In today's competitive market, all manufacturers attempt to improve their maintenance policy in order to decrease the cost of failure and increase the quality of products, but most of these attempts do not consider the role of humans involved in a manufacturing system. Human resources are the main factor in manufacturing that has an undeniable effect on products quality, machines reliability, s...

The present context of the electric industry, characterized by competitive markets, privatization, and regulatory of technical requirements forces the power utilities to optimize their asset management practices and develop the requisite decision plans techno-economically. Practically approaching, this paper devises a new support tool based on a multiattribute decision making (MADM) framework i...

Political conflict over the respective roles of the state and the market in health care has a long history. Current interest in market approaches represents the resurgence of ideas and arguments that have been promoted with varying intensity throughout this century. (In practice, advocates have never wanted a truly competitive market, but rather one managed by and for particular private interes...

We provide a model of the impact of bank mergers on loan competition, individual reserve management and aggregate liquidity risk. Banks hold reserves against liquidity shocks, refinance in the interbank market and compete in a differentiated loan market. A merger creates an internal money market that induces financial cost advantages and may increase reserve holdings. We assess the liquidity ri...

This study estimates three hypotheses of OPEC behavior: market-sharing, target revenue and competitive model for the period 1980 to 2000 for all OPEC courtiers except Iraq. To examine co-integration relation for oil production, we use ADF test in OLS estimation. Also we use ARDL approach to examine these hypotheses and the long run relationship of them. Results indicate none of three hypotheses...

An auction market is a market in which buyers enter competitive bids and sellers enter competitive offers at the same time. Many negotiation systems have been proposed that rely on adequate and precise information provided by the negotiation parties for making their decisions. This paper provides mechanisms for addressing inadequate or missing information in a negotiation environment between a ...

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened competition in the telecommunications market in the U.S. and forced the incumbent telecommunications companies to open both their physical and logical infrastructure for Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs). In this case study we focus on the problems that face a CLEC with regard to designing an information system and getting a back office system...

Several regions of the U.S. have sought to restructure the electric power industry by separating the potentially competitive generation sector from the natural monopoly functions of electricity transmission and distribution. Under this restructuring scheme, a central authority, which we will refer to as the independent system operator (ISO), is given control over both the transmission system an...