Retention

Employee retention in the 21th century reflects how companies keep their employees motivated and well prepared for the challenges in the workplace. In this paper, I apply the concepts of motivation and how employers keep their employees. I also emphasize the costly effects of a employee leaving the organization, both as a dollar and emotional standpoint

How Has NAFTA Affected the Business Relationship Between the United States and Mexico?

This paper researches the effects NAFTA has had on the relationship between Mexico and the United States. It positions the question of why Mexico chose to enter the agreement within a larger historical context, debating the economic and social effects on the country as a whole. This study shows how economic trends have changed prior to and since Mexico joined NAFTA. It elaborates on the specific dynamics of what it means for the two countries to interact with each other on a cultural level, under the framework explained by Geert Hofstede\u27s cultural dimensions. Then, it poses recommendations for ways that managers and executives from the United States can use these cultural understandings to avoid corporate-level miscommunications and missteps. Because NAFTA is currently being renegotiated, this paper also discusses the current state of affairs in regards to that process. With updates from as recently as May 4, 2018, the paper weighs possible outcomes of the renegotiations, taking into consideration variables such as the elections occurring in both the United States and Mexico before the end of the year. Finally, this paper concludes that the business relationship between the two countries would not be as developed or as interdependent as it is today without NAFTA

Type I Seesaw Mechanism, Lepton Flavour Violation and Higgs Decays

We review and update the current phenomenological constraints on minimal type I seesaw extensions of the Standard Model in which New Physics content can be probed at the electroweak scale. In this class of models, the flavour structure of the neutrino Yukawa couplings is determined by the requirement of reproducing neutrino oscillation data. The strongest constraints on the seesaw parameter space are imposed by the very recent upper limit on \mu\ --> e \gamma\ decay rate. Searches of non-standard Higgs boson decays into a light and a heavy neutrino may also provide and independent test of these seesaw scenarios.Comment: Prepared for DISCRETE 2012 - The Third Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries, Instituto Superior T\'ecnico, Lisbon, 3 - 7 December 201

Flavor and CP symmetries for leptogenesis and 0nubb decay

We perform a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenology of leptonic low and high energy CP phases in a scenario with three heavy right-handed neutrinos in which a flavor and a CP symmetry are non-trivially broken. All CP phases as well as lepton mixing angles are determined by the properties of the flavor and CP symmetry and one free real parameter. We focus on the generation of the baryon asymmetry Y_B of the Universe via unflavored leptogenesis and the predictions of m_ee, the quantity measurable in neutrinoless double beta decay. We show that the sign of Y_B can be fixed and the allowed parameter range of m_ee can be strongly constrained. We argue on general grounds that the CP asymmetries epsilon_i are dominated by the contribution associated with one Majorana phase and that in cases in which only the Dirac phase is non-trivial the sign of Y_B depends on further parameters. In addition, we comment on the case of flavored leptogenesis where in general the knowledge of the CP phases and light neutrino mass spectrum is also not sufficient in order to fix the sign of the CP asymmetries. As examples we discuss the series of flavor groups Delta (3 n^2) and Delta (6 n^2), n >= 2 integer, and several classes of CP transformations.Comment: 1+59 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables; v2 matches journal versio

Diphoton Resonances at the LHC

We review the current status of searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model in the diphoton channel at the LHC and estimate the reach with future collected data. We perform a model independent analysis based on an effective field theory approach and different production mechanisms. As an illustrative example, we apply our results to a scenario of minimal composite dynamics.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures; invited review for MPLA; journal versio

How the Experts Algorithm Can Help Solve LPs Online

We consider the problem of solving packing/covering LPs online, when the columns of the constraint matrix are presented in random order. This problem has received much attention and the main focus is to figure out how large the right-hand sides of the LPs have to be (compared to the entries on the left-hand side of the constraints) to allow $(1+\epsilon)$-approximations online. It is known that the right-hand sides have to be $\Omega(\epsilon^{-2} \log m)$ times the left-hand sides, where $m$ is the number of constraints. In this paper we give a primal-dual algorithm that achieve this bound for mixed packing/covering LPs. Our algorithms construct dual solutions using a regret-minimizing online learning algorithm in a black-box fashion, and use them to construct primal solutions. The adversarial guarantee that holds for the constructed duals helps us to take care of most of the correlations that arise in the algorithm; the remaining correlations are handled via martingale concentration and maximal inequalities. These ideas lead to conceptually simple and modular algorithms, which we hope will be useful in other contexts.Comment: An extended abstract appears in the 22nd European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2014

The Query-commit Problem

In the query-commit problem we are given a graph where edges have distinct probabilities of existing. It is possible to query the edges of the graph, and if the queried edge exists then its endpoints are irrevocably matched. The goal is to find a querying strategy which maximizes the expected size of the matching obtained. This stochastic matching setup is motivated by applications in kidney exchanges and online dating. In this paper we address the query-commit problem from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. First, we show that a simple class of edges can be queried without compromising the optimality of the strategy. This property is then used to obtain in polynomial time an optimal querying strategy when the input graph is sparse. Next we turn our attentions to the kidney exchange application, focusing on instances modeled over real data from existing exchange programs. We prove that, as the number of nodes grows, almost every instance admits a strategy which matches almost all nodes. This result supports the intuition that more exchanges are possible on a larger pool of patient/donors and gives theoretical justification for unifying the existing exchange programs. Finally, we evaluate experimentally different querying strategies over kidney exchange instances. We show that even very simple heuristics perform fairly well, being within 1.5% of an optimal clairvoyant strategy, that knows in advance the edges in the graph. In such a time-sensitive application, this result motivates the use of committing strategies