Vid utveckling av tyngre fordon inför man allt fler avancerade funktione. Mycket av denna funktionalitet handlar om att maskiner automatiskt ska utföra uppgifter för att assistera föraren. Detta leder till att nya risker uppstår. Och till följd av detta har man börjat skapa nya funktionella säkerhetsstandarder. ISO 26262 är en ny funktionell säkerhetsstandard som finns för vanliga personbilar men som ännu inte trätt i kraft för lastbilar. I ISO-26262 standarden ska krav kunna mappas till andra krav samt till systemarkitektur. I nuläget finns det vissa verktyg på marknaden som stödjer användaren när den skriver kravspecifikationer. Men undersökningar av verktyg ledde till att vi kommit fram till att alla hade någon brist. Och ingen hade bra stöd för mappning mellan krav och systemarkitektur. I detta examensarbete har arbetet varit att testa implementera funktionalitet för ett verktyg som assisterar användaren på olika sätt när den skriver kravspecifikationer. Baserat på kontraktteori och konceptet om portar som hjälp för att koppla samman krav med systemarkitektur ska applikationen se till att det finns en formell koppling mellan dessa. För att testa och validera att portar går att använda för att testa intressant funktionalitet har också en applikation utvecklats där mycket funktionalitet implementerats. Resultatet har varit lyckat då vi baserat på kontraktteori lyckats implementera och validera att det är möjligt att använda portar för att skapa koppling mellan krav och systemarkitektur, samt mellan krav och krav. Validering av att det valda lagringsformatet JSON också förser implementeraren med nog starkt stöd för att kunna spara dessa krav så att data i filerna kan brytas ner och lagras i temporära databasen Neo4J och på så sätt skapa ett fungerande kretslopp. / When developing new heavy vehicles today demands for increasingly more advanced features are asked for. A lot of the new functionality is about machines performing tasks automatically to assist the driver when driving. This leads to new risks, and as a result a new functional safety standard has been created. ISO 26262 is a functional safety standard that today exists for ordinary cars, but has not yet became a standard for trucks. According to the ISO 26262-standard requirements can be mapped to other requirements as well as to the system architecture. At present there are several tools on the market that supports the user when writing specifications. However, our research of the tools has led us to conclude that all lacked something. For example neither of the tools had good support for mapping between requirements and system architecture. In this thesis work, functionality for a tool which is supposed to support the user in various ways when writing requirements specifications was to be examined. Based on contract theory and the concept of ports that links requirements together with system architecture, an application can ensure that there is a formal link between the two. To test the suggested functionality a prototype is being developed. The result has been a successful as we based on contract theory could validate that using ports to create links between different requirements as well as between requirements and system architecture works through the implementation of the tool. Validation that the selected storage format JSON also provides the implementer with enough support to save the requirements in a way so that the data files can be decomposed and stored in the Neo4J database.

Les Hôpitaux d’Instruction des Armées français ont fait l’objet d’évaluations successives de la Cour des Comptes. Cette dernière souligne une sous-activité qui engendre un déficit comptable. Les activités militaires et en particulier la participation aux Opérations Extérieures (OPEX) expliquent- elles en partie le déficit et la sous activité constatés?Cette question pratique nourrit la réflexion théorique menée dans la thèse. Les OPEX menées par les hôpitaux militaires sont des projets indéterminés. La littérature consacrée à ce type de projets favorise une remise en question de l’adéquation des standards de gestion de projet aux projets indéterminés. Les notions d’engagement des parties prenantes et de flexibilité de la planification sont mises en lumière par l’analyse de la littérature. Cette première analyse nous permet de poser la problématique théorique de la thèse : Quelle place pour l’engagement des acteurs et la flexibilité de la planification dans la gestion des projets indéterminés ?Afin d’étudier les modes de gestion appropriés aux projets indéterminés, nous recourons à la simulation dans le cadre d’une recherche intervention. La simulation sert d’outil d’observation de la gestion des OPEX dans les hôpitaux militaires et permet de mettre en lumière leur impact sur l’activité et donc sur les ressources financières des hôpitaux. Cet impact amène à questionner le processus de planification actuel des OPEX et à proposer une planification collective et flexible. La simulation révèle également le rôle important de l’engagement des personnels des HIA dans la gestion des OPEX.Ces constatations de terrain, permettent de progresser sur la connaissance théorique des outils de gestion appropriés aux projets indéterminés. Deux notions nous semblent particulièrement adaptées aux contraintes imposées par l’indétermination des projets : la planification interactive qui apporte flexibilité et coopération au sein de l’équipe projet et le contrat relationnel qui permet d’allier incitation et adaptabilité.La thèse se conclue sur une proposition de structuration de l’espace des projets selon deux dimensions : le degré de détermination de l’objet du projet et le degré d’engagement des parties prenantes. Ces dimensions permettent de poser des frontières entre l’espace d’applicabilité des outils classiques de gestion de projet et de ceux qui se révèlent appropriés aux projets indéterminés. La diversité des projets indéterminés menés actuellement (secteur public, développement international, changement organisationnel) renforce l’intérêt d’une telle structuration, facilitatrice de la diffusion d’outils de gestion propres aux projets indéterminés. / Successive evaluations of French Military hospitals by the Court of Auditors point out a sub-activity that generates a deficit. The French Military Health Care Service acknowledged these points but considers that military activities (in particular participation in External Operation), may explain, at least partly, the deficit and sub-activity mentioned by the Court of Auditors.This practical question feeds the theoretical reflection conducted in this thesis. A detailed description of external operations shows that they can be considered as soft projects. These projects are characterized by the progressive determination of their goals: that are not completely known when the project starts. The literature questions adequacy of project management standards to soft projects and the following research question emerges: what is the role of stakeholders’ engagement and planning flexibility in soft projects management?The thesis is based on an intervention research. A simulation is built to objectify external operations management in military hospitals. It highlights the impact of external operations on care production and consequently on hospitals ‘deficit. Two analyses are conducted to understand the causes of this impact. First, an analysis of the current planning process of external operations suggests that renewing planning methods can be necessary to offer a flexible planning based on cooperation. Second, the simulation reveals the important role of physicians and nurses’ commitment in managing external operations. This commitment, driven by strong relationships between project stakeholders, positively influences external operations’ outcomes.These observations allow theoretical progress on management tools for soft projects.Two concepts seem particularly suited to soft projects’ constraints: interactive planning developed in companies facing high uncertainties and relational contracting described by law and economics scholars. Interactive planning brings both flexibility and cooperation that appear decisive to build a response to soft goals. Relational contracts help understand how high commitment can bring simultaneously motivation and adaptability, that are both essential to achieve soft goals.To conclude, I suggest structuring projects’ space according to the degree of determination of projects’ goals and the degree of stakeholders’ engagement in the project. These dimensions allow defining areas where project management standards will be applicable and those where they might need to be adapted to soft projects. The diversity of soft projects (public sector, international development, organizational change) calls for such a structure that can facilitate the spread of specific management tools.

This dissertation studies firms' strategic interactions in anticipation of random service disruption following technology failure. In particular it is aimed at understanding how contracting decisions between a vendor and one or multiple clients affect the firms' subsequent decisions to ensure disruption response and recovery are managed as efficiently as possible. This dissertation consists of three studies that were written as standalone papers seeking to contribute to the literature on contract design and technology management in operations management. Together, the three studies justify the importance of structuring the right incentives to mitigate disruption risks. In the first study we contribute to this literature by means of an analytical model which we use to examine how a client and vendor should balance investments in response capacity when both parties' efforts are critical in resolving disruption and each may have different risk preferences. We study the difference in the client's optimal expected utility between a case in which investment in response capacity is observable and a case in which it is not and refer to the difference in outcomes between the two cases as the cost of complexity. Firstly, we show that the cost of complexity to the client is decreasing in the risk aversion of vendor but increasing in her own risk aversion. Secondly, we find that a larger difference in risk aversion between a client and vendor leads to underinvestment in system uptime in case the client's investment is observable, yet the opposite happens when the client’s investment is not observable. In the second study we further examine the context of the first study through a controlled experiment. We examine how differences in risk aversion and access to information on a contracting partner’s risk preferences interact in affecting contracting and investment decisions between the client and vendor. Comparing subject decisions with the conditionally optimal benchmarks we arrive at two observations that highlight possible heuristic decision biases. Firstly, subjects tend to set and hold on to an inefficiently high investment level even though it is theoretically optimal to adjust decisions under changing differences in risk preferences. Secondly, subjects tend to set and hold on to a penalty that is too high when interacting with more risk averse vendors and too low in case the vendor is equally risk averse. Furthermore, cognitive feedback on the vendor’s risk aversion appears to have counterproductive effects on subject’s performance in the experiment, suggesting cognitive overload can have a reinforcing effect on the heuristic decision biases observed. In the third study we construct a new analytical model to examine the effect of contract design on a provider's response capacity allocation in a setting where multiple clients may be disrupted and available response capacity is limited. The results show that while clients may be incentivized to identify and report network disruptions, competition for scarce emergency resources and the required investment in understanding their own exposure may incentivize clients to deliberately miscommunicate with the vendor.

This thesis studies the labour supply with aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences. The first contribution of the thesis is the theoretical modelling of behavioural contract theory. In Chapter 1, I modify the classical principal-agent model with uncertainty and moral hazard by replacing the Expected Utility preferences of the agent with chance theory preferences (Schmidt and Zank, 2013). Chance theory agents are primarily concerned with the sure wage they can obtain, i.e., the certain component in their contract, as they treat increments in bonuses markedly different to similar changes in sure wages. Similar to the classical predictions, our agents' optimal contracts are contingent payment schemes, however, they differ with respect to the level of the sure wage. I also contrast my predictions to those of the model of Herweg et al. (2010), who assume agents with expectation-based loss-averse preferences. The other contribution of this thesis is the empirical support for the theory of aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences with field data in education economics. In Chapter 2, I study aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences in undergraduate students' performance and effort provision. Students' reference points are set as their targeted grades. I extend a two-period economics-of-education model (Krohn and O'Connor, 2005) by proposing an additional utility function that is based on the difference between the realised grade and targeted grade. I design surveys and collect data by following a group of undergraduate students at the University of Manchester for two semesters of a full academic year with a two-period panel. My results provide evidence for students' reference-dependent preferences in two ways: first, a significant jump in students' proxied utility of grade is found at the reference point, which also implies students are loss averse. Second, the reference point positively affects students' effort provision. I further study the formation of the reference point and its variation over time. My results suggest that students partially update their past realised results into the formation of reference points. Further, the relative change of their reference points depends on the achievement of the past period reference point.

The general framework of this thesis is that of ethical Technology Assessment (eTA). Whereas the first essay proposes an inclusive approach to technology assessment by delineating an ethical checklist, the following essays focus on two of the checklist points, i.e. “privacy” and “control, influence and power”, in relation to workspace surveillance. The core idea of Essay I (written in collaboration with Sven Ove Hansson) is that, due to its strong social impact, new technology and novel use of existing technology should be considered from the perspective of ethics. We suggest that assessments should be conducted on the basis of nine crucial ethical aspects of technology. In Essay II an in-depth analysis of the meaning and value of privacy in the realm of work is undertaken. The meaning and value of privacy is explained as well as why it should be protected. It is argued that two dimensions of privacy should be safeguarded; “informational privacy” and “local privacy” for the reason that workers’ personal autonomy is protected thereby. Essay III is concerned with how workspace surveillance requires that job-applicants claim their privacy interests in employment negotiations to a much larger extent than what was previously the case. In most cases however, a dependency asymmetry between employer and job-candidate makes the latter ill-equipped for doing so. This asymmetry serves as the point of departure for an analysis of the conditions under which consent should be considered a criterion on moral acceptability with regard to employment contracting. The analysis suggests ways of rectifying this imbalance, raising demands on the quality of contractual consent. Essay IV discusses the extent to which it should be morally permissible for current or prospective employees to trade off their privacy in employment negotiations. The analysis starts out from, and questions, a libertarian case for voluntary self-enslavement. It is concluded that not even an orthodox libertarian can justify trade offs of a social good like liberty. Neither should employees be allowed to abstain informational privacy for the reason that such a trade-off could harm their future selves. In Essay V a dimensional analysis is proposed as a means to identify actually or potentially privacy invasive surveillance practices. It discusses ways in which different types of surveillance intrude upon employees’ privacy in order to guide the evaluation of such practice. Even though negative implications cannot be avoided altogether, by means of the proposed analysis, minimally intrusive means of monitoring can be identified. / QC 20100902

With the extant work on civil war duration as a starting point, this project uses the Ugandan case to identify and address theoretical aporias in our existing understanding of the determinants of duration. The vast majority of existing work begins with the assumption that the rebel force is the determining factor in the duration of conflict. Challenging this assumption, I argue that civil war duration should be understood as a function of the calculations made by both the rebel units and the established state, a dynamic that has implications for the way in which we think of the preferences of the state. Finally, that incentive structures exist, given the nature of post-colonial states that lower the utility of peace for elected leadership and reduce their willingness to provide peace as a collective good to the broader population as civil war can be used as one of Jeffrey Herbst’s buffer mechanisms.

This dissertation includes two essays on adverse selection and moral hazard problems in reinsurance markets. The first essay builds a competitive principal-agent model that considers adverse selection and moral hazard jointly, and characterizes graphically various forms of separating Nash equilibria. In the second essay, we use panel data on U.S. property liability reinsurance for the period 1995-2000 to test for the existence of adverse selection and moral hazard. We find that (1) adverse selection is present in private passenger auto liability reinsurance market and homeowners reinsurance market, but not in product liability reinsurance market; (2) residual moral hazard does not exist in all the three largest lines of reinsurance, but is present in overall reinsurance markets; and (3) moral hazard is present in the product liability reinsurance market, but not in the other two lines of reinsurance.

In an attempt to promote in-depth dialogue amongst bioethicists coming from distinct disciplinary and religious backgrounds this thesis offers an overview of the current state of bioethics and a critical analysis of a number of the leading methods of addressing pluralism in bioethics. Exploring the critiques and methodological proposals coming from the social sciences, the contract theorists, and the pragmatists, this study describes the problems which arise when confronting moral and religious diversity in a bioethical context and examines the ability of these various methodologies to adequately resolve these matters. Finally, after a discussion of the benefits and the potential problems of each of the aforementioned schools, a methodological model labelled “Pragmatic Perspectivism” is set forth as a potential conceptual framework through which a bioethical theory for a secular yet religiously pluralistic society may be forged.

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay examines a general theory of information based on informal contracting. The measurement problem—the disparity of true and measured performances—is at the core of many failures in incentive systems. Informal contracting can be a potential solution since, unlike in formal contracting, it can utilize a lot of qualitative and informative signals. However, informal contracting must be self-enforced. Given this trade-off between informativeness and self-enforcement, I show that a new source of statistical information is economically valuable in informal con- tracting if and only if it is sufficiently informative that it refines the existing pass/fail criterion. I also find that a new information is more likely valuable, as the stock of existing information is large. This information theory has implications on the measurement problem, a puzzle of relative performance evaluation and human resources management. I also provide a methodological contribution. For tractable analysis, the first-order approach (FOA) should be employed. Existing FOA-justifying conditions (e.g. the Mirrlees-Rogerson condition) are so strong that the information ranking condition can be applied only to a small set of information structures. Instead, I find a weak FOA- justifying condition, which holds in many prominent examples (with multi- variate normal or some of univariate exponential family distributions). The second essay analyzes the effectiveness of managerial punishments in mitigating moral hazard problem of government bailouts. Government bailouts of systemically important financial or industrial firms are necessary ex-post but cause moral hazard ex-ante. A seemingly perfect solution to this time-inconsistency problem is saving a firm while punishing its manager. I show that this idea does not necessarily work if ownership and management are separated. In this case, the shareholder(s) of the firm has to motivate the manager by using incentive contracts. Managerial punishments (such as Obama’s $500,000 bonus cap) could distort the incentive-contracting program. The shareholder’s ability to motivate the manager could then be reduced and thereby moral hazard could be exacerbated depending on corporate governance structures and punishment measures, which means the likelihood of future bailouts increases. As an alternative, I discuss the effectiveness of shareholder punishments. The third essay analyzes how education affect workers’ career-concerns. A person’s life consists of two important stages: the first stage as a student and the second stage as a worker. In order to address how a person chooses an education-career path, I examine an integrated model of education and career-concerns. In the first part, I analyze the welfare effect of education. In Spence’s job market signaling model, education as a sorting device improves efficiency by mitigating the lemon market problem. In my integrated model, by contrast, education as a sorting device can be detrimental to social welfare, as it eliminates the work incentive generated by career-concerns. In this regard, I suggest scholarship programs aimed at building human capital rather than sorting students. The second part provides a new perspective on education: education is job-risk hedging device (as well as human capital enhancing or sorting device). I show that highly risk-averse people take high education in order to hedge job-risk and pursue safe but medium-return work path. In contrast, lowly risk-averse people take low education, bear job-risk, and pursue high-risk high-return work path. This explains why some people finish college early and begin start-ups, whereas others take master’s or Ph.D. degrees and find safe but stable jobs. / text

This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics and contract theory. The first essay examines whether one’s wage is based on information about the performance of one’s personal contacts. I study wage determination under two assumptions about belief formation: individual learning, under which employers observe only one’s own characteristics, and social learning, under which employers also observe those of one’s personal contacts. Using data on siblings in the NLSY79, I test whether a sibling’s characteristics are priced into one’s wage. If learning is social, then an older sibling’s test score should typically have a larger adjusted impact on a younger sibling’s log wage than vice versa. The empirical findings support this prediction. Furthermore, I perform several exercises to rule out other potential factors, such as asymmetric skill formation, human capital transfers, and role model effects. The second essay analyzes the influence of macroeconomic conditions during childhood on the labor market performance of adults. Based on Census data, I document the relationship of unemployment rates in childhood to schooling, employment, and income as an adult. In addition, a sample from the PSID is used to study how the background attributes of parents raising children vary over the business cycle. Finally, information from the NLSY79-CH is examined in order to characterize the impact of economic fluctuations on parental caregiving. Overall, the evidence is consistent with a negative effect of the average unemployment rate in childhood on parental investments in children and the stock of human capital in adulthood. The third essay studies the bilateral trade of divisible goods in the presence of stochastic transaction costs. The first-best solution requires each agent to transfer all of her good to the other agent when the transaction cost reaches a certain threshold value. However, in the absence of court-enforceable contracts, such a policy is not incentive compatible. We solve for the unique maximal symmetric subgame-perfect equilibrium, in which agents can realize some gains from trade by transferring their goods sequentially. Several comparative statics are derived. In some cases, the first-best outcome can be approximated as the agents become infinitely patient. / Economics