The partnership between banks and non-banks is one of the oldest and most common lateral business partnerships. While banks are looking for new markets and for cost efficient ways to implement new business models, SMEs presumably have considerable efficiency potentials within their financial processes. Some of these potentials could be realized by embedding functionality provided by banks withi...

We study environments where a production process is jointly shared by a finite group of agents. The social decision involves the determination of input contribution and output distribution. We define a competitive solution when there is decreasing-returns-to-scale which leads to a Pareto optimal outcome. Since there is a finite number of agents, the competitive solution is prone to manipulation...

One of the most widely known solar thermal applications is solar water heating. In terms of installation expenditures and energy cost over the total life of the system, solar water heating technology has proven to be cost efficient for several domestic and industrial applications. Technological practicability of these systems has long been recognized and is presently employed in commercial sect...

Iu recent years, a nurnber ofparallel algorithms have appeared for the generation ofcombinator-ial objects such as combinations, permutations, subsets, equivalence relations, etc. However, ltlauy of these algorithms are not cost-optimal, are designed for a powerful model of coutputirtion, or require a large rnemory per processor. To date, no parallel derangement generltion ulgorithrn possessing...

I study the effect of integration and information technology (IT) investment on the value derived from 118 mergers in the U.S. banking industry. I quantify integration scale on a per-merger basis and examine its effect on long-term changes to acquiring firms’ performance. I also examine the effect of ex ante integration risk on stock market reactions to merger announcements. While, in theory, m...

The rules of a number of electricity markets encourage renewable energy production and demand response through fixed support schemes and socialize the costs of integrating this production trough grid tariffs. These mechanisms are not economically efficient because they do not rely on market-based prices and do not consider the actual costs of achieving reliable system operation. This paper pres...

Network coverage is one of the fundamental requirements of any business of a service provider. Mobile operators are expected to deploy base stations in an effective way in order to cover most of the residential areas of a particular country. Improved network coverage leads to increase total revenue, provide end users with enhanced Quality of Services (QoS) anytime anywhere, and play vital role ...

Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are a largely avoidable and costly burden on public health systems. Accurate estimates of the costs of HAI are necessary to gauge the cost efficiency of alternative infection control measures, but are traditionally very difficult to compute. In particular, existing studies of the costs of HAI do not take into account the possible endogeneity bias between the r...

Abstract —A motion adaptive deinterlacing algorithm is presented in this paper. It consists of the ELA-Median directional interpolation, same-parity 4-field horizontal motion detection, morphological operation for noise reduction and adaptive threshold adjusting. The edges can be sharper when the ELA-Median directional interpolation is adopted. The same-parity 4-field horizontal motion detectio...

This chapter seeks to extend current knowledge relating to innovative methods in marketing. The authors consider the significance of SMS marketing amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) within South Africa and aim to emphasise the various advantages of SMS marketing to SMEs within emerging economies. They look at how SMS marketing has emerged within the Western world and how it could be ju...