companies strive to improve market share, grow corporate profit, and gain strategic advantage. in order to achieve these goals, supply chain competency must be placed at the heart of a company’s business model. using e-commerce and information and communication technologies (ict) in today’s changing demands of business has made organizations more responsive and flexible. e-commerce and internet...

Sentiment in annual reports is recognized as being an important determinant of future financial performance. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the sentiment on future financial distress. We evaluated the sentiment in the annual reports of U.S. companies using word categorization (rule-based) approach. We used six categories of sentiment, together with financial indicators, as th...

Regarding to rapidly changing and highly competitive business environment it will become increasingly important for organizations to measure their performances appropriately. With respect to special characteristics of pharmaceutical industry and lack of reported performance measurement, this study tries to design an integrated performance measurement model for pharmaceutical companies. For gene...

Organizations have invested and continue to invest considerable resources in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Much of this investment is made on the basis of guarantee than an expected return will occur. This study presents the results of an empirical study of the impact of ICT investment on performance at the South African Post office (SAPO). Six years of historical data, from 2...

To actuaries and other financial professionals, risk adjustment means charging a premium or paying capitation in proportion to the expected costs of an individual or group. Most of the articles herein research exactly that topic. A few have a different view. Concerned with quality or performance indicators, they adjust for the variation in expected outcomes based on the variation in covered gro...

PURPOSE The efficacy of rewarding physicians financially for preventive services is unproven. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of a physician pay-for-performance program similar to the Medicare Physician Quality Reporting Initiative program on quality of preventive care in a network of community health centers. METHODS A retrospective review of administrative data was do...

In this paper we have two goals: first, we want to represent monthly stock market fluctuations by constructing a non-linear coincident financial indicator. The indicator is constructed as an unobservable factor whose first moment and conditional volatility are driven by a two-state Markov variable. It can be interpreted as the investors’ real-time belief about the state of financial conditions....