Band 4, Heft 2

Engineering has and will continue to have a critical impact on healthcare; the application of technology-based techniques to biological problems can be defined to be technobiology — it can be considered to be the complement to biotechnology, an all too encompassing and overused term. If technobiology can be thus defined, then biotechnology can be conversely defined to be the application of biology-based techniques to technical problems; as a consequence, the two complementary terms, together, can cover the increasingly expanding and complex world where technology and biology intersect. In addition to detailing the scope of technobiology, this paper expands on the technobiology approach of service systems engineering to the development of a healthcare service system that is integrated, adaptive and evidence-based; focuses on a range of example applications in regard to the technobiology areas of information, instrumentation, and insertion; underscores, as an example, the collaborative technobiology efforts between the College of Engineering and the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami; and concludes with some additional insights.

This paper extends the DSSW model to accommodate rational arbitrageurs, optimistic investors and pessimistic investors. We model the price impact by using daily data and create a new methodology to calculate the optimistic and the pessimistic. The new sentiment indicator has high correlation with the other traditional ones, and as a proxy variable of individual share or financial market on daily, it could distinguish the optimistic and the pessimistic. In the empirical research, we develop a time-series model and a cross-section model respectively to explore the explanatory power of highly frequent investor sentiment to idiosyncratic volatility and capital asset mispricing. The results show that the new sentiment indicator can explain 21.31% of idiosyncratic volatility to individual share on average, and it has a great explanation of 36% to capital asset mispricing.

The lack of surrendering profits to policy holder leads to the development of this paper. For an insurer with promotion budget, both the interests of the insurance company and policy-holder are given a balance. In addition, promotion budget is introduced into the risk management process, which makes cheap reinsurance more fair. This article aims at obtaining the explicit strategy and value function for an investment-reinsurance problem under stochastic interest rates. Applying stochastic control technique, a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation is established. The closed-form solution for the HJB equation and a verification theorem are obtained. At last, some numerical analysises illustrate the impacts of different parameters.

This article prices American-style continuous-installment options in the constant elasticity of variance (CEV) diffusion model where the volatility is a function of the stock price. We derive the semi-closed form formulas for the American continuous-installment options using Kim’s integral representation method and then obtain the closed-form solutions by approximating the optimal exercise and stopping boundaries as step functions. We demonstrate the speed-accuracy of our approach for different parameters of the CEV model. Furthermore, the effects on both option price and the optimal boundaries are discussed and the causes of underestimating or overestimating the option prices are analyzed under the classical Black-Scholes-Merton model, in particular, for the case of elasticity coefficient with numerical examples.

The paper focuses on modeling longitudinal customer behavior and develops a dynamic programming (DP) to show how customer transaction database may be used to guide marketing decisions such as pricing and the design of customer reward programs. Dynamic programming is not as a tool to marketing decisions making in this research but rather as a description of consumer behavior. The results show that the method provides a means for evaluating the effectiveness of marketing strategy, for example, customer reward programs. Moreover, the findings from the model estimation indicate that reward program can actually increase the customer’s purchase level and stimulate the repeat purchase behavior.

Under some circumstances, the studies on economic growth theory can be translated into the researches on production function which will beneficial for the government to analyze the pattern of economic growth and then make reasonable policies. The commonly used production functions include C-D production function, CES production function, VES production function with different elasticity of substitution. This paper will put forward to a new class of production function which elasticity of substitution σ is a non-linear function of K / L . With this new model, a calculation formula for accurately measure the influence rates of various factors to economic growth will be derived, which is significant for in-depth studies on functions and scientific measurement. The empirical analysis on the influence rates of China’s economic growth factors and its good results will be presented in the end of this paper.

A novel decision-making method based on evidential reasoning is proposed for solving the two-sided matching problem with uncertain information under multiple states in this paper. Firstly, the discernment frame of evidence is constructed for two-sided matching. Secondly, the preference ordinal values given by two-sided decision-makers are transformed into rank belief degrees. On this basis, and with two-sided satisfaction as the goal, two-sided rank belief degrees are taken as pieces of evidence, and satisfaction degrees of two-sided matching are obtained through evidence fusion. Then, a decision-making model based on satisfaction degrees is constructed in order to obtain the matching solution. Finally, an illustrative example demonstrates the application of the proposed approach.