This paper tests various implications of quality-based price discrimination theory in the context of internet book retailers’ shipping menus. Many internet retailers create quality variants of a homogeneous good by bundling it with several shipping options that differ by delivery time. This practice can allow retailers to extract further surplus from consumers through quality-based price discri...

 The use of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices in the form of ‘bundles’ and in integration with the business strategy of the organisation have been emphasised throughout the HRM literature. These are called the horizontal integration and vertical integration respectively. This article aim at examining the use of these practices in liner shipping industry in which human element plays a vi...

BACKGROUND Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) circulating in blood is currently used for noninvasive diagnostic and prognostic tests. Minimizing background DNA is vital for detection of low abundance cfDNA. We investigated whether a new blood collection device could reduce background levels of genomic DNA (gDNA) in plasma compared to K(3) EDTA tubes, when subjected to conditions that may occur during sample...

This paper addresses a bottleneck problem in mobile file systems: the propagation of updated large files from a weaklyconnected client to its servers. It proposes an efficient mechanism called operation shipping or operation-based update propagation. In the new mechanism, the client ships the user operation that updated the large files, rather than the files themselves, across the weak network....

We conducted 80 auctions on eBay. Forty of these auctions were for various popular music CDs while the remaining 40 auctions were for video games for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console. The revenue equivalence theorem states that any auction form having the same effective reserve price yields the same expected revenue. The effective reserve price on eBay consists of three components: the opening b...

The spread of non-native species has been a subject of increasing concern since the 1980s when human-mediated transportation, mainly related to ships' ballast water, was recognized as a major vector for species transportation and spread, although records of non-native species go back as far as 16th Century. Ever increasing world trade and the resulting rise in shipping have highlighted the issu...

Recent empirical studies in maritime economics define market contractions and expansions (market dynamic movements) as shipping agent controlled, distinguishing between cargo-owner and ship-owner markets. It is argued that freight dynamics are triggered by the activities of shipping agents, in the sense that both a higher earning market-state with high volatility and a lower earning market-stat...

This paper considers a truck scheduling problem in a multiple cross docks while there is temporary storage in front of the shipping docks. Receiving and shipping trucks can intermittently move in and out of the docks during the time intervals between their task execution, in which trucks can enter to any of the cross docks. Thus, a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model for multiple cross docks ...

This paper is derived from a cost benefit study of the involvement of the State in the shipping industry which was carried out in the context of the Appraisal of the Public Capital Programme. A brief theoretical comment on foreign exchange rates is the only new material I have added. The paper is concerned with the mainly strategic company in the state-owned shipping sector, Irish Shipping Ltd....

OBJECTIVES Confirmation of Kudoa septempunctata (K. septempunctata) as the pathogenic agent causing acute food poisoning remains under debate owing to inconsistencies in the reproducibility of experimental evidence. Higher intake of olive flounder infected with K. septempunctata would result in increased diagnosis of food poisoning by K. septempunctata, if the latter was one of the causal agent...