This paper introduces xTrust, a general purpose security framework that supports a wide range of applications and security mechanisms in a way that makes trust highly visible. It provides basic services for identifying paths between peers that are trusted for specific purposes, and for utilizing those paths for the trustworthy exchange of information. The design of the system is based on four g...

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis and econometric methods to evaluate the efficiency of Turkish secondary education. It identifies scale diseconomies and relates them to the underlying structural characteristics of the system. Some ideas on improving performance are offered. The role of heterogeneity and centralization is highlighted. Heterogeneity is modeled as an undesirable measure. ...

Due to the recent economic woes, information systems (IS) departments are under enormous pressure to cut costs while maintaining productivity in software development projects. Improving software project productivity has become a critical issue for every organization especially under the current economy uncertainty. Previous studies focus mainly on the efficiency of the traditional SAD process a...

The state of service management practice and the developments in ICT-efficiency research prompt the call for managerial relevance, normative theory building and the conceptualization and measurement of the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on service process efficiency. Drawing on theoretical insights from economic and behavioral literature, this article deduces a model o...

The paper proposes a two-level scheduling structure based on time aggregation. The main purposes of the upper-level are to help the decision maker in the choice of managerial decisions and to optimally distribute production over time. The main objective of the lower level is to implement the upper-level decisions as efficiently as possible. The study validates the feasibility and efficiency of ...

Conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods assume that input and output variables are continuous. However, in many real managerial cases, some inputs and/or outputs can only take integer values. Simply rounding the performance targets to the nearest integers can lead to misleading solutions and efficiency evaluation. Addressing this kind of integer-valued data, the current paper propo...

background: one way to improve the performance of hospitals, the largest resource-consuming units in the healthcare sector, is to continuously evaluate their performance.objective: the current study assessed the performance of hospitals affiliated with the kurdistan university of medical sciences using data envelopment analysis (dea).methods: this retrospective descriptive-analytic study used d...

The overall aim of this study was to analyze what drives and restrains efficient dairy production, based on data from dairy farms in Sweden. Key back ground factors of the study was that Swedish farms are getting larger and fewer, the Mid Term Review which changes the market situation and the evidence from several international studies that dairy farms can become more efficient than they are. T...