Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010ECO005.
Real options refer to the investment, entry, exit and other strategic decisions of the firm that share three important characteristics: they are irreversible, they are made under uncertainty, and their timing is chosen by the firm. The term `real options' was introduced in 1977 by Stewart Myers in his paper `Determinants of corporate borrowing' that related risky debt holdings to the future...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010INFO005.
Software understanding takes up a large share of the total cost of a software system. The high costs attributed to software understanding activities are caused by the size and complexity of software systems, by the continuous evolution that these systems are subject to, and by the lack of physical presence which makes software intangible. Reverse engineering helps practitioners deal with the...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010ECO003.
Family firms form the majority of organizations around the world, but only few survive beyond the first generation. However, very little has been said about succession routes alternative to intergenerational transfer. This thesis focuses on sale of family businesses, with a particular emphasis on valuation and acquirers’ perception of family firm targets. In order to cope with the research...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010ECO002.
The thesis focuses on discrete choice models for freight transport demand with a particular emphasis on the estimation of willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) measures. In order to cope with the research objective, I extend the classic discrete choice model specifications towards the frontier of the current literature on asymmetric model specifications in stated choice...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010INFO004.
This thesis presents methods for minimizing the computational effort of problem solving. Rather than looking at a particular algorithm, we consider the issue of computational complexity at a higher level, and propose techniques that, given a set of candidate algorithms, of unknown performance, learn to use these algorithms while solving a sequence of problem instances, with the aim of...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010ECO001.
A growing body of research has examined emergent leadership within groups. Emergent leadership is defined as a process during which some individuals, over time and through social interaction, are recognized and accepted as leaders by the group. Interestingly, although there is much theorizing about how leadership emerges and about the individual characteristics facilitating the emergence of...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2005 ; 2005ECO005.
This Thesis is structured in two Chapters, each aimed at contributing to the existing literature by exploring the effects of ambiguity aversion on two classical equilibrium asset pricing problems: the term structure of interest rates and two-agents equilibrium. In both cases, ambiguity aversion is modeled by means of a Max-Min expected utility representation that falls within the Recursive...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010INFO003.
We study the approximability of scheduling problems in different contexts. We first give a short introduction to the field of scheduling theory and present a simple single machine scheduling problem that will form the base for all variants considered in the remainder of this thesis. We point out that this scheduling problem, though long known to be efficiently solvable in its original form,...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010INFO002.
In recent years, component- and service-orientation has gained importance as the new paradigm in software engineering, and it has introduced the challenge of dynamic component look-up and binding into the validation and verification process. This introduces a new class of inherently dynamic properties that have to be verified when the system is running in its target environment rather than...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010.
The subject of the study are telecentres, public places where people can access information through ICT, and which should fulfill the communication needs of the communities in which they are located. The central question of this thesis sprang from the study of the available literature and from nine exploratory field studies carried out in West Africa (in Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea and...
|
