In general, a corporation in financial distress may take two routes. The first one corresponds to the liquidation in which the assets of the firm are sold either piecemeal or as a going concern. The proceeds from this sale are then divided among all the claimants in accordance with their priority rights. Alternatively, the firm may embark on a reorganization process whose purpose is to find a method to overcome the trouble. Typically, this process involves a negotiation between debtors and creditors with a view to establishing a new mechanism for the settlement of claims: writting off some of the claims, exchanging bonds and other debts with new notes, bonds, swapping new equities for old ones, injection of new capital. This paper aims at providing a formal analysis on the choice between these two options when firms get into financial difficulties.
Swarm intelligence is a new research paradigm that offers novel approaches for studying and solving distributed problems using solutions inspired by social insects and other natural behaviors of vertebrates. In this thesis, we present methodologies for modeling artificial, mobile systems within the swarm intelligence framework. The proposed methodologies provide guidelines in the study and design of artificial swarm systems for the following two classes of experiments: distributed sensing and distributed manipulation.
Event discovery and information dissemination through local communication in artificial swarm systems present similar characteristics as natural phenomena such as foraging and food discovery in insect colonies and the spread of infectious diseases in animal populations, respectively. We show that the artificial systems can be described in similar mathematical terms as those used to describe the natural systems. The proposed models can be classified in two main categories: non-embodied and embodied models. In the first category agents are modeled as mobile bodiless points, whereas the other models take into account the physical interference between agents resulting from embodiment. Furthermore, within each category, we distinguish two subcategories: spatial and nonspatial models. In the spatial models we keep track of the trajectory of each agent, the correlation between the positions occupied by the agents over consecutive time steps, or make use of the spatial distribution resulting from the movement pattern of the agents. In the nonspatial models we assume that agents hop around randomly and occupy independent positions over consecutive time steps.
Worldwide financial market instability has been the focus of attention of both academic and policy circles. Naturally, following the series of currency crashes in the 1990s, most of the discussion has centered on currency crises. The latest crisis in Turkey in February 2001 will certainly contribute to keeping an avid interest in the triggers of crises well into the new millennium. But currency collapses are not the only ones to have attracted attention. The daily volatility of stock and bond markets in non-crisis times have also stirred interest, with, for example, the vagaries of the NASDAQ index in the United States making the daily headlines of newspapers around the globe.
