Contingent Use of Negotiators’ Tactics in Construction Dispute Negotiation

In the course of negotiation, negotiators’ tactics should be responsive to the situational factors. This is commonly described as the contingent use of negotiators’ tactics. This study examines this concept in construction dispute negotiation and has three stages of work. Stage 1 develops taxonomies of the three construction dispute negotiation dimensions: dispute sources, negotiators’ tactics, and negotiation outcomes by exploratory factor analysis. A structural equation modeling is also used to confirm the taxonomies. Stage 2 examines the contingent use of negotiators’ tactics on outcomes respective to the dispute sources through the use of moderated multiple regression (MMR). Stage 3 discusses the findings. The dispute source, “Delay” is found to be a universal moderator in the MMR analysis of the tactic-outcome relationships. That means when the dispute source is delay, a wide range of negotiators’ tactics can be used, respective to outcome intended. It is also found that the most versatile tactics are those that seek progress. This group of tactics is effective in almost every group of dispute source and, in general, positive results can be expected. However, aggressive and assertive tactics should be used restrictively, as they will only be useful against a compromising negotiation counterpart.     

An asymptotically exact LMI solution to the robust discretisation of LTI systems with polytopic uncertainties and its application to sampled-data control

In this paper, the problem of robust discretisation of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with polytopic uncertainties is introduced. More specifically, the main objective is to provide a systematic way to find an approximate discrete-time (DT) model of a continuous-time (CT) plant with uncertainties in polytopic domain. The system matrices of polytopic DT model to be found are expressed as parameter-dependent matrices which are homogeneous polynomials of arbitrary degree with respect to the uncertain variables in the simplex, and is obtained in such a way that the norm between the system matrices and the truncated power series of the exact DT model is minimised while preserving the polytopic structure of the original CT plant. The solution procedures proposed are presented in terms of single-parameter minimisation problems subject to linear matrix inequality (LMI) constraints which are numerically tractable via LMI solvers. Finally, examples are given to show the validity and effectiveness of the proposed techniques.     

Incentive Contracting Based Upon Consumer Indifference

In contract purchasing, price is often negotiated, given a reliability specification. Prior to procurement a sample is taken to determine if the product meets the reliability specification. This paper considers an alternative approach in which the contract price reflects actual field performance for an item subject to two types of failures. A consumer indifference curve that specifies the predicted break-even point between price and reliability is used to establish the initial purchase price. The actual purchase price is determined by estimating the break-even point based upon a sample of failures. Both the vendor and consumer agree upon the statistical methods for revising the price at purchase time. In this manner, more reliable products yield higher prices than less reliable products, thus resulting in a quantifiable incentive contract.     

Toward agency and ontology for web-based information retrieval

This paper presents a system that selects information sources, browses websites, and monitors changes in selected websites. Its distinguishing features are 1) adopting a holistic approach for bolstering web-based information gathering using a society of agents and 2) exploiting features of ontology and lexical chain for processing user queries and filtering relevant information. By engineering web-based information gathering systems along the dimensions of agency and ontology, relations among concepts can be identified and established, and information filtering and monitoring tasks can be automated by information filtering agents (IFAs) and information monitoring agents (IMAs). IFAs and IMAs relieve users of the tasks of browsing and monitoring changes in websites and multiple web sites can be browsed and monitored in parallel by several IFAs and IMAs. By establishing ontological relations among (key)words 1) the query processing agent (QPA) selects appropriate URLs for a query and 2) IFAs search and filter information relevant to the query. Empirical results demonstrated that the QPA can find appropriate number of websites and IFAs are effective in filtering relevant information.     

Effects of catalyst aging on the activity and selectivity of commercial three-way catalysts

A Pd catalyst is particularly effective for the oxidation of CO and C₃H₆ at low temperatures, while the Pt/Rh/Ce catalyst is active for NO reduction. The TWC activity of both catalysts generally decreased as the catalyst mileage increased. However, the NO reduction activity was less affected by catalyst aging compared to the oxidation reactions. The selectivity of the catalysts in favor of the CO–O₂ reaction (vs. C₃H₆–O₂ reaction) in the O₂ partitioning experiments became less pronounced as the catalyst aged. The NO partitioning experiments reveal the superior capability of H₂ in NO reduction to the other reductants (CO and C₃H₆) examined in the present study. The reactivities of NO with both H₂ and CO were found to decrease upon catalyst aging, resulting in decreased overall NO removal activity.     

Dual permeation of acid dyes through nylon 6 membrane

Permeation of acid dyes in nylon 6 membrane was measured and analyzed by the dual sorption and diffusion mechanism, comprising partition and Langmuir-type modes. The results were compared with our previous work on diffusion in the same system by the film roll method. Diffusion coefficients of both dye species were found to be similar in magnitude.