In today’s increasingly complex and uncertain business environment, financial analysis is yet more critical to business managers who tackle problems of an economic or business nature. Knowledge based on formal logic and even experience becomes less sufficient. This volume systematically sets out the basic elements on which to base financial analysis for business in the new century. It incorporates a previous work that can serve as the basis and foundation for the new contributions that are now being made in the field of financial economy and intend to provide business with instruments and models suitable for dealing with the new economic context. In dealing with rapid and unpredictable changes in technological and business conditions, it postulates a growing reliance on the opinions of experts instead of past data or probabilistic forecasts, which is a radical change but may yield fruitful results. For this reason, much emphasis is devoted to the problem of aggregation of the opinion of experts in the financial field, with the object of limiting, wherever possible, the subjective component of the opinions and making sure that the decisions have the best guarantee of reaching the desired objectives.

This is truly an interdisciplinary book for knowledge workers in business, finance, management and socio-economic sciences based on fuzzy logic. It serves as a guide to and techniques for forecasting, decision making and evaluations in an environment involving uncertainty, vagueness, impression and subjectivity. Traditional modeling techniques, contrary to fuzzy logic, do not capture the nature of complex systems especially when humans are involved. Fuzzy logic uses human experience and judgement to facilitate plausible reasoning in order to reach a conclusion. Emphasis is on applications presented in the 27 case studies including Time Forecasting for Project Management, New Product Pricing, and Control of a Parasit-Pest System.

This is truly an interdisciplinary book for knowledge workers in business, finance, management and socio-economic sciences based on fuzzy logic. It serves as a guide to and techniques for forecasting, decision making and evaluations in an environment involving uncertainty, vagueness, impression and subjectivity. Traditional modeling techniques, contrary to fuzzy logic, do not capture the nature of complex systems especially when humans are involved. Fuzzy logic uses human experience and judgement to facilitate plausible reasoning in order to reach a conclusion. Emphasis is on applications presented in the 27 case studies including Time Forecasting for Project Management, New Product Pricing, and Control of a Parasit-Pest System.

This paper is devoted to the issue of forecasting financial ratios. The objective of the conducted research is to develop a predictive model with the use of an innovative methodology, i.e., fuzzy logic theory, and to evaluate its effectiveness. Fuzzy logic has been widely used in machinery, robotics and industrial engineering. This paper introduces the use of fuzzy logic for the financial analysis of enterprises. While many current phenomena in finance and economics are fuzzy, they are treated as if they are crisp. Fuzzy logic provides an appropriate tool for modeling imprecise, uncertain and ambiguous phenomena. Because the financial situation of a company is affected by many factors (economic, political, psychological, etc.) that cannot be precisely and unambiguously defined, the approach used in this paper greatly enhances the predictive power of financial analysis and makes it an economically useful tool for the management of enterprises. Empirically, this paper employs three testing samples: Central European enterprises, Latin American companies and global firms. From the verification of these models, it is evident that the refined processes are effective in improving the forecasting of financial situations of all three types of enterprises. The models created by the author are characterized by high efficiency. This study is one of the world's first attempts to combine ratio analysis with fuzzy logic to predict the financial situations of companies.

In this hands-on, practical guide, you'll walk through powerful fuzzy logic business applications for business, including risk assessment, forecasting, supplier evaluation, customer targeting, and scheduling. You'll watch fuzzy logic at work analyzing credit risk, evaluating leases, making stock market decisions, and uncovering fraud.

Experts from the world's major financial institutions contributed to this work and have already used the newest technologies. Gives proven strategies for using neural networks, algorithms, fuzzy logic and nonlinear data analysis techniques to enhance profitability. The latest analytical breakthroughs, the impact on modern finance theory and practice, including the best ways for profitably applying them to any trading and portfolio management system, are all covered.

This book starts with the basic concepts of Fuzzy Logic: the membership function, the intersection and the union of fuzzy sets, fuzzy numbers, and the extension principle underlying the algorithmic operations. Several chapters are devoted to applications of Fuzzy Logic in Operations Research: PERT planning with uncertain activity durations, Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) with vague preferential statements, and Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) with weighted degrees of satisfaction. New items are: Fuzzy PERT using activity durations with triangular membership functions, Fuzzy SMART with a sensitivity analysis based upon Fuzzy Logic, the Additive and the Multiplicative AHP with a similar feature, ELECTRE using the ideas of the AHP and SMART, and a comparative study of the ideal-point methods for MOO. Finally, earlier studies of colour perception illustrate the attempts to find a physiological basis for the set-theoretical and the algorithmic operations in Fuzzy Logic. The last chapter also discusses some key issues in linguistic categorization and the prospects of Fuzzy Logic as a multi-disciplinary research activity. Audience: Researchers and students working in applied mathematics, operations research, management science, business administration, econometrics, industrial engineering, information systems, artificial intelligence, mathematical psychology, and psycho-physics.