Economic Dispatch Model of Nuclear High-Temperature Reactor with Hydrogen Cogeneration in Electricity Market

Hydrogen produced without carbon emissions could be a useful fuel as nations look to decarbonize their electricity, transport, and industry sectors. Using the iodine–sulfur (IS) cycle coupled with a nuclear heat source is one method for producing hydrogen without the use of fossil fuels. An economic dispatch model was developed for a nuclear-driven IS system to determine hydrogen sale prices that would make such a system profitable. The system studied is the HTTR-GT/H2, a design for power and hydrogen cogeneration at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor. This study focuses on the development of the economic model and the role that input data plays in the final calculated values. Using a historical price duration curve shows that the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) or breakeven sale price of hydrogen would need to be 98.1 JPY/m3 or greater. Synthetic time histories were also used and found the LCOH to be 67.5 JPY/m3. The price duration input was found to have a significant effect on the LCOH. As such, great care should be used in these economic dispatch analyses to select reasonable input assumptions.

Customer Choice Modelling: A Multi-Level Consensus Clustering Approach

Customer Choice Modeling aims to model the decision-making process of customers, or segments of customers, through their choices and preferences identified by the analysis of their behaviors in one or more specific contexts. Clustering techniques are used in this context to identify patterns in their choices and preferences, to define segments of customers with similar behaviors, and to model how customers of different segments respond to competing products and offers. However, data clustering is an unsupervised learning task by nature, that is the grouping of customers with similar behaviors in clusters must be performed without prior knowledge about the nature and the number of intrinsic groups of data instances, i.e., customers, in the data space. Thus, the choice of both the clustering algorithm used and its parameterization, and of the evaluation method used to assess the relevance of the resulting clusters are central issues. Consensus clustering, or ensemble clustering, aims to solve these issues by combining the results of different clustering algorithms and parameterizations to generate a more robust and relevant final clustering result. We present a Multi-level Consensus Clustering approach combining the results of several clustering algorithmic configurations to generate a hierarchy of consensus clusters in which each cluster represents an agreement between different clustering results. A closed sets based approach is used to identified relevant agreements, and a graphical hierarchical representation of the consensus cluster construction process and their inclusion relationships is provided to the end-user. This approach was developed and experimented in travel industry context with Amadeus SAS. Experiments show how it can provide a better segmentation, and refine the customer segments by identifying relevant sub-segments represented as sub-clusters in the hierarchical representation, for Customer Choice Modeling. The clustering of travelers was able to distinguish relevant segments of customers with similar needs and desires (i.e., customers purchasing tickets according to different criteria, like price, duration of flight, lay-over time, etc.) and at different levels of precision, which is a major issue for improving the personalization of recommendations in flight search queries.

Price-Setting in Ukraine: Evidence from Online Prices

This study examines price duration and price-setting mechanisms in Ukraine using web-scraped prices. I found that the mean average duration of prices is about 2 months. Average price duration is lower for those products that are more exposed to temporary price changes (sales). Moreover, imported goods have a higher average price duration compared to domestic goods. In terms of the price-setting mechanism, the data supports timedependent price setting behavior over state-dependent. The evidence of time-dependent price setting is 1) the size of price change being positively related to the age of price; 2) many price changes of a size close to zero; and 3) the hazard function being non-increasing for the whole sample and tends to be flatter within relatively homogeneous groups of products.

Pricing of Sukuk Musharakah with joint venture as underlying, beyond the use of PLS ratio

Purpose Participatory contracts reflect the true spirit of Islamic finance. However, these contracts face several challenges during their implementation. This is reflected by the low volume of contracts processed by Islamic banks and the low number of Sukuk issued. This study aims to introduce a new parameter related to the valuation of Sukuk Musharakah when the underlying asset is a joint venture. Design/methodology/approach The author applies the Gordon & Shapiro model on the valuation of Sukuk Musharakah with a joint venture as underlying. A new pricing framework is introduced with several usual parameters such as the profit and loss sharing ratio, besides a new parameter, which is the dividend payout ratio. The framework shall contain price, duration and convexity computation. The new framework differs from the classic bond pricing methodology broadly used nowadays in determination of Sukuk prices. Findings The results indicate that negotiating only the profit and loss sharing ratio is not sufficient to have a fair price of Sukuk Musharakah when the underlying is a joint venture. It is due to the mismatch of interest between investors and issuers. Thus, another parameter should be negotiated which is the dividend payout ratio. Research limitations/implications The research focuses exclusively on Sukuk Musharakah with joint venture as underlying. Also, the choice of Gordon & Shapiro formula, by definition of the model, restricts the calculation of the net asset value by using only the future expected dividends with constant growth. This choice is made primarily to explain the objective of this paper in a simple way. Practical implications For investors, a compatible pricing framework with the underlying flows and risks of an asset is essential to create a liquid market. This work would help investors to boost the Sukuk Musharakah market. Originality/value Several studies have analyzed the various challenges in Sukuk markets. Few of them dealt with specificities of Sukuk Musharakah by focusing on the underlying nature. So far, the profit and loss sharing ratio is the only parameter analyzed in these studies. Thus, the authors contribute to the literature by studying other parameters that can solve the various challenges of Sukuk Markets.

All aboard the corporate socially and environmentally responsible cruise ship

Purpose The purpose of the study was to examine the relative importance of corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSER) in comparison to standard, price, duration, destination, brand and disruption using choice-based conjoint analysis (CBC). Design/methodology/approach CBC was used as the data collection survey technique, and counts analysis for preference and hierarchical Bayes estimation (HB) for importance levels data analysis methods, from Sawtooth Software Inc. Findings Results show that 2:1 Royal Caribbean Cruise Line cruise consumers prefer companies with CSER policies and practices. However, their actual product choice selection of cruise package attributes revealed that consumers overall placed less importance on CSER when choosing cruises. Experienced consumers were more brand image-conscious than those new to cruising, and consumers who were less price-sensitive were most willing to choose companies with CSER policies and practices. Research limitations/implications The information provided is specifically on “what” cruise consumer preferences and importance attributes are but does not explicitly explain “why” the respondents made the choices they did. This was at the time a limitation of the software used to conduct the study. Practical implications The Conjoint Analysis CBC Sawtooth Software pre-2014 version choice simulators do not facilitate questions that provide answers as to “why” respondents make the choices they do in the market simulations. Social implications The knowledge contribution is of value to both academia and industry, as the quantitative statistical data on the cruise consumers’ choice preferences are of value in understanding and identifying solutions/approaches towards “opening the bottleneck” that exists between private sector sustainable development practices and consumer lifestyle changes. Originality/value This was the first time that CBC/HB was applied within academia to examine the cruise consumers’ choice preferences in a UK context and also the first time that CSER was applied as a direct variable in a cruise package to determine the preference and important values of a brand in a consumer behaviour decision-making context.

Conjoint analysis tool for determining attributes on designing a graduate degree program

In this paper the use of the analysis tool sets for defining attributes and determining the importance rank on the criterion of purchase decision of customers addresses, all of which constitutes one of the fundamental steps for designing of any product. Precisely this problematic a large group of professionals from different areas of knowledge in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas it faces. This article discusses the usefulness and analysis procedure set shown as a statistical tool to study the process of decision making of customers on the attributes of products and services at the time of purchase.The result of the application was to define the attributes considered by potential customers in the selection of a training program of graduate degree in correspondence with which their design will be made, taking into account the type of university, price, duration course and days of the week will be taught.

INTEGRATED EVALUATION OF EXTERNAL WALL INSULATION IN RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS USING SWARA-TODIM MCDM METHOD

A great part of energy produced in Europe is consumed by old residential buildings. Consequently, it is necessary to retrofit energetically non-efficient buildings. However, there is a mass financial gap between cost effective retrofitting and upgrading to nearly zero energy building levels. The efficiency of apartment building modernization under current requirements applicable in Lithuania and the requirements for 2020 was analysed, focusing on thermal insulation of external walls. Six cases of residential building modernization in Lithuania were studied estimating criteria that are among the most important for implementation of apartment building modernization, such as the total cost of the external wall modernization, simple payback period, work duration, and other parameters related to the characteristics of thermal insulation systems. The weights of the criteria were calculated after an expert survey and using integrated SWARA-TODIM multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method the best alternatives were ranked. After analyzing the differences between the current situation and upcoming requirements for rendered and ventilated type of façades, it can be stated that the final result depends more on price, duration of works, payback period, energy losses and water vapour diffusion than on the type of façade or insulation requirements applied at present or future.