Risk Management Metrics

This chapter describes how risk management deals with the detection, the evaluation and the precedence of the risks in the process of project management. There is always an uncertainty factor related to the decisions of an investment while managing a project. Risk management is a proactive approach to deal with such future events that can lead to slow performance of the software project management. For successful risk management; there are different metrics that have been used in the past and are being getting used in the present for inspecting the progress of a project at specific points in a timeline that help in reducing the amount of risk. For the adoption of effective metrics for risk management, data is required. All of the metrics can be applied to the different domains of project, process and product. The chapter also covers strategies to advance, distinguish, estimate, and forecast the risk management process. A review of the key point indicators (KPIs) are also integrated along with the project metrics to signify the future and the present renderings.

Mean–variance relationship and uncertainty

This study investigates the impact of uncertainty on the mean-variance relationship. We find that the stock market's expected excess return is positively related to the market's conditional variances and implied variance during low uncertainty periods but unrelated or negatively related to conditional variances and implied variance during high uncertainty periods. Our empirical evidence is consistent with investors' attitudes toward uncertainty and risk, firms' fundamentals and leverage effects varying with uncertainty. Additionally, we discover that the negative relationship between returns and contemporaneous innovations of conditional variance and the positive relationship between returns and contemporaneous innovations of implied variance are significant during low uncertainty periods. Furthermore, our results are robust to changing the base assets to mimic the uncertainty factor and removing the effect of investor sentiment.

Entropy Method for Decision-Making: Uncertainty Cycles in Tourism Demand

A new methodology is presented for measuring, classifying and predicting the cycles of uncertainty that occur in temporary decision-making in the tourist accommodation market (apartments and hotels). Special attention is paid to the role of entropy and cycles in the process under the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. The work scheme analyses random cycles from time to time, and in the frequency domain, the linear and nonlinear causality relationships between variables are studied. The period analysed is from January 2005 to December 2018; the following empirical results stand out: (1) On longer scales, the periodicity of the uncertainty of decision-making is between 6 and 12 months, respectively, for all the nationalities described. (2) The elasticity of demand for tourist apartments is approximately 1% due to changes in demand for tourist hotels. (3) The elasticity of the uncertainty factor is highly correlated with the country of origin of tourists visiting Spain. For example, it has been empirically shown that increases of 1% in uncertainty cause increases in the demand for apartments of 2.12% (worldwide), 3.05% (UK), 1.91% (Germany), 1.78% (France), 7.21% (Ireland), 3.61% (The Netherlands) respectively. This modelling has an explanatory capacity of 99% in all the models analysed.

PROSPECTS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYSTEM OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

The article is devoted to the formulation of prospects for the development of social responsibility of enterprises in modern conditions; rethinking its essence through the inclusion of the uncertainty factor in the theory of sustainable development (basic for social responsibility); substantiation of directions of cooperation between supranational, state bodies, enterprises and academic science in the direction of increase of the efficiency of realization of projects on social responsibility in international and national business; formation of fundamental principles for the creation of uniform standards of social responsibility of international business in the form of methodological recommendations using the coefficient method. The article considers the main approaches to understanding the essence of corporate governance in the field of social responsibility, prerequisites that form the understanding of social responsibility in modern business, among which are: business ethics, ethical behavior, interaction with stakeholders, activities for society, achieving sustainable development. A list of subjective and objective problems that arise today in the implementation of social responsibility projects in international business, namely: individualized understanding of the essence of social responsibility; lack of systematicity and comprehensiveness; lack of consideration of the uncertainty factor when planning social responsibility projects and assessing its significance for the main activity; lack of supranational standards of social responsibility; inviolability of the concept of sustainable development, imperfect regulatory framework, financial capabilities of companies, is offered. Prospects for improving the system of relations in the field of social responsibility at global level and business level are proposed. A method of calculating the coefficient of social responsibility, which includes three main components: the mandatory group of factors, the sectoral part, the variable part, is proposed.

Program and Project Approaches to Solving Large-Scale Environmental Problems

The article discusses the federal program “Ecology of the Angara-Yenisei region (AYR)”. The description of the systemic synthesis of different approaches to the assessment of the program of restoration and preservation of the natural complex of the Yenisei, as the skeletal basis of the ecological-assimilation potential of AEP is given. The necessity of taking into account the uncertainty factor when evaluating large-scale environmental projects is substantiated. Purpose of the study. Show that the effects of large-scale projects affect the very scenario of economic development, in this regard, it is incorrect to use the primitive integration of an alternative (strategy) into the same scenario, it is shown that it is necessary to evaluate the “project – scenario” relationship. Materials and methods. The authors propose to use three levels of assessment for evaluating large-scale projects: macro level, meso level and micro level. This classification allows you to gradually reduce the level of uncertainty. The information obtained at the previous level of assessment is the source for the lower level. Results. At the first stage, the judgments of the experts were processed using computer products developed at the IEIE. At the second step, the National Project “Ecology of Russia” was analyzed, consisting of 11 federal projects, and a mathematical model was developed for the multicriteria problem of optimal cost management of the project, taking into account the uncertainty factor. The result of the third step was the creation of a hybrid model for assessing large-scale environmental projects from a logical-heuristic model based on expert information and an economic-mathematical model. Analogs of such models, created with the participation of the authors, work in the evaluation of large-scale railway projects. This refers to a family of semi-dynamic optimization models, which have been tested to varying degrees in solving meso-level problems, both in planned and market economies. Moreover, on the basis of one of the versions of this family, a medical-ecological-economic model was developed, and with its help, a scenario analysis of the development of the subjects of the Asian part of Russia was carried out. Conclusion. The article provides a brief description of the functionality and the need to use the appropriate mathematical and software tools as the stages of large-scale projects progress from concept to implementation.

Interspecific sensitivity of European amphibians towards two pesticides and comparison to standard test species

Background Although debates about the assessment of potential effects of pesticides on amphibians are ongoing, amphibians are not yet considered in the current EU environmental risk assessment of pesticides. Instead, the risk assessment of potential effects on aquatic amphibian life stages relies on use of data of surrogate species like the standard temperate fish species rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). This assumption is mainly based on the comparison to amphibian species not native to Europe such as the aquatic African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). It remains unclear whether these surrogate species cover semi-aquatic Central European amphibian sensitivities. Therefore, we assessed the acute sensitivity of aquatic stages of eight European amphibian species native in Germany (Bufo bufo, Bufotes viridis, Epidalea calamita, Hyla arborea, Pelobates fuscus, Pelophylax sp., Rana dalmatina, R. temporaria) towards commercial formulations of the fungicide folpet (Folpan® 500 SC, Adama) and the insecticide indoxacarb (Avaunt® EC, Cheminova). The determined acute sensitivities (median lethal concentration, LC50) were included in species sensitivity distributions and compared to experimentally determined LC50 values of X. laevis and literature values of O. mykiss. Results The results showed that native amphibian sensitivities differed between the tested pesticides with a factor of 5 and 11. Depending on the pesticide, X. laevis was five and nine times more tolerant than the most sensitive native amphibian species. Comparing literature values of O. mykiss to the experimentally determined sensitivities of the native amphibian species showed that the O. mykiss sensitivity was in the same range as for the tested amphibians for the formulation Folpan® 500 SC. The comparison of sensitivities towards the formulation Avaunt® EC showed an eight times lower sensitivity of O. mykiss than the most sensitive amphibian species. Conclusions A risk assessment using the 96-h LC50 values for fish covers the risk for the assessed aquatic stages of European amphibians after the application of the recommended uncertainty factor of 100 and thus may be adequate for lower tier risk assessment of the studied pesticides. If aquatic amphibian testing will be required for pesticide risk assessment nevertheless, acute tests with the model organism X. laevis and the application of an appropriate uncertainty factor might be a promising approach.