Escalation of commitment to failing investments is considered to be representative of biased forms of decision-making which may result in unproductive consequences. Decision makers adopt investment courses of action in initial conditions of uncertainty, which subsequently appear to lead to failure. When confronted with the prospect of their decisions producing losses, they commit decision errors thus escalating their commitment to their original courses of action. Several theories with rational and irrational antecedents have been developed in the literature to explain the escalation phenomenon. Fundamental theoretical differences are associated with the origin of the concept. Escalation of commitment was conceived in the decision theory context of the problem of resource allocation under uncertainty conditions. This thesis describes the resource allocation problem in order to identify and explain associated characteristics. Explanations of these characteristics reveal several problems: there are no decision rules available to handle uncertainty; decision makers consistently violate the requirements for rationality and rational economic decision making; individual utility maximization is divorced from the business objective of profit maximisation and also involves taking increased risks when there is an expectation that investment losses will be recovered; there are several criteria for and methods of investment evaluation which are computationally and analytically difficult to apply; and whether a decision error has been made is indeterminate with some investment projects whose success or failure cannot be determined until after project completion. These problems lead to the conclusion that the determination of the success or failure of an investment decision may depend on the valuation methodology selected. In this respect it is argued that investment decisions undertaken in public organisations should be evaluated using methodologies developed to measure social benefits and costs because calculations of private rates of return provide misleading assessments. Research on the escalation phenomenon is dominated by a psychological perspective, which obtains its findings from extensive investigation of individuals in controlled experimental laboratory conditions. The experimental research has identified personal pre-dispositional, social and situational influences, which contribute to escalation and de-escalation of commitment. The major research focus has resulted in two theoretical explanations for escalation of commitment. These derive from descriptive cognitive motivational theories concerned with expectancy, that encourage rational decision making and dissonance, which in turn produce irrational self justification based decisions. An alternative research focus favours explanations from prospect theory. Research, critical of the psychological explanations favours rational explanations derived from the normative theory of expected utility, which encourages individual self-interested behaviour. This thesis is concerned with explaining escalation of commitment in organisations. This necessarily involves adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. This thesis examines two world expositions, Expo 86 and Expo 88. World expositions are unusual government events whose principal purpose is to celebrate human achievements. Expo 86 was held to celebrate Vancouver’s centenary. Expo 88 was held to celebrate Australia’s bicentennial. They were not designed for their potential profitability. To justify the expenditures involved other objectives are attached to the celebratory purpose. These usually are associated with urban renewal and economic development. They are unorthodox investment projects. They involve long lead times of capital expenditure followed by short operating periods of six months or less, after which time most of the capital improvements are either disposed of or demolished. Expo 86 incurred significant financial losses and was considered an escalation prototype. It became a case study used to develop a generalized theoretical model of escalation. The model specifies how initially formulated rational decisions are replaced progressively by decisions based on self-justification, which escalate commitment. Escalation is reinforced by psychological pre-dispositional, social and structural influences. The model is an extension of research findings from individual laboratory experiments. The thesis identifies several plausible alternative theoretical explanations for escalation in organisations. These involve emotional commitment, social influences to conform to group norms, the possibilities for deviating from rational decision making principles in the presence of uncertainly and the agency theory problem which involves individuals pursuing their own rational self interests which are contrary to the objectives of an organisation. Expo 86 was directly linked to urban renewal objectives. The economic project and urban planning studies of Expo 86 concluded that the event successfully achieved the urban development objectives using social cost benefit analysis as the criterion of evaluation. These objectives were rationally conceived and executed. As a result of the examination, the thesis explores the problems associated with investment projects having multiple objectives, looks at how rational explanations can be accommodated in the theoretical model and questions whether calculations of accounting negative rates of return should be the criteria for evaluation and the determinant of whether Expo 86 qualified as a prototypical example of escalation in organisations. The analysis of Expo 88 reinforced these concerns. A longitudinal dimension was adopted in the case study. This enabled the origins of the event to be explored, the objectives to be identified and the project to be evaluated using various private and public investment criteria. Expo 88 qualified as a failed private investment project on all but one of the financial investment criteria employed. The evaluation of Expo 88 as a public investment project produced social benefits and economic impacts in excess of social costs. Expo 88 was conceived by influential individuals who promoted the initiative for an exposition on the basis that its staging would be publicly and personally beneficial. The project was associated with multiple objectives other than its celebratory purpose that included tourism development and urban renewal from which the public was expected to benefit and which promoters believed justified the event. The principal decision makers were not directly influenced by profitability considerations because information had been provided during the planning phase, which indicated that the project would produce financial losses. Because of public pronouncements it became politically necessary to include the profitability of the project as an objective. Various costly and deceptive measures were adopted in order to generate an impression of profitability. At the same time success was promoted publicly and successfully, not in terms of its profitability, but in terms of attendance figures. As a result of the analyses, the theoretical model was modified by incorporating rational motives into the original structure. Decision makers were driven by rational motives over the life of the projects. In the case of Expo 88 these rational motives derived from agency theory relationships and the pursuit of objectives concerned with economic development, celebration and political recognition. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the contributions and limitations of the research. The contributions involve modifications to the theoretical model to reflect the importance of rational motives in the decision making process, generalisation of the causes of escalation in organisations in various contingent circumstances and the impact that multiple project objectives and methodological problems concerned with evaluation criteria have on theory development. The major limitation relates to the selection of public organisations engaged in unorthodox investment projects as inappropriate representatives to examine the escalation phenomenon.

abstract: Training for law enforcement on effective ways of intervening in mental health crises is limited. What is available tends to be costly for implementation, labor-intensive, and requires officers to opt-in. DEFUSE, an interactive online training program, was specifically developed to train law enforcement on mental illness and de-escalation skills. Derived from a stress inoculation framework, the curriculum provides education, skills training, and rehearsal; it is brief, cost-effective, and scalable to officers across the country. Participants were randomly assigned to either the experimental or delayed treatment control conditions. A multivariate analysis of variance yielded a significant treatment-by-repeated-measures interaction and univariate analyses confirmed improvement on all of the measures (e.g., empathy, stigma, self-efficacy, behavioral outcomes, knowledge). Replication dependent t-test analyses conducted on the control condition following completion of DEFUSE confirmed significant improvement on four of the measures and marginal significance on the fifth. Participant responses to BPAD video vignettes revealed significant differences in objective behavioral proficiency for those participants who completed the online course. DEFUSE is a powerful tool for training law enforcement on mental illness and effective strategies for intervening in mental health crises. Considerations for future study are discussed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Counseling Psychology 2017

abstract: There is demand for police reform in the United States to reduce use of force and bias, and to improve police-citizen relationships. Many believe de-escalation should be a more central feature of police training and practice. It is suggested that improving officers’ communication and conflict resolution skills will temper police-citizen interactions and reduce police use of force, and that such a change will improve citizen trust in the police. To date, however, de-escalation training has not spread widely across agencies, and de-escalation as a strategy has not been studied. Without an evidence-based understanding of these concepts, de-escalation training will proceed blindly, if at all. Accordingly, this dissertation represents one of the first empirical studies of de-escalation in police work. The author completed this study as an embedded researcher in the Spokane (WA) Police Department, and it proceeds in two parts. Part 1 was exploratory and qualitative, consisting of in-depth interviews (N=8) and a focus group (N=1) with eight highly skilled police de-escalators. These officers were nominated by peers as the best among them at de-escalating difficult encounters with citizens. The results in Part 1 explore officers’ perceptions of de-escalation and offer a definition of de-escalation as well as a description of de-escalation tactics. In Part 2, the author systematically observed the concepts developed in part 1 during 35 ride-alongs with 29 police officers, including the peer nominated officers (N=131 police-citizen encounters). This phase of the research investigated whether characteristics of officers, citizens, and situations are associated with de-escalation use, and de-escalation effectiveness. Implications from these findings are drawn for police practice, theory, and research methods. This dissertation is a launching point for empirical research on de-escalation in police work. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Criminology and Criminal Justice 2017

The sub-state nationalist conflicts in both Northern Ireland and the Basque Country have undergone significant de-escalation. However, while the transformation of the conflict in Northern Ireland involved a negotiated agreement with the host state, that of the conflict in the Basque Country did not. Thus, if the shape of the outcome represents the dependent variable, exploring these transformations requires an examination of three interrelated independent variable groupings. The first explores the operational capacities of each movement through an examination of their resources, and how access to these resources may have changed over time and impacted the overall strategies. Secondly, an examination of state responses to both the conflict itself as well as to changing movement strategies is undertaken. Finally, the third grouping seeks to explore the dynamics the above variables have on the way in which the sub-state nationalist organizations are led and directed. This project found that while both the Republican Movement and the MLNV experienced motivating pulls toward de-escalation and pursuit of movement goals increasingly dominated by institutional politics (Grouping 1), the differences in the responses of the host States (Grouping 2), and the organizational structures through which movement assessments and decisions are funnelled (Grouping 3), allowed for the MLNV to make the more radical commitment to de-escalation in the absence of a negotiated settlement, while the Republican Movement was able to move the bulk of, but not all, its membership into a negotiated agreement with the British state. The Republican Movement experienced greater optimism for and motivation in negotiations than did the MLNV, while the MLNV experienced greater motivation toward de-escalation more generally.

My essay is about productivity and its metering. I distributed it into three parts. In the first part I describe theoretic apparatus. The second part contains calculations of total and partial productivity and year-on-year confrontation. Analysis was made for 6 years, it means from 2003 to 2008. In the last part, there I define possibilities, how we can escalate productivity. I wanted to show you very specific production for pharmaceutical and food-processing industry, for which Pharming a.s. produces.

For decades, men in South Africa and many African countries have enjoyed the role of being the main providers and protectors of the family. The concept, “head of the family” implied a lot in terms of playing a leading role in the family. A man literarily became the main provider of the family while the woman was the family maker, i.e. looked after the family. Since the new dispensation in South Africa, the economic situation of women has improved tremendously. The campaign for the equality through the Gender Equality process and the Feminine Theology has seen many women coming out of the oppression of economy and climbing the ladders of prosperity and better live. On the hand, the policy of gender equality seems to have negative effects on the lives of men who had the privilege of having better salaries and enjoying the economic authority and being the major breadwinners in the family. Before this, many women’s salaries were just an augmentation of the husband’s salary and most of the financial transactions in the family were done in the name of the husband. Women could not buy on credit without the authorization of the husbands. With the new dispensation, all those barriers have been removed and women have been empowered to participate in the financial transactions without getting authorizations of their spouses. Once men lose their jobs or discover that their wives are earning far more than they do, they get depressed and their lives deteriorate hopelessly. They become alcoholics and sometimes take their own lives or decide to wipe out the whole family. This situation does not only confine itself to married couples, but to single men as well, especially the young ones. Many young women have the opportunity of going through tertiary education and are therefore earning better salaries and can afford to buy houses and cars independently from male counterparts. They do not need the security and comfort of men and can live on their own. It is because of the escalation of the phenomenon of traumatised men that the researcher was challenged to want to study it further, to see how prevalent it is and work with men to make them aware of it and to find ways of accepting it as a reality. The researcher further worked on a strategy to develop a counselling model or strategies for the Church to help the affected men and to prepare those who have not yet been involved to be ready. / Dissertation (MA(Theology))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Practical Theology / unrestricted

Abstract:Cybercrime refers to any illegal use of technology, a computer, networked device or a network for criminal acts. It constitutes a rapidly evolving and complex phenomenon as the Internet is ruling on almost every sector of human activity. Innovation plays a highly significant role in the growth of an economy. However, every time there is an advancement in the field of technology, there is bound to be other adverse effects. Such is the case with criminology. In this end, the prevalence of cybercrime is alarmingly increasing, and there have been several attempts by the government and other concerned agencies at stemming its escalation (Curtis et al., 2009). The following thesis shows the investigation of the rise of cybercrime in Greece. It is a systematic literature review available on this topic, aiming to explore areas such as the preparedness of the government in the fight against cybercrime, and the consideration that, in so doing, it is obligated to protect the rights of intellectual property as well as the protection of the rights to privacy of its citizens (Gobran, 2015). Of all the categories of information technology-related crimes, cybercrimes are the most common. The thesis also explores the conventions and laws employed by law enforcement in the efforts to counter the activities of cybercrime, including their effectiveness. It also establishes the different sectors and industries with the highest rates of cybercrime activities and the ways in which these sectors are fighting against these activities.

Internet application servers are currently designed to maximize resource efficiency by servicing many thousands of users that may fall within disparate privilege classes. Pooling users into a shared execution context in this way enables adversaries not only to laterally propagate attacks against other clients, but also to use the application server as a "confused deputy" to gain escalated privileges against sensitive backend data. In this work, we present the Single-use Server (SuS) model, which detects and defeats these attacks by separating users into isolated, containerized application servers with tailored backend permissions. In this model, exploited servers no longer have unfettered access to the backend data or other users. We create a prototype implementation of the SuS model for the WordPress content management system and demonstrate our model's ability to neutralize real-world exploits against vulnerable WordPress versions. We find that the SuS model achieves a high level of security while minimizing the amount of code modification required for porting an application server. In our performance evaluation, we find that the CPU and latency overheads of the SuS model are very low, and memory consumption scales linearly. We generalize the SuS model to be applicable to a wide range of application server and backend resource pairs. With our modularized codebase, we port IMAP, a widely-used mail retrieval protocol, to the SuS model and find that doing so requires minimal effort.

The study examined the relationship between mass uprisings and insurgencies and the impact of international involvement on escalation of mass uprisings into an insurgency. The research used the insurgencies of the LRA (Uganda); RUF (Sierra Leone), Boko Haram (Nigeria) and Al-Shabaab (Somalia) as well as the mass uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya as case studies. The study established that insurgencies in Africa that relied primarily on terrorism and violence explain criminal rather than political violence. While the mass uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya revealed normal patterns of conflict, it was established that the case of Libya was a hybrid of mass uprising and insurgent methods that leaned towards a description of a new category of insurgency. The study further confirmed that internal conditions in a state and the nature of international involvement define the outcomes of a mass uprising or an insurgency in terms of escalation, duration and termination. The comprehensive humanitarian interventions in the insurgencies of the LRA, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab and the R2P intervention in Libya escalated violence and conflict continuation. In contrast, the limited involvement in the mass uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt resulted in low levels of violence, while the intervention in Sierra Leone terminated the RUF insurgency in view of the associated DDR and institutional building programmes. The study recommends that since humanitarian and military interventions invariably escalate violence and increased fatalities, interventions to end conflicts (mass uprisings and insurgencies) must be based an incremental use of force as a complement to peaceful negotiations. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Political Sciences / DPhil / Unrestricted

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