BACKGROUND Biologic agents have revolutionized the management of psoriasis but at a higher cost compared with "traditional" agents. Cost must be considered when evaluating management options for psoriasis. OBJECTIVE To estimate the annual cost of treatment of psoriasis using biologic agents and assess the trend over the past decade. METHODS The cost of annual treatment paradigms for etanerc...

A major requirement of today’s online shops is the availability of competent virtual sales agents that guide the customers through the vast space of available products, services, and other opportunities. This function is mostly implemented by search agents that should help customers to find relevant product information. While these search functions are considered quite important by the online s...

One key requirement for effective supply chain management is the quality of its inventory management. Various inventory management methods are typically employed for different types of products based on their demand patterns, product attributes, and supply network. In this paper, our goal is to develop robust demand prediction methods for weather sensitive products at retail stores. We employ h...

The after–sales activities are nowadays acknowledged as a relevant source of revenue, profit and competitive advantage in most manufacturing industries. Top and middle management, therefore, should focus on the definition of a structured business performance measurement system for the after-sales business. The paper aims at filling this gap, and presents an integrated methodology for the after-...

Information about prospective customers (prospects) is an important input into the sales process. Specialized online sites know as infomediaries provide organizations with the opportunity to purchase prospect information directly. In this research, we examine the role of firms’ resources in driving both the investment in prospect information and the sales resulting from these investments. Speci...

Business development and marketing are two important business functions. Business development is a concept that relates closely to strategy and is part of the business model. It is the function of growing a business through a range of activities from mergers and acquisitions, financial and performance management, and their associated revenue and profit streams. Business development includes mar...

The authors investigated the influence of goal orientation on sales performance in a longitudinal field study with salespeople. As hypothesized, a learning goal orientation had a positive relationship with sales performance. This relationship was fully mediated by 3 self-regulation tactics: goal setting, effort, and planning. In contrast, a performance goal orientation was unrelated to sales pe...

RFID has been regarded as a time and money-saving solution for a wide variety of applications, such as manufacturing, supply chain management, and inventory control, etc. However, there are some security problems on RFID in the product managements. The most concerned issues are the tracking and the location privacy. Numerous scholars tried to solve these problems, but their proposals do not inc...

A generalized envelope theorem is established for a Bayesian dynamic program problem. An application of the theorem is given in a Bayesian inventory management problem with unobserved lost sales. Specifically, we show that the optimal inventory level with unobserved lost sales is greater than the optimal inventory level with observed lost sales. We prove this result under the continuous demand ...

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