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...

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2011.05.015 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +98 21 88021067; fax E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] This paper presents a new approach for bidding strategy in a day-ahead market from the viewpoint of a generation company (GENCO) in order to maximize its own profit as a participant in the market. It is assumed tha...

This paper investigates the decision making of firms with two different objectives – profit maximization and sales maximization, and compares their responses when encountering a higher per unit production cost or if per unit tax is imposed. The discussion in this paper is a follow up of Li and Yao [1], except in this case, a more comprehensive literature review is provided, and a very restricte...

Simulations have been conducted for two purposes, namely, (1) to validate our analytical results (Theorems 1 and 2); (2) and to find more effective queueing disciplines which increase the net profit of a service provider. In Table 1, we show our simulation results by using the same parameters in Figures 1–10. For each λ = 6.05, 6.15, ..., 6.95, we trace the behavior of an M/M/m queueing system ...

This paper examines the problem of how to design incentive-compatible mechanisms in environments in which the agents’private information evolves stochastically over time and in which decisions have to be made in each period. The environments we consider are fairly general in that the agents’ types are allowed to evolve in a non-Markov way, decisions are allowed to a¤ect the type distributions a...

Online Social Networks (OSNs) attract billions of users to share information and communicate where viral marketing has emerged as a new way to promote the sales of products. An OSN provider is often hired by an advertiser to conduct viral marketing campaigns. The OSN provider generates revenue from the commission paid by the advertiser which is determined by the spread of its product informatio...

This paper concerns with a mathematical model considering customer satisfaction requirements in a supply chain. The model tradeoffs the supply chain ability to fulfill the customers’ requirements and the limited budget in a variety of production phases. The decisions made here help to determine the profit provider price and economic quantity while the effective supplier and priori requireme...

In this paper, we present an accurate and fast algorithm for maximizing profits through buffer size optimization for production lines. We consider both buffer space cost and average inventory cost with distinct cost coefficients for different buffers, and we include a nonlinear production rate constraint. To solve the problem, a corresponding unconstrained problem is introduced and a nonlinear ...