We estimate a Bayesian learning model in order to assess the value of health plan performance information and the extent to which the explicit provision of information about product quality alters consumer behavior. We make use of a source of variation in which health plan performance information for HMOs was released to employees of a Fortune 50 company for the first time. Our empirical work i...

Diagnostic tasks require determining the differences between a model of an artifact and the artifact itself. The differences between the manifested behavior of the artifact and the predicted behavior of the model guide the search for the differences between the artifact and its model. The diagnostic procedure presented in this paper is model-based, inferring the behavior of the composite device...

Skyline operation is typical multicriteria decision making well documented in data engineering. The assumption of skyline operation is settled human preference, which may be subject to huge challenges in practical decision-making applications because it simplifies preference scenarios that are usually dynamic. This study establishes the mathematical formulation of dynamic preference in real set...

Software architecture visualization tools tend to support browsing, that is, exploration by following concepts. If architectural diagrams are to be used during daily software maintenance tasks, these tools also need to support specific fact-finding through searching. Searching is essential to program comprehension and hypothesis testing. Furthermore, searching allows users to reverse the abstra...

The most obvious considerations that affect an organization's choice of security technologies are the threats the organization considers significant and the costeffectiveness of various security technologies against those threats. In practice, however, the choice is also strongly driven by less tangible, more nontechnical, considerations such as ease of implementation and maintenance, fit with ...

Ontologies capture consensual knowledge of a specific domain in a generic and formal way, to allow reusing and sharing it among groups of people. However, there is not a unique possible ontology to model for a particular domain. For example, in the case of the software maintenance domain there are several published ontologies (Kitchenham et al., 2001), (Deridder, 2002), (Dias et al., 2003), (Ru...