Procurement and Predation: Dynamic Sourcing from Financially Constrained Suppliers

This paper studies the interaction between financially constrained and financially strong firms on a procurement market. It characterizes and discusses a procurement agency’s optimal response when faced with financially asymmetric firms. By considering a dynamic setting, both present and future consequences and incentives are taken into account

Journal Staff

Bröstcancer drabbar dagligen ungefär 20 kvinnor i Sverige. Det är därför viktigt att se till att processen som dessa kvinnor och deras anhöriga genomgår fungerar väl och att upplevelsen är så bra som den kan vara under dessa omständigheter. Föreliggande projekt har genom ett tjänstedesignperspektiv undersökt hur bröstcancerprocessen upplevs av patienter. Detta med hjälp av intervjuer av både patienter och administratör inom bröstcancerprocessen. Dessa ledde fram till s.k. patientresor som beskriver hur processens olika steg ser ut men även hur patienterna upplevde dessa. Det skapades även patientresor utifrån hur landstinget vill och försöker få processen att se ut i dagens läge. Utifrån dessa patientresor hölls en workshop där fyra deltagare ifrån företaget Usify arbetade mot olika typer av visualiseringar av denna process. Visualiseringarnas fokuspunkter var väntan och känslor, då det hade framkommit under intervjuerna att väntan var det som upplevdes mest frustrerande och som den värsta delen under bröstcancerprocessen.   De idéer som framkom ur workshopen omarbetades sedan i två steg för att filtrera ut de designförslagen som ansågs mest passande. Dessa presenterades sedan för de tidigare intervjuade patienterna för att se om dessa överensstämde med deras upplevelser och ge dem möjligheten att ge sina åsikter. Resultatet visade att visualiseringarna kan kategoriseras i tre olika kategorier: statistik, verktyg och upplevelse. Dessa kategorier uppfyller separata behov och på så vis går alla designförslagen att använda i olika skeenden för olika ändamål. Något som upptäcktes under projektet var just hur väntan för patienterna resulterade i ett fel i tjänsten, de löften som dessa fick hölls inte av vården.   Inom tjänstedesign används ofta olika typer av visualiseringar för att upptäcka fel av den här karaktären. Problemet med väntan i visualiseringar är att dessa ofta är aktivitetsbundna, de vill säga att enbart aktiviteter avbildas. Väntan ses inte som en aktivitet och inkluderas därför sällan. Detta skulle kunna vara det som ligger till grund för att väntan förbises, i och med detta bör väntan inkluderas i visualiseringar. Förståelsen av väntan, som i bröstcancerprocessen upplevs som viktig för patienten, är något som kan leda till empati för patienten och ett resultat av detta projekt är att detta kan väckas med hjälp av visualiseringar av väntan.

The future of shale

Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016This project examines the various drivers that led to the U.S. shale oil revolution in order to predict its place in the energy industry going forward and to analyze its effects on Alaska. The shale boom flooded the market with oil causing a dramatic decrease in crude oil prices in late 2014. With this price drop threatening to send Alaska into an economic recession, the future of shale should be of primary concern to all Alaskans as well as other entities that rely heavily on oil revenue. The primary driver leading to the shale revolution is technology. Advances in hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, and 3D seismic mapping made producing shale oil and gas possible for the first time. New technologies like rotary steerable systems and measurements while drilling continue to make shale production more efficient, and technology will likely continue to improve. Infrastructure helps to explain why the shale revolution was mostly an American phenomenon. Many countries with shale formations have political infrastructure too unstable to risk shale investment. Capital infrastructure is a primary strength of the U.S. and also helps to explain why shale development didn't find its way up to Alaska despite having political stability. Financial infrastructure allowed oil companies to receive the funding necessary to quickly bring shale to the market. The final driver explored is crude oil prices. High oil prices helped spark the shale revolution, but with the recent price crash, there is uncertainty about its future. With production costs continually falling due to technology improvements and analysts predicting crude oil prices to stabilize above most project breakeven points, the future of shale looks bright.Introduction -- Shale & Alaska North Slope Crude Oil Prices -- Seeds of its own destruction? Technology -- Hydraulic Fracturing -- History of fracking -- Directional drilling -- History of drilling -- Benefits of directional drilling -- 3D seismic mapping -- Creating a shockwave -- Recording the data -- Interpreting the results -- The birth of a revolution -- Current/future developments -- Rotary steerable system -- Measurements while drilling -- Future developments. Infrastructure -- Political risk -- Financial markets -- Over investment -- Capital infrastructure. Crude prices -- The price crash -- Breakeven prices -- Future prices -- Alaska -- Conclusion -- Bibliography

Controlled ferrite content improves weldability of corrosion-resistant steel

Corrosion-resistant steel that adds restrictions on chemical composition to ensure sufficient ferrite content decreases the tendency of CRES to develop cracks during welding. The equations restricting composition are based on the Schaeffler constitution diagram

Taxation, Inequality and the Allocation of Talent

This paper examines the implications of income redistribution on human capital accumulation and income inequality, presenting a model where human capital investment is indivisible and agents differ in economic opportunity as well as intellectual ability. It is shown that the impact of redistribution is ambiguous on the income distribution as well as on human capital accumulation. In particular, while redistributive policy is likely to be successful both in terms of efficiency and equity in low-tax societies, it may be highly detrimental in both respects if the rate of redistribution is already moderate or high.human capital; talent; efficiency; equity; redistributive taxation

Denseness of volatile and nonvolatile sequences of functions

In a recent paper by Jonasson and Steif, definitions to describe the volatility of sequences of Boolean functions, $f_n \colon \{ -1,1 \}^n \to \{ -1,1 \}$ were introduced. We continue their study of how these definitions relate to noise stability and noise sensitivity. Our main results are that the set of volatile sequences of Boolean functions is a natural way "dense" in the set of all sequences of Boolean functions, and that the set of non-volatile Boolean sequences is not "dense" in the set of noise stable sequences of Boolean functions.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure

Algorithms and Speech

One of the central questions in free speech jurisprudence is what activities the First Amendment encompasses. This Article considers that question in the context of an area of increasing importance – algorithm-based decisions. I begin by looking to broadly accepted legal sources, which for the First Amendment means primarily Supreme Court jurisprudence. That jurisprudence provides for very broad First Amendment coverage, and the Court has reinforced that breadth in recent cases. Under the Court’s jurisprudence the First Amendment (and the heightened scrutiny it entails) would apply to many algorithm-based decisions, specifically those entailing substantive communications. We could of course adopt a limiting conception of the First Amendment, but any nonarbitrary exclusion of algorithm-based decisions would require major changes in the Court’s jurisprudence. I believe that First Amendment coverage of algorithm-based decisions is too small a step to justify such changes. But insofar as we are concerned about the expansiveness of First Amendment coverage, we may want to limit it in two areas of genuine uncertainty: editorial decisions that are neither obvious nor communicated to the reader, and laws that single out speakers but do not regulate their speech. Even with those limitations, however, an enormous and growing amount of activity will be subject to heightened scrutiny absent a fundamental reorientation of First Amendment jurisprudence

Orthogonal multiplet bases in SU(Nc) color space

We develop a general recipe for constructing orthogonal bases for the calculation of color structures appearing in QCD for any number of partons and arbitrary Nc. The bases are constructed using hermitian gluon projectors onto irreducible subspaces invariant under SU(Nc). Thus, each basis vector is associated with an irreducible representation of SU(Nc). The resulting multiplet bases are not only orthogonal, but also minimal for finite Nc. As a consequence, for calculations involving many colored particles, the number of basis vectors is reduced significantly compared to standard approaches employing overcomplete bases. We exemplify the method by constructing multiplet bases for all processes involving a total of 6 external colored partons.Comment: 50 pages, 2 figure