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Proposes cusum‐cuscore procedures that consider equal weight past sample mean values and past sample score values. The objective is to compare the performance of the cusum‐cuscore and the ewma‐cuscore and in particular to investigate the number of past sample mean values needed to make a significant impact on the performance of the schemes. It will be shown by average run length calculations that the two schemes complement each other very well and that they perform significantly better than standard Shewhart, cuscore and cusum procedures.

K2's work with AXA (UK) has developed from a single “athlete at work” workshop for one manager into a high‐performance coaching program across 40 claims teams in multiple sites. It also formed part of AXA's Fast Forward initiative for accelerating individual talent. This paper aims to explore how the program developed at such scale, changing the inherent performance culture within AXA's critical claims business and giving the teams improved control over their results outcome.

Delivery of K2's elite team program to front line claims teams and management personnel was designed to inspire confidence, improve morale and establish a network of support, thereby triggering a sustainable cultural change within the organization and all‐round better performance.

The author demonstrates how a structured, premeditated performance program can often lead to unexpected, organic shifts in behavior that positively influence and alter a company's future outlook and performance ratio. By taking ownership of new styles of working, leaders can inspire and innovate through workforce participation, creating highly beneficial standalone initiatives that are adopted into the business on a permanent basis.

The article summarizes the relationship between K2 and AXA Claims, the difficulties facing both staff and leaders at the outset of the program, and how K2 set about effecting lasting change through use of individual and team techniques and methodologies.

Finds the regions of dynamic instability of elastic beams constrained at the ends by means of translational and rotational elastic springs, using the equation of boundary frequencies. Obtains the diagrams showing the regions of instability of the beam, as a function of the dynamic component of the periodic forcing function and its frequency, from that equation in exact form. In this procedure inertial, stiffness and constraint characteristics of the examined system are taken into account. Presents selected applications concerning the analysed problem.

Credit risk evaluation is a crucial task for banks and non-bank financial institutions to support decision-making on granting loans. Most of the current credit risk methods rely solely on expert knowledge or large amounts of data, which causes some problems like variable interactions hard to be identified, models lack interpretability, etc. To address these issues, the authors propose a new approach.

First, the authors improve interpretive structural model (ISM) to better capture and utilize expert knowledge, then combine expert knowledge with big data and the proposed fuzzy interpretive structural model (FISM) and K2 are used for expert knowledge acquisition and big data learning, respectively. The Bayesian network (BN) obtained is used for forward inference and backward inference. Data from Lending Club demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Compared with the mainstream risk evaluation methods, the authors’ approach not only has higher accuracy and better presents the interaction between risk variables but also provide decision-makers with the best possible interventions in advance to avoid defaults in the financial field. The credit risk assessment framework based on the proposed method can serve as an effective tool for relevant policymakers.

The authors propose a novel credit risk evaluation approach, namely FISM-K2. It is a decision support method that can improve the ability of decision makers to predict risks and intervene in advance. As an attempt to combine expert knowledge and big data, the authors’ work enriches the research on financial risk.

1.1. Logical Necessity of the Three Dimensions as a Unit of Thought The mathematician does not look kindly on the simple question of why natural space should consist of precisely three dimensions. Instead of giving an answer he assumes a silent smile and shows us a version of space with an infinity of dimensions, as if space were some kind of toy for him to fiddle with to his heart's content.

Financial institutions that are marketing tax‐sheltered plans claim that the implied rates of return of tax‐sheltered strategies are superior to those rates of return realized from taxable plans. The purpose of our paper is to investigate that claim. To accomplish our purpose, we have developed a model to determine, under different assumptions of various tax rates, the incremental benefits and the implied rates of returns of tax‐deferred investments over the taxable investments. When the model is applied, the results show that tax‐deferred investments are not always superior. Consequently, investors may not have a choice but to select portfolios at the lower end of the efficient frontier.

Motivated by the growing importance of the expected shortfall in banking and finance, this study aims to compare the performance of popular non-parametric estimators of the expected shortfall (i.e. different variants of historical, outlier-adjusted and kernel methods) to each other, selected parametric benchmarks and estimates based on the idea of forecast combination.

Within a multidimensional simulation setup (spanned by different distributional settings, sample sizes and confidence levels), the authors rank the estimators based on classic error measures, as well as an innovative performance profile technique, which the authors adapt from the mathematical programming literature.

The rich set of results supports academics and practitioners in the search for an answer to the question of which estimators are preferable under which circumstances. This is because no estimator or combination of estimators ranks first in all considered settings.

To the best of their knowledge, the authors are the first to provide a structured simulation-based comparison of non-parametric expected shortfall estimators, study the effects of estimator averaging and apply the mentioned profiling technique in risk management.

The proposed exponentially weighted moving average combined Shewhart cumulative score (EWMA‐CUSCORE) procedure for controlling the process mean cumulate scores of ‐1, 0, 1 or 2h assigned to each moving average of the current and past sample mean values depending on a preassigned interval in which its value falls. It will be shown by average run length (ARL) comparisons that the proposed scheme performs better than the Shewhart type schemes, the combined Shewhart cumulative score type schemes, the cusum type schemes and the standard EWMA type schemes for detecting shifts in the process mean when the underlying process control variable is normal.

Purpose – This chapter investigates the role of infrastructure aid to developing countries for determining the effect on national income and consumer welfare. The chapter further demonstrates the conditions for the Dutch disease effect by decomposing the output effects of infrastructure aid into the initial factor-saving effect, factor-substitution effect and nontraded good effect.

Methodology/approach – This chapter extends the Heckscher−Ohlin model to a 3×2 case with two traded goods and a nontraded good, and derives comparative static results on factor prices, the price of nontraded goods, foreign exchange rate, sectoral outputs, and national income and consumer welfare.

Findings – It is shown that for a recipient country, infrastructure aid to either the export or import sector necessarily raises national income and consumer welfare, whereas the same aid to the nontraded good sector does not affect national income but raises consumer welfare. Infrastructure aid may lead to a Dutch disease effect via its three effects on industrial outputs: the initial factor-saving effect, factor-substitution effect and nontraded good effect.

Research limitations/implications – This chapter considers infrastructure capital as a public input, but it is devoid of analysis of inter-industrial spillover effects that the infrastructure capital generates to other sectors.

Practical implications – This chapter reveals several aspects of infrastructure aid that the practitioners of aids must consider.

In this paper we take a close look at those strategic incentives arising in a situation where firms share the costs and profits in a multi-firm project, and bargain for their respective (precommitted) split of cost- and profit-shares. We establish that, when each firm's effort contribution to the joint undertaking is mutually observable (which is often the case in closely collaborative operations) and hence can form basis of the contingent cost- and profit-sharing scheme, it is not the gross economic efficiency but the super-/sub-additivity of the nett returns from effort that directly affects the sustainability of a profile of firms' effort contributions. The (in)efficiency result we obtain in this paper is of different nature from so-called “free riding” or “team competition” problems: the set of sustainable outcomes with bargaining over precommitted cost- and profit-shares is generally neither a superset nor a subset of the sustainable set without bargaining.