Xu Nan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-49). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2. --- Various Preference and Technology Specifications and Indeterminacy --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- CES Preference and Cobb-Douglas Technology --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Separable Utility and CES Technology --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3 --- Summary --- p.20 / Chapter 3. --- Capacity Utilization and Indeterminacy --- p.20 / Chapter 3.1 --- Separable Utility and Capacity Utilization --- p.21 / Chapter 3.2 --- Non-separable Utility and Capacity Utilization --- p.26 / Chapter 4. --- Production Depending on Average Consumption and Capital and Indeterminacy --- p.30 / Chapter 4.1 --- Production Depending on Aggregate Consumption and Capital --- p.32 / Chapter 4.2 --- Equivalence between the Two Settings --- p.36 / Chapter 5 . --- Concluding Remarks --- p.39 / Chapter 6. --- Appendix --- p.42 / Chapter 6.1 --- Properties of CES Utility Function --- p.42 / Chapter 6.2 --- Proof of Proposition 1 --- p.43 / Chapter 6.3 --- Derivation of Production Function in Section 3 --- p.45 / Chapter 6.4 --- Derivation of Depreciation Rate in subsection 3.2 --- p.46 / References --- p.47

Thesis. 1975. Sc.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 348-359. / Sc.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING / Bibliography: leaves 89-90. / by Vincent Bouthonnier. / M.S.

Thesis. 1975. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil Engineering. / Bibliography: leaves 114-116. / by Elias Nicolas Hani and Yves Lesage. / M.S.

The Governments' promotion and support of Best Value within the Social Housing Sector has been a prime catalyst in the move by Registered Social Landlord's [RSL's] away from the traditional culture of acceptance of the lowest bid towards consideration of both price and quality criteria as a basis for contractor selection. Manifestly this radical change in the way the sector procures its construction services has forced many of its stakeholders to undergo significant cultural and organisational changes within a relatively short period of time, and problems have developed during this transitional period that have affected the efficiency of the best value process. This research traced the root causes of these problems and its overarching aim was to develop an approach which will enable RSL's and their stakeholders to streamline the best value tender analysis procedure thereby allowing tenders to be dealt with effectively and efficiently whilst also creating a transparent and auditable decision making process. The approach has been established using a mixed methods research methodology utilising; case studies, surveys, rational decision analysis and system evaluation. The main output of the research is the development of a support tool known by the acronym OVID-BV which aids the multi objective decision making process. The underlying rationale for the support tool is based on the innovative use of uncertainty in decision making and the functionality of the tool uses a combination of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), multi attribute utility theory (MAUT) and whole life costing (WLC).

ELABORATIONS ON MULTIATTRIBUTE UTILITY THEORY DOMINANCE By David L. Vairo A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019. Major Director: Dissertation director’s name, Dr. Jason Merrick, Supply Chain Management and Analytics Multiattribute Utility Theory (MAUT) is used to structure decisions with more than one factor (attribute) in play. These decisions become complex when the attributes are dependent on one another. Where linear modeling is concerned with how factors are directly related or correlated with each other, MAUT is concerned with how a decision maker feels about the attributes. This means that direct elicitation of value or utility functions is required. This dissertation focuses on expanding the types of dominance forms used within MAUT. These forms reduce the direct elicitation needed to help structure decisions. Out of this work comes support for current criticisms of gain/loss separability that is assumed as part of Prospect Theory. As such, an alternative to Prospect Theory is presented, derived from within MAUT, by modeling the probability an event occurs as an attribute.

This work covers a substantial mosaic of related concepts in utility theory as applied to financial decision-making. It reviews some of the classical notions of Benthamite utility and the normative utility paradigm offered by the von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory; exploring its major pitfalls before moving into what is postulated as an entropic notion of utility. Extrinsic utility is proposed as a cardinally measurable quantity; measurable in terms of the expected information content of a set of alternative choices. The entropic notion of utility is subsequently used to model the financial behavior of individual investors based on their governing risk-return preferences involving financial structured products manufactured out of complex, multi-asset options. Evolutionary superiority of the Black-Scholes function in dynamic hedging scenarios is computationally demonstrated using a haploid genetic algorithm model programmed in Borland C. The work explores, both theoretically and computationally, the psycho-cognitive factors governing the financial behavior of individual investors both in the presence as well as absence of downside risk and postulates the concepts of resolvable and irresolvable risk. A formal theorem of consistent preference is proposed and proved. The work also analyzes the utility of an endogenous capital guarantee built within a financial structured product. The aspect of investor empowerment is discussed in terms of how financial behavior of an investor may be transformed if he or she is allowed a choice of one or more assets that may gain entry into the financial structured product. Finally there is a concluding section wherein the different facets are placed in their proper perspective and a number of interesting future research directions are also proposed.

This dissertation aims at developing and testing a new method that can better capture preferences for multistate health profiles. The motivation arose from the failure of the QALY (Quality-Adjusted Life Year) model in adequately capturing preferences in multistate health profiles. The current QALY-based technique captures preferences for multistate health profiles by evaluating each health state in the profile independently of other states. As the past literature showed, this additive independence condition does not hold in practice and hence such approach is inadequate. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel approach to measure preferences for multistate health profiles by looking at two consecutive health states at a time. It hypothesizes that an evaluation of the future health state is dependent or "conditioned" on the level of the preceding, or current, health state. Characteristics of the current health state that are suspected to impact the resulting conditional preference scores for future health state are systematically explored in a carefully designed empirical study. The interested factors include duration of the current health state, direction of change and amplitude of change between the current and future health states. A 2

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Risk attitudes are important for human decision making, especially in scenarios where huge wins or losses are possible, as exemplified by planetary rover navigation, oilspill response, and business applications. Decision-theoretic planners therefore need to take risk aspects into account to serve their users better. However, most existing decision-theoretic planners use simplistic planning objectives that are risk-neutral. The thesis research is the first comprehensive study of how to incorporate risk attitudes into decision-theoretic planners and solve large-scale planning problems represented as Markov decision process models. The thesis consists of three parts. The first part of the thesis work studies risk-sensitive planning in case where exponential utility functions are used to model risk attitudes. I show that existing decision-theoretic planners can be transformed to take risk attitudes into account. Moreover, different versions of the transformation are needed if the transition probabilities are implicitly given, namely, temporally extended probabilities and probabilities given in a factored form. The second part of the thesis work studies risk-sensitive planning in case where general nonlinear utility functions are used to model risk attitudes. I show that a state-augmentation approach can be used to reduce a risk-sensitive planning problem to a risk-neutral planning problem with an augmented state space. I further use a functional interpretation of value functions and approximation methods to solve the planning problems efficiently with value iteration. I also show an exact method for solving risk-sensitive planning problems where one-switch utility functions are used to model risk attitudes. The third part of the thesis work studies risk sensitive planning in case where arbitrary rewards are used. I propose a spectrum of conditions that can be used to constrain the utility function and the planning problem so that the optimal expected utilities exist and are finite. I prove that the existence and finiteness properties hold for stationary plans, where the action to perform in each state does not change over time, under different sets of conditions.