background: in 2012, switzerland changed from retrospective to prospective hospital payment based on diagnosis related groups (drgs), following the example of the united states, australia, and germany. as in these countries, the objective of this transition was to motivate hospitals to improve efficiency by making them bear financial risk to some extent.objective: this contribution seeks to fin...

one of the new topics in dea is the data with integer values. in dea classic models, it is assumed that input and output variables have real values. however, in many cases, some inputs or outputs can have integer values. measuring cost efficiency is another method to evaluate the performance and assess the capabilities of a single decision-making unit for manufacturing current products at a min...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units (DMUs). This tool has been utilized by a number of authors to examine two-stage processes, where all the outputs from the first stage are the only inputs to the second stage. The current article examines and extends these models using game theory concepts. The resulting models are linear, and ...

The aim of this paper is the evaluation overall performance of buyer-supplier relationships.In some situations the cost of inputs in a buyer-supplier chain are available, on the other hand, achieving a low cost position is necessary for most businesses. And, in a buyer-supplier chain wants to know how assign inputs with the least cost. This paper introduces cost efficiency with same and dierent...

I. FROM EXCLUSIVE USE TO PUBLIC RIGHT ............................... 240 A. Dealing the Cards, and Valuing the Deal ............................ 242 B. Reshuffling the Deck............................................................ 243 II. THE REPEAL OF GROSCH’S LAW .............................................. 246 III. THE BARAN PRINCIPLES ......................................................

In the context of the ongoing deregulation of the electricity industry, we revisit the commonly held assumption that, under the condition of perfect information, a decentralized unit commitment would lead to the same power quantities traded and the same optimal social welfare as a centralized unit commitment. Taking operating cost independent of the output quantity into account, we show in the ...

Based on the aggregated findings of 25 studies from the literature, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of the impacts, motivation, and success factors of the adoption of the IS/IT service management reference framework ITIL in IS/IT service organizations in practice. Positive effects across studies include increased customer satisfaction, service quality, and the increase of time and ...

The Swedish Transport Administration is introducing a new regime, called maintenance windows, for allocating train free slots reserved for maintenance tasks on the railway infrastructure. In this paper, a model for the assessment and the dimensioning of such maintenance windows is presented, which considers marginal effects on both the maintenance cost and the expected train traffic demand. The...

Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is being extensively and rapidly deployed. The flexibility and cost efficiency are the key factors luring enterprises to transition to VoIP. Some security problems may surface with the widespread deployment of VoIP. This article presents an overview of VoIP systems and its security issues. First, we briefly describe basic VoIP architecture and its fundamental dif...