the research and analysis of risks associated with any type of construction projects.     

Understanding the relationship between relative and absolute risk

BACKGROUND: Relative risks are the most common statistics used to quantify the risk of mortal or morbid outcomes associated with different patient groups and therapeutic interventions. However, absolute risks are of greater value of both patient and physician in making clinical decisions. METHODS: The relationship between relative and absolute risks is explained using graphical aids. A program to estimate absolute risks from relative risks is available on the internet (see ftp://ftp.vanderbilt.edu/pub/biostat/absrisk+ ++.txt). This program uses a competing hazards model of morbidity and mortality to derive these estimates. RESULTS: When a patient's absolute risk is low, it can be approximated by multiplying her relative risk by the absolute risk in the reference population. This approximation fails for higher absolute risks. The relationship between relative and absolute risk can vary dramatically for different diseases. This is illustrated by breast cancer morbidity and cardiovascular mortality in American women. The accuracy of absolute risk estimates will be affected by the accuracy of relative risk estimates, by the appropriateness of the reference groups used to calculate relative risks, by the stability of cross-sectional, age-specific morbidity and mortality rates over time, by the influence of individual risk factors on multiple causes of mortality, and by the extent to which relative risks may vary over time. CONCLUSIONS: Valid absolute risk estimates are valuable when making treatment decisions. They can often be obtained over time intervals of 10 to 20 years when the corresponding relative risk estimates have been accurately determined.     

炼钢厂转炉煤气系统安全性评价

应用美国道化学公司火灾爆炸指数法对转炉煤气回收系统进行安全性评价,评价结果表明,通过“安全补偿”,系统固有危险等级由“非常大”降到“较轻”,甚至接近于“安全状态”,说明在科学管理和控制下可以降低风险级别,从而为有目标、有方向地预防和控制煤气事故提供决策依据。     

Risk Assessment as an Integral Aspect of Capacity Evaluations.

Objective: To highlight the need for rehabilitation psychologists' evaluation of potential risks when examining an individual's decision-making capacity (DMC). Design: A literature review of research regarding decision making, predictive accuracy, and rehabilitation outcomes. Conclusions: The perceived level of risk or potential harm entailed in a decision determines the "sliding scale" for DMC. There is much less research on risk assessment than on the cognitive components needed for DMC, meaning that clinicians usually have to rely on clinical judgment. Clinical judgment is often inaccurate in terms of identifying factors that could increase the risk for harm and is susceptible to errors when predicting future risk. It is therefore argued that the process of assessing an individual's DMC must be matched by an equally rigorous analysis of clinicians' ability to quantify situational risk. Only when these 2 components are properly considered can an adequate standard for DMC be established. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrated Subsurface Modeling and Risk Assessment of Petroleum-Contaminated Sites in Western Canada

Soil and groundwater contamination can pose a variety of impacts and risks to communities. Identification of management schemes with sound environmental and socio-economic efficiencies is desired. Before any decisions regarding site remediation actions can be made, three major questions may have to be answered. They are namely “What happened underground?”, “What will happen in the future under the given remediation scenarios?”, and “Are there specific risks to the surrounding community?”. In this study, an integrated modeling and risk assessment method is developed for effectively managing petroleum-contaminated sites through technically answering the above questions. It presents an integral concept that integrates issues of multicontaminant transport simulation, biodegradation modeling, health risk assessment, and site remediation for real-world problems within a general decision support framework. The developed method is applied to a petroleum-contaminated groundwater system in western Canada for identifying cost-effective management schemes with improved environmental and socio-economic efficiencies. The research outputs are directly useful for the decision maker to gain insight into the site and to make remediation decisions.     

REILP Approach for Uncertainty-Based Decision Making in Civil Engineering

The civil and environmental decision-making processes are plagued with uncertain, vague, and incomplete information. Interval linear programming (ILP) is a widely applied mathematical programming method in assisting civil and environmental decision making under uncertainty. However, the existing ILP decision approach is found to be ineffective in generating operational schemes for practical decision support due to a lack of linkage between decision risk and system return. In addition, the interpretation of the ILP solutions represented as the lower and upper bounds of decision variables can cause problems of infeasibility and nonoptimality in the resulted implementation schemes. This study proposed a risk explicit ILP (REILP) approach to overcome the limitations of existing ILP approaches. The REILP explicitly reflects the tradeoffs between risk and system return for a decision-making problem under an interval-type uncertainty environment. A risk function was defined to enable finding solutions which maximize system return while minimizing system risk, hence leading to crisp solutions that are feasible and optimal for practical decision making. A numerical experiment on land-use decision making under total maximum daily load was conducted to illustrate the REILP approach. The model results show that the REILP approach is able to efficiently explore the interval uncertainty space and generate an optimal decision front that directly reflects the tradeoff between decision risks and system return, allowing decision makers to make effective decision based on the risk-reward information generated by the REILP modeling analysis.     

How to base continuing medical education (CME) on the concepts of evidence and decision

In order to play its part fully, CME in France must be radically reformed, less in its methods than in its philosophy; it is important to ground CME on objective evaluation, evidence-based medicine and on medical decision making. These notions are often neglected, or even unrecognized, especially in medical education. Asset of actual situation are the recent decision of CME legal obligation, which will require validation of quality criterion in CME, and large network of associations and 'leader-practioners', that would let to most practicing physicians' participation.     

Patients' information needs and decision-making processes: What can be learned from genetic counselees?

This field study investigated the information needs and decision-making strategies of 161 genetic counselees interviewed just prior to counseling. Patients were interested mostly in information about the outcomes and consequences of the alternative options at their disposal and about measures to defuse the risks. They wanted mainly information stated with certainty and were less interested in probability information. There was no difference in the search for information between the alternative eventually chosen and the one not chosen. There was a difference, however, among types of decisions and the interest in the various categories of information. These findings were interpreted within the theoretical model of decision making in natural risky situations (O. Huber, 1997). Practical implications for shared medical decision making are presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rationale for systematic reviews

Systematic literature reviews including meta-analyses are invaluable scientific activities. The rationale for such reviews is well established. Health care providers, researchers, and policy makers are inundated with unmanageable amounts of information; they need systematic reviews to efficiently integrate existing information and provide data for rational decision making. Systematic reviews establish whether scientific findings are consistent and can be generalised across populations, settings, and treatment variations, or whether findings vary significantly by particular subsets. Meta-analyses in particular can increase power and precision of estimates of treatment effects and exposure risks. Finally, explicit methods used in systematic reviews limit bias and, hopefully, will improve reliability and accuracy of conclusions.     

The "consumer" in psychotherapy.

Maintains that the consumer movement has grown to be a recognized force in the mental health field. One can find strong support in the literature for the principle of client input into treatment planning and delivery. Views, however, that advocate unconditional and total control by the consumer over clinical decision making go too far. Among other things, the fact that some clients are extremely fragile and dependent, coupled with the power position of the therapist, suggests that certain clients in certain therapist-treatment situations cannot be considered as legitimate consumers (i.e., wholly capable of self-direction in regard to the clinical process). Researchers are asked to accept the challenge of developing a consumership grid that would identify what types of clients confronted with what types of situational conditions should have given degrees of influence in clinical decision making. (French abstract) (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Efficacy of Using Support Vector Machine in a Contractor Prequalification Decision Model

Contractor prequalification is basically a nonlinear two-group classification problem. A robust contractor prequalification decision model should include the ability of handling both quantitative and qualitative data. Support vector machine (SVM) is a set of related supervised learning methods which can handle data in a high dimensional feature space for nonlinear separable problems. A new contractor prequalification decision model using SVM is proposed to assist clients to identify qualified contractors for tendering in this study. A case study was used to validate the proposed decision model and the classification ability was compared with neural networks (NNs) and principal component analysis (PCA). The results show that the proposed SVM model outperforms NN and PCA and the merits of using SVM to mitigate the limitations of using NN are elaborated. The proposed decision model is an ideal alternative for supporting clients to perform contractor prequalification decision making.     

Review of Treatment Planning in Psychotherapy: Taking the Guesswork Out of Clinical Care.

Reviews the book by Woody et al (see record 2002-06426-000, which outlines a step-by-step simple method by which clinicians can plan and evaluate the course and outcome of therapy. The authors outline their rationale for their "Planning and Assessment in Clinical Care (PACC)" system. Differences in clinical practice between university and health care settings can be quite surprising and possibly overwhelming, especially for the new clinician. The book has a number of strong points that will likely aid not only the individual therapist interested in planning and evaluating the course and outcome of their therapy with clients and patients, but also should help to increase the research productivity of psychologists working in a variety of service settings. Benefits that clients and patients are likely to receive as a result of therapy that is complemented by thorough, yet simple, planning and evaluation strategy. The book is comprised of 7 easy-to-read chapters with a valuable appendix containing a number of well-validated assessment measures. The reviewer believes the book to be well-suited for graduate students as an introductory textbook for a course in psychotherapy planning and evaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

工程总承包(EPC)项目风险的辨识及应对措施

文章阐述了EPC总承包的工作范畴以及风险特点,集中分析了决策阶段、投标报价、合同签订、设计阶段、采购阶段、施工管理阶段风险产生的原因,对主要风险的化解和规避提出了应对措施,并对风险控制和处理给出了建议。     

What is a good treatment decision? The client's perspective.

63 adult outpatient clients of a community mental health center evaluated 5 methods of clinical decision making: intuition, research, therapist's informal successful experience, professional recommendation therapist, and no rationale. Clients rated their therapists' informal successful experience and the use of research as favorable decision methods. Clients thought that their therapists would also rate these methods as favorable. We conclude that clients want their therapists to make clinical decisions on the basis of informal experience in which the efficacy of the recommendations is demonstrated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depletion of a Drosophila homolog of yeast Sup35p disrupts spindle assembly, chromosome segregation, and cytokinesis during male meiosis

This paper addresses the effects of availability and anchoring-and-adjustment on people's beliefs and values concerning environmental issues. The first three studies focus on lay people's perceptions of the causes of large scale environmental risks, the second series of three studies deals with how people value environmental goods and how much they are prepared to pay to mitigate environmental risks. In studies 1-3 we investigate the effects of availability and anchoring-and-adjustment on estimating the contribution of various factors to large scale environmental risks. Highly complex risks such as acid rain and global warming tend to be associated with multiple causes, and our results show that estimating the role of these causes is clearly affected by availability and anchoring-and-adjustment. Both have sizeable effects and persist over time. Moreover, corrective procedures only seem to have a limited effect. Availability and anchoring-and-adjustment not only play a role in judging the possible causes of risks; they also play a role in research attempting to assess the public's willingness to pay (WTP) to protect our environment. The outcomes of WTP surveys are often used as a tool to help policy decision making. In the second part of this article we present three studies on this issue. Results provide further evidence of the impact of the two heuristics on the outcomes of WTP research. Implications for research and practice are briefly discussed.     

Hierarchical Structuring of PPP Risks Using Interpretative Structural Modeling

Project risk management emphasizes the need to rank and prioritize risks in a project to focus the risk management efforts. This risk prioritization is of special significance in public-private partnership (PPP) projects, since project success depends upon the efficient allocation of risks to the party who can best manage it. Previous studies on risk identification and assessment of PPP project risks have only produced an unstructured list of such risks and prioritizing them on the basis of probability and impact. This paper suggests the use of interpretative structural modeling (ISM) to prepare a hierarchical structure as well as the interrelationships of these risks that would enable decision makers to take appropriate steps. MICMAC (matrice d'impacts croises-multiplication appliqué a un classemen) analysis is also done to determine the dependency and driving power of the risks. ISM, along with MICMAC analysis, provides a useful hierarchy of risks whose individual relationships are unambiguous but whose group relationships are too complex to organize intuitively and can help practitioners better understand risk dependencies and prioritize risk-mitigation efforts. This study identified 17 risks encountered during the development phase of PPP projects in Indian road sector and found that fourteen risks were weak drivers and weak dependents. Delay in financial closure, cost overrun risk, and time overrun risk have been found to have the highest dependence on other risks. The analysis can be extended by practitioners for risk analysis in other infrastructures such as railways, seaports, airports etc.