Special issue on Journal of Modelling in Management

Citation

Wu, B. (2009), "Special issue on Journal of Modelling in Management", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jm2.2009.29704aaa.001

Special issue on Journal of Modelling in Management

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Modelling in Management, Volume 4, Issue 1

This special issue is devoted to practical aspects of modelling in management. It covers the development of existing theoretical methods, research, and practical applications for the interface between human perceptions and intelligent management.

The aims of this special issue are to bring together researchers and practitioners in order to exchange their ideas and discuss issues occurred when implementing statistical analysis in real-world environment. The scope of the special issue is intended to extend conventional statistical methods to handle new types of data in the various of field, such as management science, economics, psychology, linguistics, etc.

Several studies have demonstrated a close correlation among capital structure, operational risk and profitability. Chen, Chen, Liao and Chen investigate the influence of capital structure and operational risk on profitability of life insurance industry in Taiwan. This study provides evidence regarding the influence of capital structure and operational risk on profitability of life insurance industry in Taiwan. Structural equation modelling, which involves factor-analysis and path-analysis, is used to justify the relationship among capital structure, operational risk and profitability. This study leads to main key findings which are: using multiple financial indexes which suitably measures the specific financial factors, the capital structure exerts a negative and significant effect on operational risk, there is no reciprocal relationship but a one-way effect between capital structure and operational risk and the operational risk exerts a negative and significant effect on profitability.

A method for creating buying behavior of customer by Kansei information design presented by Kosaka and Shiizuka is a very interesting work. They propose a method for Kansei value creation to be actually reflected in consumer behavior. Looking at business from Kansei (emotional/sensitive) value creation perspective, they claim that the current situation is that in most cases, value creation for products or services is not done practically. For most of the products and services put on the market, it is hard to say that their value is recognized. That is not because they lack something that reaches into the hearts of consumers but because of the poor transmission of Kansei information, which leads to value creation, during the selling process. The current issues and challenges of value creation in business are shown. It provides an important aspect to show the mechanism and its elements to achieve value creation in marketing and sales activities.

Ahmad, Khan, Quadri and Kumar conduct a study on modelling and analysis of software reliability with Burr type X testing-effort and release-time determination. They discuss a software reliability growth model (SRGM) based on the non-homogeneous Poisson process which incorporates the Burr type X testing-effort function (TEF). They demonstrate the performance of the proposed SRGM by using actual data sets from three software projects. Results are compared with other traditional SRGM to show that the proposed model has a fairly better prediction capability and that the Burr type X TEF is suitable for incorporating into software reliability modelling.

Human conception is multifold. To properly reveal the interrelationship of each ideas, the authors extend the question to membership function analysis that is: to choose or not, that is the question of memberships: fuzzy statistical analysis as a new analytical approach in child language research, which proposed a new concrete analytical approach in human thought computation and with an application to the child language written by Sun and Wu. Certain statistical concept such as fuzzy samples, fuzzy mode, fuzzy category test and their related properties are illustrated. They also make a comparison between the traditional statistical result and fuzzy statistical analysis.

Liu and Liu consider the problem of that the initial value of the American option is less than its fair price; this implies that the replication portfolio does not exist in the market. They develop an optimization model whose solution provides an optimal strategy for the writer to minimize the expected loss for this problem. However, this model regards the optimal exercise strategy of buyer as an input parameter. For obtaining this optimal strategy, they formulate the binomial method as a mixed integer nonlinear program and show that this program has the same optimal solution of its nonlinear relaxations. Moreover, the numerical results reveal that loaning money to construct a replication portfolio may not be an optimal strategy.

It is our hope that this special issue will serve as a solid starting point for analyzing statistical data and thus enlarging the domain of applicability of the field of modelling and management. Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to all authors and referees who have made large contribution to this special issue of Journal of Modelling in Management.

Berlin WuGuest Editor