This paper presents a comparative statics result on a rental housing market. The relationship between the qualities of apartments and their rents is investigated. Our comparative statics considers rent changes when an improvement occurs in a local area of the market. We show that rents go up locally in response to the improvement, but rents go down in the inner area of the city. To show the dis...

The Rental Fleet Scheduling Problem (RFSP) arises in vehicle rental operations that offer a wide variety of vehicle types to customers, and allow a rented vehicle to “migrate” to a setdown depot other than the pickup depot. When there is a shortage of vehicles of a particular type at a depot, vehicles may be relocated to that depot, or vehicles of similar types may be substituted. The RFSP invo...

Web services have the potential to provide much more seamless, dynamic and open distributed applications than earlier technologies. We describe our experiences developing an integrated, collaborative travel planning application using .NET, C# and web services. This application provides a unified portal for customers and travel agents to plan, revise and book travel itineraries, with interaction...

This research investigates whether or not employee engagement has an impact on upselling effectiveness in the car rental service industry, where upselling is a key performance metric for customer development. Our empirical strategy employs a series of simple empirical tests based on measures of engagement constructed using various sub-groups of employees and questions. The main results demonstr...

In this paper, we describe a hybrid recommendation system combining the two main approaches to recommendation collaborative filtering and content-based classification. We build a collaborative filtering framework to construct a useritem matrix of ratings and produce recommendations based on user-user similarity computed using Pearson correlation. We tackle the sparsity of the user-item matrix b...

Non-functional requirements (NFRs), sometimes termed quality, or quality of service, attributes or requirements, have been a topic of interest within systems engineering, software engineering, and requirements engineering for a considerable period of time. NFRs have been for too long overlooked during the development of software systems. This has led to numerous cases of failure resulting in ov...

In the 1980s, the Thai government tried to legalize squatters living in certain geographical areas by issuing special titles that allowed for cultivation but restricted the sale and rental of the land. Using data from 2,874 farming households collected in 1997 and a differences-in-differences empirical strategy, we compare the differential rental rates between secured and unsecured plots in ref...