offshore employees (expatriates) working abroad are an important part of any organisational workforce, working and competing globally. the specific requirements of expatriates are quite different as compared to the local workforce of that particular company. these requirements range from base salary to the educational needs of their families, children, and spouses. the employers especially work...

This study shows for the first time, that investing comprehensively in sustainability as measured by the GRESB rating) pays off for REITs by enhancing operational performance and lowering risk exposure and volatility. Analyzing a sample of REITs from North America, Asia and Europe for the 2011-14 time period, it also appears that there is a great deal of untapped potential, particularly in the ...

This paper addresses how efficient reward methods can be applied to multiple agents co-evolving in noisy and changing environments, under communication limitations. This problem is approached by “factoring” a global reward over all agents into agent-specific rewards that have two key properties: 1) agents maximizing their agentspecific rewards will tend to maximize the global reward, 2) an agen...

While food webs have provided a rich vein of research material over the last 50 years, they have largely been the subject matter of the pure ecologist working in natural habitats. While there are some notable exceptions to this trend, there are, as I explain in this paper, many applied questions that could be answered using a food web approach. The paper is divided into two halves. The first ha...

BACKGROUND Health professionals from high-income countries are increasingly becoming involved in international service-learning trips in low and low/middle-income countries. While much has been written about the ethics and curricular guidelines related to such endeavors, scant attention has been paid to the attitudes with which trainees and clinicians enter into or return from them. In this ess...

Enabling reinforcement learning to be effective in large-scale multi-agent Markov Decisions Problems is a challenging task. To address this problem we propose a multi-agent variant of Q-learning: “Q Updates with Immediate Counterfactual Rewards-learning” (QUICR-learning). Given a global reward function over all agents that the large-scale system is trying to maximize, QUICR-learning breaks down...

There is increasing interest among both medical and other professional communities in becoming involved in global health, development, and other charitable work. There has also been a proliferation of opportunities in the field. Nonetheless, it is still difficult to find practical information on the daily realities of development work or advice on the difficulties inherent to this type of work....

Difference rewards (a particular instance of reward shaping) have been used to allow multiagent domains to scale to large numbers of agents, but they remain difficult to compute in many domains. We present an approach to modeling the global reward using function approximation that allows the quick computation of shaped difference rewards. We demonstrate how this model can result in significant ...

considerable attention has been given to the identification of key forms of reward and its linkage to employee engagement. for this purpose following study aims to uncover the influence of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards on employee engagement in the public sector of uganda. a sample of 184 public sector employees was randomly selected and taken from gulu district. a quantitative approach based...