Abstract In social networks, there exist many kinds of groups in which people may have the same interests, hobbies, or political orientation. Sometimes, group decisions are made by simply majority, means that most users this reach an agreement, such as US Presidential Elections. A is called activated if $$\beta$$ β</mml:m...

Profit maximization is difficult. Sophisticated and experienced managers often disagree about which action is most likely to maximize profits for a given firm. Economic models of profit maximization, on the other hand, are—in general—easy to solve. Well-trained economists can readily discern the action which maximizes the firm’s objective function. The global maximum is unique and achievable be...

Managing shipping vessel profitability is a central problem in marine transportation. We consider two commonly used types of vessels—“liners” (ships whose routes are fixed in advance) and “trampers” (ships for which future route components are selected based on available shipping jobs)—and formulate a vessel profit maximization problem as a stochastic dynamic program. For liner vessels, the pro...

The resource-based view on firm diversification, subsequent to Penrose (1959), has focused primarily on the fungibility of resources across domains. We make a clear analytical distinction between scale-free capabilities and those that are subject to opportunity costs and must be allocated to one use or another, thereby shifting the discourse back to Penrose’s (1959) original argument regarding ...

Business training is an essential part of business development programs (BDPs). Yet, its impact on entrepreneurs’ profits is limited. We develop a theoretical framework where limited effect of business training is due to mismatch between a BDPs’ narrow focus on business-promoting strategies and a wider context in which microfinance clients operate. We assume households have multiple sources of ...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate IT productivity in Australia. Our model incorporates profit maximization assumption and allows inefficiency. You have found IT hardware is the single factor which provides positive contribution to the productivity.

We consider the problem of link capacity dimensioning and bandwidth allocation in networks that support elastic flows and maintain proportional fairness among these flows. We assume that a certain allocated bandwidth to a user demand generates revenue for the network operator. On the other hand, the operator is incurred a capacity dependent cost for each link in the network. The operator’s prof...