Health care delivery in the developed world is in constant transformation. Structures and values are changing. New and more effective tools and technology are being used to identify and overcome diseases. Yet even if these new technologies are increasingly available to the public, not all of them have market potential. Cost efficiency is at the core of our health care system. Cost consideration...

This study aims to inspect and evaluate the integration of database queries and their use in e-commerce product searches. It has been observed that e-commerce is one of the most prominent trends, which have been emerged in the business world, for the past decade. E-commerce has gained tremendous popularity, as it offers higher flexibility, cost efficiency, effectiveness, and convenience, to bot...

For variable annuities, the cost of hedging must be taken into consideration when firms use the dynamic hedging strategy. In this paper, we study hedging strategies by assuming the hedge position follows a random walk with boundary conditions. We find that re-balancing delta to the initial position is always more cost-efficient than re-balancing it to the edge for a fixed transaction cost. Howe...

Cloud computing is very common today due to its various characteristics and benefits. It is cost efficient and thus very popular, but has great impact on environment such as increase in pollution, climatic changes and shortage of energy resources. Green cloud computing is important issue at present time. In this paper, the author have made critical observations of energy efficiency in all field...

Manufacturers in a wide range of industries nowadays face the challenge of providing a rich product variety at very low cost. This typically requires the implementation of cost efficient, flexible production systems. Often, so called mixed-model assembly lines are employed, where setup operations are reduced to such an extent that various models of a common base product can be manufactured in i...

Supply contracts are a medium for coordinating materials and information flows in supply chains aiming at reducing uncertainties, order variances, delivery lead times, and inventory risks with increased fill rates. Practitioners were always up-front involved in designing and negotiating clauses of so called quantity flexibility contracts. Meanwhile researchers have proved the advantage of such ...

We represent planning as a set of loosely coupled network flow problems, where each network corresponds to one of the state variables in the planning domain. The network nodes correspond to the state variable values and the network arcs correspond to the value transitions. The planning problem is to find a path (a sequence of actions) in each network such that, when merged, they constitute a fe...

Understanding the phenomenon of propagation of disruptions regarding security is a critical factor for designing of robust export supply chains. From a system dynamics approach, this research analyses the effects of the materialization and simultaneous propagation of disruptions of security at various points in export supply chains (ESC). The model allows understanding why the production sites ...

This paper analyzes the cost efficiency and optimal scale of the electricity distribution industry in Taiwan. Due to the substantial difference in network density, firms may differ widely in production technology. We employ the stochastic metafrontier approach to estimate the cost efficiency of 24 distribution units during the period of 1997 and 2002. Empirical results find that the average cos...

This study examines the determinants of bank profitability in China over the period 2003-2009. The determinants are divided into three groups: bank-specific, industryspecific and macroeconomic variables. The two-step General Method of Moments (GMM) system estimator is used. The results show that there is a positive relationship between bank profitability, cost efficiency, banking sector develop...