CEO duality has been the subject of debate for over twenty years and shows no signs of abating. With conflicting theoretical and empirical evidence underpinning the debate the practice has fluctuated, investor perception of board leadership structure has altered, international regulation has reacted, scholarly conceptualizations of duality have become overly complex, and the need to understand duality and conclude the debate has increased. This thesis explores duality in listed corporations and aims to form an appropriate solution to end the dichotomy. My solution requires one to confront misunderstandings which have led to a traditional insistence towards structural reform and prolonged the contentious debate, and recognize an underlying contention which needs to be resolved to bring finality to the debate. I argue finality is possible if a process oriented approach is adopted and corporations recognize the need to be technically equipped to deal with leadership structures in the modern corporate arena.

The study is focused on the thermal entanglement of spin chains. Chains consisting of two and three qubits are considered. These chains are considered open because they are coupled to bosonic baths at different temperatures. The baths represent the environment. The dynamics of these open systems are examined as are the effects of different parameters - such as bath temperature - on the entanglement of the spins. The measure of entanglement used in these cases is the concurrence. Comparisons are made between a model that assumes a strong spinspin interaction and one that assumes a weak one. In all these cases, analytical solutions for the system dynamics are presented. It is found that at large times, all systems converge to a state that depends only on bath temperature. It is also found that increases in bath temperatures diminish the entanglement between spins and that at high enough temperatures the entanglement vanishes altogether. The time and temperature dependence of the entanglement is different for the two models that are studied. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2010.

CEO duality has been the subject of debate for over twenty years and shows no signs of abating. With conflicting theoretical and empirical evidence underpinning the debate the practice has fluctuated, investor perception of board leadership structure has altered, international regulation has reacted, scholarly conceptualizations of duality have become overly complex, and the need to understand duality and conclude the debate has increased. This thesis explores duality in listed corporations and aims to form an appropriate solution to end the dichotomy. My solution requires one to confront misunderstandings which have led to a traditional insistence towards structural reform and prolonged the contentious debate, and recognize an underlying contention which needs to be resolved to bring finality to the debate. I argue finality is possible if a process oriented approach is adopted and corporations recognize the need to be technically equipped to deal with leadership structures in the modern corporate arena.

This paper solves a long-standing open problem in mathematical finance: to find a solution to the problem of maximizing utility from terminal wealth of an agent with a random endowment process, in the general, semimartingale model for incomplete markets, and to characterize it via the associated dual problem. We show that this is indeed possible if the dual problem and its domain are carefully defined. More precisely, we show that the optimal terminal wealth is equal to the inverse of marginal utility evaluated at the solution to the dual problem, which is in the form of the regular part of an element of(L∞)* (the dual space of L∞). (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

We show that, for a utility function U: R to R having reasonable asymptotic elasticity, the optimal investment process H. S is a super-martingale under each equivalent martingale measure Q, such that E[V(dQ/dP)] < "unendlich", where V is conjugate to U. Similar results for the special case of the exponential utility were recently obtained by Delbaen, Grandits, Rheinländer, Samperi, Schweizer, Stricker as well as Kabanov, Stricker. This result gives rise to a rather delicate analysis of the "good definition" of "allowed" trading strategies H for the financial market S. One offspring of these considerations leads to the subsequent - at first glance paradoxical - example. There is a financial market consisting of a deterministic bond and two risky financial assets (S_t^1, S_t^2)_0<=t<=T such that, for an agent whose preferences are modeled by expected exponential utility at time T, it is optimal to constantly hold one unit of asset S^1. However, if we pass to the market consisting only of the bond and the first risky asset S^1, and leaving the information structure unchanged, this trading strategy is not optimal any more: in this smaller market it is optimal to invest the initial endowment into the bond. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

Motivated by applications in multimedia streaming and in energy systems, we study duality relations in fi nite queues. Dual of a queue is de fined to be a queue in which the arrival and service processes are interchanged. In other words, dual of the G1/G2/1/K queue is the G2/G1/1/K queue, a queue in which the inter-arrival times have the same distribution as the service times of the primal queue and vice versa. Similarly, dual of a fluid flow queue with cumulative input C(t) and available processing S(t) is a fluid queue with cumulative input S(t) and available processing C(t). We are primarily interested in finding relations between the overflow and underflow of the primal and dual queues. Then, using existing results in the literature regarding the probability of loss and the stationary probability of queue being full, we can obtain estimates on the probability of starvation and the probability of the queue being empty. The probability of starvation corresponds to the probability that a queue becomes empty, i.e., the end of a busy period. We study the relations between arrival and departure Palm distributions and their relations to stationary distributions. We consider both the case of point process inputs as well as fluid inputs. We obtain inequalities between the probability of the queue being empty and the probability of the queue being full for both the time stationary and Palm distributions by interchanging arrival and service processes. In the fluid queue case, we show that there is an equality between arrival and departure distributions that leads to an equality between the probability of starvation in the primal queue and the probability of overflow in the dual queue. The techniques are based on monotonicity arguments and coupling. The usefulness of the bounds is illustrated via numerical results.

In this study, classic grounded theory is used to explore and explain the relationship between street-involved youth and the streets. The main concern of the youth in this study is negotiating duality, and at the heart of this negotiation process is seeking safety on the streets while struggling to emerge into mainstream society. Data was collected in a mid-sized urban Canadian city through semi-structured interviews, observation, conversations and photography with 52 current street-involved youth, 6 former street-involved youth, and 8 adults who work with this population. The study led to the development of a substantive theory of negotiating duality, the core construct which emerged as the means by which street-involved youth handle their need to both survive in the day-to-day context of the streets while simultaneously working their way off the streets and back to mainstream society. Four domains of duality emerged as significant: dual logic, dual space and place, dual identity, and dual normality. Additionally, three interrelated concepts (social processes) emerged from the data: seeking safety, struggling to emerge, and living outside normal. These processes were characterized by five bifocal strategies: escaping, provisioning, anchoring, routing, and using (in)visibility. This theory is a model of person-place interaction, explaining the dynamic relationship street-involved youth have with and between the street and mainstream society. The findings of this study enhance understanding about street-involved youth and their interaction with the streets and mainstream society and provide a framework that can be utilized to inform youth homelessness services, policy development, and future research. / Graduate

Processes having the same bridges are said to belong to the same reciprocal class. In this article we analyze reciprocal classes of Markov counting processes by identifying their reciprocal invariants and we characterize them as the set of counting processes satisfying some duality formula.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-117). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Abordaremos a teoria do transporte otimo demonstrando o teorema da dualidade de Kantorovich para uma classe ampla de funções custo. Tal resultado desempenha um papel de suma importância na teoria do transporte otimo. Uma ferramenta importante utilizada e o teorema da dualidade de Fenchel-Rockafellar, aqui enunciado e demonstrado em bastante generalidade. Demonstramos tamb em o teorema da dualidade de Kantorovich-Rubinstein, que trata do caso particular da função custo distância. / We analyze the optimal transport theory proving the Kantorovich duality theorem for a wide class of cost functions. Such result plays an extremely important role in the optimal transport theory. An important tool used here is the Fenchel-Rockafellar duality theorem, which we state and prove in a general case. We also prove the Kantorovich-Rubinstein duality theorem, which deals with the particular case of cost function given by the distance.