This book provides a new point of view on the subject of business failure prediction, through the application of multicriteria analysis methods. The aim of the book is to provide a review of the research in the area and to explore the adequacy of these methods to one of the most complex problems in the area of financial management. In addition, the book explores the applications of the methods so that it can become a very useful tool for researchers and practitioners. The analysis of the modeling and the results in these applications provides the background for further employment of the methods.

This book presents a set of new, innovative mathematical modeling tools for analyzing financial risk. Operational Tools in the Management of Financial Risks presents an array of new tools drawn from a variety of research areas, including chaos theory, expert systems, fuzzy sets, neural nets, risk analysis, stochastic programming, and multicriteria decision making. Applications cover, but are not limited to, bankruptcy, credit granting, capital budgeting, corporate performance and viability, portfolio selection/management, and country risk. The book is organized into five sections. The first section applies multivariate data and multicriteria analyses to the problem of portfolio selection. Articles in this section combine classical approaches with newer methods. The second section expands the analysis in the first section to a variety of financial problems: business failure, corporate performance and viability, bankruptcy, etc. The third section examines the mathematical programming techniques including linear, dynamic, and stochastic programming to portfolio managements. The fourth section introduces fuzzy set and artificial intelligence techniques to selected types of financial decisions. The final section explores the contribution of several multicriteria methodologies in the assessment of country financial risk. In total, this book is a systematic examination of an emerging methodology for managing financial risk in business.

In two volumes, this new edition presents the state of the art in Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). Reflecting the explosive growth in the field seen during the last several years, the editors not only present surveys of the foundations of MCDA, but look as well at many new areas and new applications. Individual chapter authors are among the most prestigious names in MCDA research, and combined their chapters bring the field completely up to date. Part I of the book considers the history and current state of MCDA, with surveys that cover the early history of MCDA and an overview that discusses the “pre-theoretical” assumptions of MCDA. Part II then presents the foundations of MCDA, with individual chapters that provide a very exhaustive review of preference modeling, along with a chapter devoted to the axiomatic basis of the different models that multiple criteria preferences. Part III looks at outranking methods, with three chapters that consider the ELECTRE methods, PROMETHEE methods, and a look at the rich literature of other outranking methods. Part IV, on Multiattribute Utility and Value Theories (MAUT), presents chapters on the fundamentals of this approach, the very well known UTA methods, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its more recent extension, the Analytic Network Process (ANP), as well as a chapter on MACBETH (Measuring Attractiveness by a Categorical Based Evaluation Technique). Part V looks at Non-Classical MCDA Approaches, with chapters on risk and uncertainty in MCDA, the decision rule approach to MCDA, the fuzzy integral approach, the verbal decision methods, and a tentative assessment of the role of fuzzy sets in decision analysis. Part VI, on Multiobjective Optimization, contains chapters on recent developments of vector and set optimization, the state of the art in continuous multiobjective programming, multiobjective combinatorial optimization, fuzzy multicriteria optimization, a review of the field of goal programming, interactive methods for solving multiobjective optimization problems, and relationships between MCDA and evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO). Part VII, on Applications, selects some of the most significant areas, including contributions of MCDA in finance, energy planning problems, telecommunication network planning and design, sustainable development, and portfolio analysis. Finally, Part VIII, on MCDM software, presents well known MCDA software packages.

The book discusses a new approach to the classification problem following the decision support orientation of multicriteria decision aid. The book reviews the existing research on the development of classification methods, investigating the corresponding model development procedures, and providing a thorough analysis of their performance both in experimental situations and real-world problems from the field of finance. Audience: Researchers and professionals working in management science, decision analysis, operations research, financial/banking analysis, economics, statistics, computer science, as well as graduate students in management science and operations research.

Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis: State of the Art Surveys provides survey articles and references of the seminal or state-of-the-art research on MCDA. The material covered ranges from the foundations of MCDA, over various MCDA methodologies (outranking methods, multiattribute utility and value theories, non-classical approaches) to multiobjective mathematical programming, MCDA applications, and software. This vast amount of material is organized in 8 parts, with a total of 25 chapters. More than 2000 references are listed.

This book provides a new point of view on the subject of business failure prediction, through the application of multicriteria analysis methods. The aim of the book is to provide a review of the research in the area and to explore the adequacy of these methods to one of the most complex problems in the area of financial management. In addition, the book explores the applications of the methods so that it can become a very useful tool for researchers and practitioners. The analysis of the modeling and the results in these applications provides the background for further employment of the methods.

As its title implies, Advances in Multicriteria Analysis presents the most recent developments in multicriteria analysis and in some of its principal areas of application, including marketing, research and development evaluation, financial planning, and medicine. Special attention is paid to the interaction between multicriteria analysis, decision support systems and preference modeling. The five sections of the book cover: methodology; problem structuring; utility assessment; multi-objective optimisation; real world applications. Audience: Researchers and professionals who are operations researchers, management scientists, computer scientists, statisticians, decision analysts, marketing managers and financial analysts.

th This book is devoted to the 19 Meeting of the EURO Working Group on Financial Modelling, held in Chania, Crete, Greece,November28-30, 1996. The EURO Working Group on Financial Modelling was founded in September 1986 in Lisbon. The primary field of interest for the Working Group can be described as "the development of financial models that help to solve problems facedby financial managers in the firm". From this point of view, the following objectivesof the Working Group are distinguished: • providing an international forum for exchange of information and experience on financial modelling; • encouraging research in financial modelling (i. e. new techniques, methodologies, software,empirical studies,etc. ); • stimulating and strengthening the interaction between financial economic theory and the practice of financial decision making; • cooperating and exchanging information with universities and financial institutions throughout Europe. According to the aboveobjectives,the basic aim of this book is to present some new operational approaches (i. e. neural nets, multicriteria analysis, new optimization algorithms, decision software, etc. ) for financial modelling, both in a theoretical and practical levels. Thus, the present volume is divided in nine chapters. The first chapter refers to the new trends in financial modelling and includes two invited papers by Gil-Aluja and Pardalos. The second chapter involves papers on the topic of high performance computing and finance which is a European union project in which participate some members of the EURO Working Group on Financial Modelling (Spronk, Zenios, Dempster, etc. ).

Soft computing techniques are widely used in most businesses. This book consists of several important papers on the applications of soft computing techniques for the business field. The soft computing techniques used in this book include (or very closely related to): Bayesian networks, biclustering methods, case-based reasoning, data mining, Dempster-Shafer theory, ensemble learning, evolutionary programming, fuzzy decision trees, hidden Markov models, intelligent agents, k-means clustering, maximum likelihood Hebbian learning, neural networks, opportunistic scheduling, probability distributions combined with Monte Carlo methods, rough sets, self organizing maps, support vector machines, uncertain reasoning, other statistical and machine learning techniques, and combinations of these techniques. The businesses or business problems addressed in this book include (or very closely related to): analysis of correlations between currency exchange rates, analysis of USA banks and Moody’s bank financial strength rating, arrears management, business risk identification, company audit fee evaluation, dental treatments, business internal control, intelligent tutoring systems and educational assessment, modeling agent behavior, motor insurance industry, personal loan defaults, pricing strategies for increasing the market share, pricing strategies in supply chain management, probabilistic sales forecasting, user relevance feedback analysis for online text retrieval, and world crude oil spot price forecasting.

Risk is the main source of uncertainty for investors, debtholders, corporate managers and other stakeholders. For all these actors, it is vital to focus on identifying and managing risk before making decisions. The success of their businesses depends on the relevance of their decisions and consequently, on their ability to manage and deal with the different types of risk. Accordingly, the main objective of this book is to promote scientific research in the different areas of risk management, aiming at being transversal and dealing with different aspects of risk management related to corporate finance as well as market finance. Thus, this book should provide useful insights for academics as well as professionals to better understand and assess the different types of risk.