Business Firms' Responses to the Crises of 2009

Author(s):  
Sean M. Murphy ◽  
Daniel L. Friesner ◽  
Robert Rosenman

In 2009 firms faced both economic uncertainty and influenza outbreaks. Both crises posed large costs for firms; however, the manner in which they were perceived by management to affect the organization potentially differed. Using generalized maximum entropy (GME) the authors analyzed a business outlook survey of Seattle, Washington area businesses. Overall, firms were more proactive in responding to the economic crisis than to the influenza pandemic, even though the potential costs associated with both were quite large. Among the authors' conclusions is that business managers responded to the economic crisis more because it was more familiar and something over which they thought they had more control.

Entropy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 776 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Niven ◽  
Markus Abel ◽  
Michael Schlegel ◽  
Steven H. Waldrip

The concept of a “flow network”—a set of nodes and links which carries one or more flows—unites many different disciplines, including pipe flow, fluid flow, electrical, chemical reaction, ecological, epidemiological, neurological, communications, transportation, financial, economic and human social networks. This Feature Paper presents a generalized maximum entropy framework to infer the state of a flow network, including its flow rates and other properties, in probabilistic form. In this method, the network uncertainty is represented by a joint probability function over its unknowns, subject to all that is known. This gives a relative entropy function which is maximized, subject to the constraints, to determine the most probable or most representative state of the network. The constraints can include “observable” constraints on various parameters, “physical” constraints such as conservation laws and frictional properties, and “graphical” constraints arising from uncertainty in the network structure itself. Since the method is probabilistic, it enables the prediction of network properties when there is insufficient information to obtain a deterministic solution. The derived framework can incorporate nonlinear constraints or nonlinear interdependencies between variables, at the cost of requiring numerical solution. The theoretical foundations of the method are first presented, followed by its application to a variety of flow networks.


Auditor ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (9) ◽  
pp. 45-49
Author(s):  
Yu. Starovaya

The purpose of the study was to identify the most effective method of investment appraisal in the context of global economic uncertainty. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that a macroeconomic factor of uncertainty is the global pandemic, but not the classic economic crisis. The practical significance of the study lies in the fact that the obtained recommendations and conclusions can be used by investors and analytical agencies when assessing the investment attractiveness of individual companies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amilcar Orlian Fernandez-Dominguez

AbstractAccording to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), violence should be considered by examining both actual and perceived crime. However, the studies related to violence and internal migration under the Mexican drug war episode focus only on one aspect of violence (perception or actual), so their conclusions rely mostly on limited evidence. This article complements previous work by examining the effects of both perceived and actual violence on interstate migration through estimation of a gravity model along three 5-year periods spanning from 2000 to 2015. Using the methods of generalized maximum entropy (to account for endogeneity) and the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition, the results show that actual violence (measured by homicide rates) does affect migration, but perceived violence explains a greater proportion of higher average migration after 2005. Since this proportion increased after 2010 and actual violence, the results suggest that there was some adaptation to the new levels of violence in the period 2010–2015.


1994 ◽  
Vol 158 ◽  
pp. 215-217
Author(s):  
A.T. Bajkova

The problem of image reconstruction from incomplete and noisy complex Fourier spectrum is considered. The maximum entropy method (MEM) is of great interest as the most effective nonlinear reconstruction method having superresolution effect. Because objects of radio astronomical observations are incoherent radio sources described by real non-negative distributions, application of the classical MEM is quite reasonable. But it is established that the MEM gives acceptable reconstruction quality mostly in the case of point-like sources and in general it does not ensure satisfactory reconstruction of continous, graytone objects, which can considerably restrict applications of the MEM in astronomy. The generalized maximum entropy method (GMEM) was originally proposed for reconstruction of distributions described by complex functions (Bajkova, 1992) and was considered as having the same properties of the classical MEM. More careful analysis of the GMEM and classical MEM for real non-negative objects allowed to establish that the GMEM ensures much more exact reconstruction, especially in the case of continous objects. Explanation and demonstration of this interesting and very important phenomenon is the purpose of the present paper.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Kun Yang ◽  
Jialiu Xie ◽  
Rong Xie ◽  
Yucong Pan ◽  
Rui Liu ◽  
...  

The influenza pandemic is a wide-ranging threat to people’s health and property all over the world. Developing effective strategies for predicting the influenza outbreak which may prevent or at least get ready for a new influenza pandemic is now a top global public health priority. Owing to the complexity of influenza outbreaks that are usually involved with spatial and temporal characteristics of both biological and social systems, however, it is a challenging task to achieve the real-time monitoring of influenza outbreaks. In this study, by exploring the rich dynamical information of the city network during influenza outbreaks, we developed a computational method, the minimum-spanning-tree-based dynamical network marker (MST-DNM), to identify the tipping point or critical stage prior to the influenza outbreak. With historical records of influenza outpatients between 2009 and 2018, the MST-DNM strategy has been validated by accurate predictions of the influenza outbreaks in three Japanese cities/regions, respectively, i.e., Tokyo, Osaka, and Hokkaido. These successful applications show that the early-warning signal was detected 4 weeks on average ahead of each influenza outbreak. The results show that our method is of considerable potential in the practice of public health surveillance.


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