1,720,990 research outputs found
Bonus-Malus Approach to Project Management
No full textThis paper concentrates on the management of delayed projects charged with penalty costs and of expedited projects rewarded with bonuses, based on an activity graph description of the projects. We propose a two-stage heuristic procedure to assist project managers to determine “fair” shares of penalties or compensations for agents involved when information regarding the project’s schedule and its actual execution is available. Incentives for better performance play a key role in this procedure, which combines a “bonus-malus” approach with a rationing approach. In the first stage, activities’ deviations from the schedule are computed using heuristic algorithms which implement incentives for better performance according to two alternative scenarios. In the second stage, the deviations of activities computed according to the chosen scenario are adjusted using well-known rules from the literature on rationing problems. A new family of compensations-penalties solutions, called Mutual Help Solutions, is introduced and illustrated
Two Approaches to the Problem of Sharing Delay Costs in Joint Projects
No full textThis paper concentrates on cost sharing situations which arise when delayed joint projects involve joint delay costs. The problem here is to determine "fair" shares for each of the agents who contribute to the delay of the project such that the total delay cost is cleared. We focus on the evaluation of the responsibility of each agent in delaying the project based on the activity graph representation of the project and then on solving the important and complicated problem of the delay cost sharing among the agents involved. Two approaches, both rooted in cooperative game theory methods are presented as possible solutions. In the first approach delay cost sharing rules are introduced which are based on the delay of the project and on the individual delays of the agents who perform activities. This approach is inspired by the bankruptcy and taxation literature and leads to five rules: the constrained equal contribution rule, the (truncated) proportional rule and the (truncated) constrained equal reduction rule. By introducing two coalitional games related to delay cost sharing problems, which we call the pessimistic delay game and the optimistic delay game, also game theoretical solutions as the Shapley value, the nucleolus and the tau-value generate delay cost sharing rules. In the second approach the delays of the paths in the activity graph together with the delay of the project play a role. A two-stage solution is proposed. The first stage can be seen as a game between paths, where the delay cost of the project has to be allocated to the paths. Here serial cost sharing methods play a role. In the second stage the allocated costs to each path are divided proportionally w.r.t. the individual delays among the activities in the path
A Flow Approach to Bankruptcy Problems
No full textIn this note we represent a classical bankruptcy problem as a standard flow problem on a simple network and implement some known division rules from the bankruptcy literature via suitable cost functions in the related minimum cost flow problem
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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