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The dissertation looks at three topics that involve experimental economics methods or individual decision making under risk: how do people make educational decisions when facing the risk of drop out; which models best characterize individuals' decision processes under risk; how can physicians improve discharge decisions to reduce the risk of unplanned readmissions. In the first chapter, I introduce the risk of dropout into Spence’s job market signaling model and test the modified model in the laboratory. I look at equilibria in the labor market and discuss the refinement based on the Cho-Kreps Intuitive Criterion. I derive the condition under which a separating equilibrium is the only perfect Bayesian equilibrium that survives the refinement and discuss the effects of workers' risk preferences on these equilibrium predictions. The data from lab experiments show that the market reaches the separating equilibrium more often when it is the only intuitive equilibrium. I also observe that, when the share of the low-ability type in the worker population decreases, or the cost to pursue a degree increases, the size of the wage premium for having the degree generally decreases. In the experiments, I use binary lottery tasks to elicit subjects' risk preferences to explain their strategies in the signaling games, and the analyses partially confirm the prediction that more risk-averse individuals pursue a higher degree less frequently in the presence of dropout risks. In the second chapter, as part of a joint project with Dr. Glenn W. Harrison and Dr. Rusty Tchernis, we apply the Bayesian econometric method to estimation of individual preferences under risk. We estimate a mixture model of Expected Utility Theory and Cumulative Prospect Theory using both simulated and observed binary lottery choices. We develop Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms to sample from the posterior distribution of parameters in the mixture model and compare the performances of different algorithms. The algorithms generally recover the true parameters used in the simulation, although some algorithms outperformed others in terms of efficiency. We also apply the algorithms to estimation using actual choice data. We find that 56.5% of the subjects can be characterized as consistent with Expected Utility Theory and 43.5% with Cumulative Prospect Theory. We find modest risk aversion among Expected Utility maximizers, and overweighting on the probabilities of extreme outcomes with very mild loss aversion among Cumulative Prospective Utility maximizers. In the third chapter, coauthored with Dr. Ira L. Leeds, Dr. Vjollca Sadiraj, Dr. James C. Cox, Dr. Timothy M. Pawlik, Dr. Kurt E. Schnier and Dr. John F. Sweeney, we sought to define the association between information used for hospital discharge and patients' subsequent risk of unplanned readmission. De-identified data for patients from a tertiary academic medical center's surgical services were analyzed using a time-to-event model to identify criteria that statistically explained the timing of discharges. The data were subsequently used to develop a prediction model of unplanned hospital readmissions. Comparison of discharge behaviors versus the predictive readmission model suggested important discordance with certain clinical measures not being accounted for to optimize discharges. We suggest that decision-support tools for discharge may utilize variables that are not routinely considered by healthcare providers.

<p>Background and research problem: The former highly inflationary property market is currently undergoing a stagnation process. Investors have been used to annual growth figures in double digits,</p><p>but now this is no longer considered to be a realistic outlook for future years. According to a report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Urban Land Institute, published by Avanza Wealth Management,</p><p>the three most attractive markets for property investment in Europe are London, Paris and Stockholm. Because of this the authors have focused their investigation on two companies in the London and</p><p>Stockholm. The authors will additionally use an international bank, an estate agent and a consultancy firm for further information, with regards to the property market and risks associated with these types</p><p>of investment in particular. This leads us into the purpose and research problem for this thesis which is concentrated around risks involved in property investments and how companies handle these risks.</p><p>What are the biggest risks associated with these types of investment and how does different organisations analyse these identified risk factors? What different risk factors do companies in the property sector consider? Furthermore, a comparison between the investigated companies in London and London will be undertaken.</p><p>Delimitations: The authors have chosen to limit the thesis geographically to the regions of London and Stockholm, since these markets have been categorised as being amongst the most attractive for</p><p>property investments in Europe. Also, the authors have chosen not to consider the risk factors associated with new productions in debt since this will make this thesis far to indecisive and immense,</p><p>hence it will be impossible for the intended reader to grasp the actual risks associated with the</p><p>property market as a whole.</p><p>Method: A number of interviews have been held with representatives at both board and management levels within the property companies which have been the focal point of this thesis. Moreover, several</p><p>other interviews have been held with other associated companies to create a broad picture of the property market and the inherent risks in these investments.</p><p>Results and conclusions: The largest risks associated with property investments, according to the interviewed property organisations are: fluctuations in interest rates, economic cycles, the position of</p><p>the property, change in property law or property regulations. The interviewed bank had partially diverging opinions about the risk factors and summarised these as: fluctuations in rental income,</p><p>vacancies, the ability of repayments and also the position of the property. This divergence would seem to be a result of the fact that the bank focuses on just the aspects of loans to finance the investment. To sum up the thesis, the authors conclude that the organisations, whether in London or Stockholm, seem to have identified relatively similar risk factors and that they also use roughly the same countermeasures to meet these risks.</p><p>Suggestions for further research: It would be of interests for the industry to investigate the possibility of being able to quantify these risks into figures to be able to build models for calculations</p><p>of these risks and thus be able to estimate the actual cost of risk associated with investments in property. Furthermore, it would be interesting to perform a large scale investigation with more</p><p>organisations together with quantitative analysis and questionnaires.</p>

Background and research problem: The former highly inflationary property market is currently undergoing a stagnation process. Investors have been used to annual growth figures in double digits, but now this is no longer considered to be a realistic outlook for future years. According to a report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Urban Land Institute, published by Avanza Wealth Management, the three most attractive markets for property investment in Europe are London, Paris and Stockholm. Because of this the authors have focused their investigation on two companies in the London and Stockholm. The authors will additionally use an international bank, an estate agent and a consultancy firm for further information, with regards to the property market and risks associated with these types of investment in particular. This leads us into the purpose and research problem for this thesis which is concentrated around risks involved in property investments and how companies handle these risks. What are the biggest risks associated with these types of investment and how does different organisations analyse these identified risk factors? What different risk factors do companies in the property sector consider? Furthermore, a comparison between the investigated companies in London and London will be undertaken. Delimitations: The authors have chosen to limit the thesis geographically to the regions of London and Stockholm, since these markets have been categorised as being amongst the most attractive for property investments in Europe. Also, the authors have chosen not to consider the risk factors associated with new productions in debt since this will make this thesis far to indecisive and immense, hence it will be impossible for the intended reader to grasp the actual risks associated with the property market as a whole. Method: A number of interviews have been held with representatives at both board and management levels within the property companies which have been the focal point of this thesis. Moreover, several other interviews have been held with other associated companies to create a broad picture of the property market and the inherent risks in these investments. Results and conclusions: The largest risks associated with property investments, according to the interviewed property organisations are: fluctuations in interest rates, economic cycles, the position of the property, change in property law or property regulations. The interviewed bank had partially diverging opinions about the risk factors and summarised these as: fluctuations in rental income, vacancies, the ability of repayments and also the position of the property. This divergence would seem to be a result of the fact that the bank focuses on just the aspects of loans to finance the investment. To sum up the thesis, the authors conclude that the organisations, whether in London or Stockholm, seem to have identified relatively similar risk factors and that they also use roughly the same countermeasures to meet these risks. Suggestions for further research: It would be of interests for the industry to investigate the possibility of being able to quantify these risks into figures to be able to build models for calculations of these risks and thus be able to estimate the actual cost of risk associated with investments in property. Furthermore, it would be interesting to perform a large scale investigation with more organisations together with quantitative analysis and questionnaires.

This study is an independent and critical assessment of the Business Link Start-up Service (BLSS) in the creation of new ventures in the East Midlands. The BLSS was part of the region’s £70m annual investment in business support (2007-10). THE BLSS was delivered in the five counties of the East Midlands region and included the four Business Link Contractors (BLCs). The study uses a sequential mixed method approach to data collection and analysis. The data collection was multi-level and captures experiences, views and expectations at regional policy and funding level (East Midlands Development Agency), contract management level (East Midlands Business), contractor level (Nottingham Business Ventures, Northampton Business School, Skills for Enterprise, and Derbyshire Enterprise Agency), and nascent entrepreneur level. Semi-structured interviews were used to understand the context and experiences in the provision of the BLSS. The qualitative data illuminates shared experiences in the context of entrepreneurship support provision. The quantitative study (a survey of 105 participants), is an analysis of the nascent entrepreneurs’ profiles who were at different stages of new venture creation, their access of the BLSS (training, business advice, and information) and progress to new venture creation (NVC). The BLSS product was well designed to provide a balance of flexibility and structure in meeting nascent entrepreneur needs. However, BLSS contract and output targets (measures) distorted the delivery process. The delivering of BLSS by contractors was adapted to ‘deliver’ the required outputs. The focus on ‘hitting targets’ is a threading theme in the discussion. The behaviour of the contractors limited the capacity of the BLSS to ensure the progress of individuals from one stage to another when they are counted as an output. This evaluation of business support led to the development of a ‘new’ nascent entrepreneur support model which is expected to help in redefining of the objectives and measures for start-up support programmes. The ‘new’ model fully recognises the need to progressively develop individuals through to start-up without ignoring the complexity of creating a new business and the need for evolving support throughout the start-up process

In this thesis we examined the export dynamics at the firm level. A two period model is proposed for the life of firms. The firms may have three different behaviors: staying out of markets, producing for the domestic market, and producing for both the domestic and the export markets. During two periods, firms may enter or exit the markets according to their expected) profits. All firms are profit maximizing such that they compare the maximum (expected) profits in the domestic and export markets. Firms are also heterogenous so that they have different levels of productivity. We examined changes in investment, market share and profits with respect to changes in the market and firm parameters. The profits and investments of the exporting and non-exporting firms are compared by both analytical and numerical methods.

Technological change when a large social technology is under the processes of deployment and development are complex and uncertain. In this dynamic context, risks and uncertainties (R&U) incurred are unavoidable, which might obstruct the progression of the technology implementation and innovation. Hence, a set of mechanism and strategy are required from the stakeholders to facilitate these two processes and to deal with R&U arise. This research studied biofuels in the UK by looking at the context of a regulated market. The Scottish Government and two oil companies (BP and Shell) were selected as cases studied. Subsequently, an overarching research question was formulated to drive the research “How these major actors interact with one and another to deal with R&U arising from technological change during a technology deployment and development?” By using Social Shaping of Technology (SST), integrating with Risk Governance and the Risk Regulated Regime; an interdisciplinary concept has been developed. The application of SST was to broaden the risk governance and risk regulated regime, helped to look at R&U of technological change from a social dimension. The research was grounded on social constructionism under an exploratory study. A qualitative case study approach was adopted, backed by three data collection methods-interview, observation and document analysis. This research was aimed to investigate the driving forces for the government and oil companies in taking biofuels as the current energy source for transport; their roles and responsibilities in biofuels deployment and development; interactions taken place, R&U faced during two processes, as well as counteracting strategy implemented to deal with these R&U. After that, explanation building and time series analysis were adopted for data analysis. The research points out there were different types of R&U (expected and unexpected) arose when a technology undergoes the processes of technological change. These different types of R&U required different strategies to deal with. Therefore, the regulators have to set a clear direction for a technology deployment and development, as well as to have the control mechanism with precautionary principle instituted, in order to facilitate the technology implementation and innovation. Meanwhile, oil companies are collaborating with the governments, to commit consistent biofuels supply which fulfil the requirements set by the regulators; as well as established various types of partnership with biotechnology institutions/agriculture industry to conduct the next generation biofuels (NBG) R&D. Such seamless interactions and cooperation, not only aim to reduce the possibilities of R&U occurrence, to minimise the impacts, but also to set a path for the ease of technology adoption and innovation. Therefore, apart from satisfying their respective internal interests of political and economic gains; these two actors have to safeguard the social, economic and environmental benefits for the interests of the general public.

This research is conducted to formulate a framework for project risk management by evaluating the current understanding and practices. It examines the risk management processes provided by the various standards, frameworks and guidelines available globally. The research argues that the existence of varying risk management standards, frameworks and guidelines is not an assurance that organisations will adopt their principles and processes. Furthermore, these documents do not provide sufficient information concerning the understanding of the concept of risk and uncertainty and their management. To accomplish this goal, it became necessary for the research to reach an understanding about the concepts and fundamental issues of risk and uncertainty management. This research also sought to know how organisations in different industries manage risks and uncertainties for their projects. This research was confined to the study of the understanding and practices of PRM by established or influential organisations in aerospace and aviation, oil, gas and petrochemical, power, telecommunication as well as construction industries with matching criteria. Semi-structured interviews were conducted using an ‘aide-memoire’ with managers involved in the management of project risks to document the current practices of risk management. Thematic analyses were used to compress and summarise the large amount of data into internally consistent understandings of risk and uncertainty. Based on the results, the research proposes a structure that explains the current understanding of the concepts of risk and uncertainty as well as an outline process framework for conducting risk management for industry use. Practically, risk and uncertainty are found to be interrelated whereby and they happen as an outcome of each other’s occurrence. The proposed framework consists of six major steps which incorporated the purposes and activities within, providing a better understanding of how risk can be managed. This research contributes theoretically, methodologically and practically to project risk management body of knowledge.

<p>As the economy recovered with the winding down of the pandemic, businesses with complex supply chains could not bring their inventories back to optimal levels as their production was susceptible to disruption due to supply outages. Deriving optimal ordering policies as a way to mitigate the impact of production disruption represents a challenge in multi-stage decision problems given the complexity of the network and the uncertainty in the demand.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In the first part of the thesis, we formulate a stochastic inventory control problem for a general supply network model. Using the Bellman’s recursion and properties of the cost function at each stage, we characterize the optimal request decision as a threshold policy where the threshold computation is based on the marginal cost. Lastly, we validate that the policy developed minimizes the inventory cost and meets an exogenous random demand. However, the policy does not guarantee that the inventory level for each firm satisfies the constraints when a supply disruption occurs in the network.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In the second part of the thesis, we consider a serial network in which firms engage in production subject to disruption risk and they look to maximize their profit. We propose an algorithm to characterize a stationary optimal policy based on the closed-form solutions obtained from a discounted finite horizon problem for profit maximization. Finally, by computing the policy proposed as a function of the tier’s location and its disruption probability, we provide simulation results of the disruption effect in the supply network.</p>

The on-going global economic difficulties and the subsequent increases in unemployment have led the UK government to look at innovative ways of reintegrating unemployed people back into work. Nowhere is this more critical than in the area of youth unemployment, which in the UK is steadily rising for young people aged 16-24 years who are not in employment, education or training (NEET). As part of this strategy work-integration social enterprises (WISEs) have become providers of employment enhancement programmes (EEPs) that aim to improve the employability of NEETs, in part due to the 'added value' that WISEs are seen to bring to such programmes. However, this perception, along with the requirements of public funding contracts, creates a pressure on WISEs to demonstrate such 'added value' through rigorous evaluation procedures. However, there is little academic research that both attempts to measure WISE performance in relation to 'outcomes' and to understand how organisational type and structure affects this. This research study takes a comparative, multi-case study approach to study three separate work-integration organisations delivering EEPs to NEETs. Two of these organisations are WISEs and the other organisation is a 'for-profit' private company utilised in this study as a comparison group. In order to provide a rigorous measure of outcome, all participants completed three different self-efficacy scales and engaged in individual semi-structured interviews with researchers before and after engagement in their respective programmes (Time 1 & Time 2). Results from the qualitative analysis of the interviews and the statistical analysis of the questionnaire data are triangulated to evaluate the outcome from all three programmes, providing the participant perspective alongside changes in self-efficacy. In addition, semi-structured interviews and focus groups were held with the owners and staff at the organisations respectively, in order to elicit understanding of how the differing aims, values and structures present at each organisation impacted upon the delivery of the programmes and hence upon the outcome benefits experienced by the NEETs. The results of the research provide an opportunity to compare and contrast programmes delivered by social enterprises with that of a 'for-profit' company in order to give an insight into programme and outcome differences based upon the orientation of the delivery organisation. Results revealed no significant difference between the outcome benefits experienced by the NEETs at the WISEs and those NEETs present at the for-profit comparison group. However, analysis of the effect of the organisational aims, values and structures upon the delivery of EEPs, suggests that the 'added value' offered by WISEs, whilst not immediately evident in the outcome data, came from the induction policies that they operated and their willingness to work with more socially excluded individuals.