Suchergebnisse

This is the long-awaited second collection of essays, reflections, poems and artwork by Nora Bateson. The book is an embodiment of her recent work on Warm Data and offers a radical ecological approach to many of the key issues of our time: climate change, political upheaval, education, health, food and relationships.

The objectives of this article strive to describe the idea and rationale of combining i.e. why, when and how to develop theoretically new combined approaches. Then business administration, especially marketing is used as a theoretical and empirical illustrative area. Methodology is inductive and deductive logic and in the empirical examples surveys, case analysis and utilization of secondary data. This article introduce a new promising way, in the long run, to develop new comprehensive approaches and even paradigms for different disciplines, subdisciplines and branches of subdiciplines. Therefore, the ultimate message of the article is to challenge the researchers to put the idea and rationale for combing to the test in their own research field and to build new combined and comprehensive approaches if possible in the field. This message is rather multidisciplinary concerning for example economics, social sciences and political sciences in addition to business administration.

Workshop proceedings and summary reports will appear in scientific periodicals and will also be available in various forms as technical reports from the NISS in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. In particular, study papers from the workshop will be prepared that will serve as indicators of further research directions, as well as current summaries of the complex issue of combining environmental data. Potential applications and improvements in associated areas of scientific/statistical research include census sampling, geostatistics, and biological effect modeling. This workshop was an experiment in how to stimulate and foster research and collaborations across disciplinary lines. Its motivation derives, however, from ever-growing social, political, economic, and scientific needs; with such strong background, it is hoped that the workshop stimulus will be strong, compelling, and fruitful.

When combining forecasts, a simple average of the forecasts performs well, often better than more sophisticated methods. In a prescriptive spirit, we consider some other parsimonious, easy-to-use heuristics for combining interval forecasts and compare their performance with the benchmark provided by the simple average, using simulations from a model we develop and data sets with forecasts made by professionals in their domain of expertise. We find that the empirical results closely match the results from our model, thus providing some validation for the theoretical model. The relative performance of the heuristics is influenced by the degree of overconfidence in and dependence among the individual forecasts, and different heuristics come out on top under different circumstances. The results provide some good, easy-to-use alternatives to the simple average with an indication of the conditions under which each might be preferable, enabling us to conclude with some prescriptive advice.