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The purpose of this paper is to explore how, and under what conditions, professionals involve relatives in clinical practice.

Two cases were constructed from two studies in Denmark, theoretically inspired by Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and position and analyzed with focus on the involvement of relatives from the perspective of professionals.

Support to relatives in practice is rarely included in the way that treatment and care are organized in healthcare. Professionals’ views of the involvement of relatives were characterized by the values of neoliberal ideology and medical-professional rationality, in which relatives are not regarded as a subject of care and support in clinical practice. The involvement of relatives aimed to ensure patients’ participation in randomized clinical trial and to help professionals to care for patients when the professionals were not absolutely needed. Professionals were relatively higher positioned in the clinic than relatives were, which allowed professionals to in – and exclude relatives. Neoliberal ideology and medical-professional rationality go hand in hand when it comes to patient treatment, care and the involvement of relatives; it is all about efficiency, treatment optimization and increased social control of the diagnosed patient. These neoliberal, organizational values consolidate doxa of the medical field and the positions that govern the meeting with patients’ relatives – if it takes place at all.

The results put into perspective how the combination of neoliberalism and medical logic work as an organizing principle in contemporary healthcare systems, and challenge a normative, humanistic view on involving patients’ relatives in the medical clinic.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the relative states between the leader and wingman based on vision‐based relative navigation system using extended information filtering (EIF).

For a typical leader‐wingman formation case, the relative navigation equations are introduced. Vision‐based navigation system which consists of an optical sensor and a series of specific light sources is used to capture the line‐of‐sight measurement between the two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Owing to the limitations on the field of view of the optical sensor, not every specific light source would be visible. And the spatial relative position of the two vehicles could also contributes to the diminution of visibility since some of the light sources are likely to be shielded by the frame and wing. Therefore, the EIF can be applied to the vision‐based relative navigation while every specific light source is regarded and processed as an individual information source. It is demonstrated that the information of visual source could be easily extracted by the simple update equation of information filtering.

The EIF could be used in vision‐based relative navigation system to give an accurate estimation of relative position, velocity and attitude without increasing the amount of calculation or decreasing the estimation accuracy compared to conventional Kalman filtering.

The EIF is first introduced to the vision‐based relative navigation in order to provide relative state between UAVs during formation flight.

The purpose of this paper is to study which factors affect consumer expenditure and how, when positional concerns matter. It also investigates how consumers finance and reallocate their expenditure, and modify their consumer baskets when members of their reference groups spend more on positional goods, and they do not want to lag behind.

A literature review is presented, and then a new model is developed from a behavioural economic perspective. It describes how consumers with various risk attitudes reallocate their consumer expenditure and modify their consumer baskets when consumption externalities influence their relative consumption due to a positional game, but they want to “keep up with the Joneses”.

Consumers with different risk attitudes finance and reallocate their consumption expenditures variously to sustain their relative positions. Risk-neutral, slightly and intermediately risk-seeking consumers achieve a lower utility level than others. They do not realise a utility-maximising consumer basket, as it includes a relatively low number of nonpositional goods, but this choice can be considered the best response in a positional game in order to sustain their relative position.

The relationship between positional and nonpositional goods is explicitly described. The model assumes that consumers can be classified based on their risk attitudes when positional concerns matter. It also describes how consumers with various risk attitudes reallocate their consumer expenditure when they want to sustain or improve their relative consumption in a positional game.

This research examines the effects of physical proximity (close vs distant) of retailers’ private label brands (PLBs) relative to national brands (NBs) and brand display orientation (horizontal [brands occupy the same shelf] vs vertical [brands occupy different shelves]) on consumers’ PLB quality perceptions and PLB evaluations.

Two experiments involving real brands in different product categories tested the hypotheses.

A PLB positioned close (vs distant) to a NB is evaluated more favorably and this effect is mediated by increased PLB quality perceptions, but only in a horizontal brand display. In a vertical brand display, a PLB positioned close (vs distant) to a NB is evaluated less favorably and this effect is mediated by decreased PLB quality perceptions.

The findings suggest that to enhance consumers’ PLB quality perceptions and evaluations, PLBs be positioned next to (rather than on separate shelves) and close to (rather than distant from) NBs in the same product category.

Although the literature suggests that the best shelf position for PLBs is close to NBs, there is a lack of empirical research on the effects of relative shelf positioning on consumers’ quality perceptions and subsequent PLB evaluations. This research finds that both physical proximity and brand display orientation play an important role.

The purpose of this paper is to present a small UAV system with autonomous formation flight capability, the Swallow UAV system, and the application of an extended Kalman filter (EKF) based augmentation method to reduce the impact of data link loss, which will fail the formation flight algorithm of the system.

The hardware of the Swallow UAV system is composed of two aircraft and a set of ground control station for leader‐wingman formation flight. A hardware‐in‐the‐loop simulation environment is build to support the system development. Fuzzy logic control method is applied to the guidance, navigation, and control system of leader and wingman aircraft. The leader system is designed with waypoint navigation and circle trajectory tracking functions to make the aircraft stay in visual range autonomously for safety. The wingman system is designed with formation flight functionality. However, the relative position and velocity are derived from the wireless data link transmitted leader navigation information. It is vulnerable to the data link loss. The EKF based leader motion estimator (LME) is developed to estimates the leader position when the data link broke, and corrects the estimation when the data link is available.

The designed LME is flight tested, and the results show that it woks properly with sound performance that the estimation error of relative position within 3 meters, relative velocity within 1.3 meters, and leader attitude within 1.6 degrees in standard deviation.

The research implements the autonomous formation flight capability with the EKF based LME on a small UAV system.

We investigate the dynamics of competitive repositioning of firms in the deregulated U.S. airline industry (1979–1995) in terms of a firm's target market, strategic posture, and resource endowment relative to other firms in the industry. We suggest that, despite strong inertia in competitive positions, the direction of repositioning responds to external and internal alignment considerations. For external alignment, we examined how firms changed their competitive positioning to mimic the positions of similar, successful firms, and to differentiate themselves when experiencing intense rivalry. For internal alignment, we examined how firms changed their position in each dimension to align with the other dimensions of positioning. This internal alignment led to convergent positioning moves for firms with similar resource endowments and strategic postures, and divergent moves for firms with similar target markets and strategic postures. The evidence suggests that repositioning moves in terms of target markets and resource endowments are more sensitive to external and internal alignment considerations, but that changes in strategic posture are subject to very high inertia and do not appear to respond well to alignment considerations.

Concerns itself with competitive position accounting measurement, stating that it is a much more complex task, however, than devising a standard procedure for measuring competitive position. States that changes in competitive position generally build gradually, ebbing and flowing. Argues that a competitor's sales revenue is perhaps the most important of all competitive indicators and that estimation of this for firms and markets must be prime in developing a strategic management accounting system. Adds that market share provides a link between accounting performance of the single period for which the share is measured and the performance of future periods. Sums up by showing within this article that accounting representation of a firm's competitive position within an industry is possible by using quite basic accounting measurements. Goes on to say there is much development needed to refine methods of accounting for competitors, but the resulting change in the role of accountants will be immense.

This research investigates when and how brands influence attribute importance weights. Most past studies modelling consumer decision processes treated the brand of a product as an attribute parallel to the price, color or size of a product, and as a result, those studies assigned an equal (i.e. non-contingent) importance weight across brands for each attribute. In contrast, this study introduces a brand-contingent attribute-weighting process, in which brand is a higher-order construct that influences attribute importance.

This study presents a multi-level choice model in which the importance weight of an attribute can vary across brands. This study then estimates the model using real purchase data and survey data from an airline industry.

This study finds that attribute importance weights are contingent upon two aspects of a brand – the perceived relative position of the brand and consumers’ brand usage experiences. Specifically, when consumers perceive a brand to be inferior to its competitors in a given attribute, they generally place greater weight on that attribute for that brand. In contrast, when consumers perceive a brand to be superior to its competitors in a given attribute, only consumers with extensive brand usage experiences place greater weight on that attribute for that brand.

The findings provide managerial insights on brand positioning and segmentation strategies using consumers’ brand usage experiences.

This study advances the literature on consumer decision processes by modeling an attribute-weighting process that is contingent upon brands. The present study models this process based on consumer behavior theories and estimates the model using real market data.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel high-precision relative navigation method for tight formation-keeping based on thrust on-line identification.

Considering that thrust acceleration cannot be measured directly, an on-line identification method of thrust acceleration is explored via the estimated acceleration of major space perturbation and the inter-satellite relative states obtained from space-borne acceleration sensors; then, an effective identification model is designed to reconstruct thrust acceleration. Based on the identified thrust acceleration, relative orbit dynamics for tight formation-keeping is established. Further, using global positioning system (GPS) measurement information, a modified extended Kalman filter (EKF) is suggested to obtain the inter-satellite relative position and relative velocity.

Compared with the normal EKF and the adaptive robust EKF, the proposed modified EKF has better estimation accuracy in radial and along-track directions because of accurate compensation of thrust acceleration. Meanwhile, high-precision relative navigation results depend on high-precision acceleration sensors. Finally, simulation studies on a chief-deputy formation flying control system are performed to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed relative navigation algorithm.

This paper provides a reference in solving the problem of high-precision relative navigation in tight formation-keeping application.

This paper proposes a novel on-line identification method for thrust acceleration and shows that thrust identification-based modified EKF is more efficient in relative navigation for tight formation-keeping.