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As a vital method to resolve conflicts between water use in upstream and downstream areas and solve the problem of transboundary water pollution, watershed ecological compensation is widely used worldwide. It is necessary to analyze the influencing factors of watershed ecological compensation from the perspective of how different governments interact with each other. However, the previous literature has paid less attention to the special situation of cross-regional water diversion projects, the changing processes of governmental behavior, and the interventions by the central government. Therefore, when taking the upstream and downstream governments and the central government in the basin of a cross-regional water diversion project as research objects, it is important to study their behavior and influencing factors to improve the ecological compensation system in the basin. This paper first analyzes the interactions among upstream, downstream, and central governments in the basin, based on evolutionary game theory. Second, the evolutionary game models before and after the interventions by the central government were developed separately, and the effects of different contexts on the dynamic evolutionary process were analyzed. Finally, taking the Hanjiang River Basin as an example, which is where the water source area of China's South-to-North Water Diversion Middle Project is located, the opportunity cost of protecting the water environment in the upstream areas of this basin was estimated by establishing an econometric regression model using data on water quality and gross domestic product. The results show that (1) the initial probabilities of governments affect their final behaviors; (2) even without the supervision of the central government, it is still possible for upstream and downstream governments to reach the desired state spontaneously; (3) the supervision of the central government can promote upstream and downstream governments to reach a stable state faster; and (4) the current level of compensation from the central government is significantly lower than the opportunity cost of protecting the water environment for upstream governments in the Hanjiang River Basin. This paper can provide helpful insights for improving the ecological compensation system in the basin, which helps promote cooperation in water environment protection.

This book mainly introduces a series of theory and approaches of group decision-making based on several types of uncertain linguistic expressions and addresses their applications. The book pursues three major objectives: (1) to introduce some techniques to model several types of natural linguistic expressions; (2) to handle these expressions in group decision-making; and (3) to clarify the involved approaches by practical applications. The book is especially valuable for readers to understand how linguistic expressions could be employed and operated to make decisions, and motivates researchers to consider more types of natural linguistic expressions in decision analysis under uncertainties.

Knowledge management (KM) is a tool to tackle cybersecurity issues, provided it emphasizes on the interrelated social, organizational, and technological factors involved in cybersecurity. This paper proposes a sociotechnical systems analysis framework of KM systems for cybersecurity. Specifically, it applies a sociotechnical systems approach to investigation of constructs of KM systems for cybersecurity and identifies five major constructs of KM systems for cybersecurity: roles of KM in cybersecurity, organizational framework of KM for cybersecurity, cybersecurity analytics process, tools of KM for cybersecurity, and system architecture of KM for cybersecurity. The five constructs in the proposed sociotechnical systems analysis framework are analyzed. The paper makes contribution to the growing information systems literature by presenting a special case of sociotechnical systems analysis. The sociotechnical systems analysis framework provides guidelines for the development of KM systems for cybersecurity in organizations.

The relations between unobserved events and observed outcomes can be characterized by a bipartite graph. We propose an algorithm that explores the structure of the graph to construct the "exact Core Determining Class," i.e., the set of irredudant inequalities. We prove that in general the exact Core Determining Class does not depend on the probability measure of the outcomes but only on the structure of the graph. For more general linear inequalities selection problems, we propose a statistical procedure similar to the Dantzig Selector to select the truly informative constraints. We demonstrate performances of our procedures in Monte-Carlo experiments.

ABSTRACTHigher order thinking skills are important for managers. Systems thinking is an important type of higher order thinking in business education. This article investigates a soft Operations Research approach to teaching and learning systems thinking. It outlines the integrative use of Strategic Options Development and Analysis maps for visualizing and assessing systems thinking and the joint analytical process for systems thinking development. This approach has been applied in an MBA course, and has demonstrated its usefulness for students in developing systems thinking skills.