This paper employs sample path arguments to derive the following convexity properties and comparative statics for an M/M/S queue with impatient customers. If the rate at which customers balk and renege is an increasing, concave function of the number of customers in the system (head-count), then the head-count process and the expected rate of lost sales are decreasing and convex in the capacity...

of an organization. A leading computer industry information service firm indicated that it “expects most business process reengineering initiatives to fail through lack of attention to data quality.” An industry executive report noted that more than 60% of surveyed firms (500 medium-size corporations with annual sales of more than $20 million) had problems with data quality. The Wall Street Jou...

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and resource sales. We analyze these policies in an empirical model of US Forest Service timber auctions. The model fits the data well both within the sample of unrestricted sales used for estimation, and when we predict (out-of-sample) outcomes for small business set-asides. Our estimates suggest that restricting entry sub...

In the world of Internet, users always expects the services, provided by the service providers must be easy to access. When online users need to retrieve information while doing online sales, then the ease of use depends on the frequency of the items that are available in the product recommendations. To achieve this, the crawlers are used to retrieve and download the required information from t...

This article provides a look at business concentration for sales and assets for the period 1967 to 2002 based on Theil’s entropy, a measure adopted by several authors in earlier publications. For contrast, three other well-known measures of concentration, the HirschmanHerfindahl (HHI) index and the 4-firm and 8-firm concentration ratios, CR4 and CR8, were utilized. Data used were sales and asse...

• Managing the quality of the customer interaction is no small task. The bank is one of the first financial services institutions (FSIs) that committed itself to a CRM strategy that would give equal emphasis to service and sales. For Royal Bank this means providing customer contact personnel with the information that allows for appropriate decision making. In this case, the bank seeks to ensure...

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of an organization. A leading computer industry information service firm indicated that it “expects most business process reengineering initiatives to fail through lack of attention to data quality.” An industry executive report noted that more than 60% of surveyed firms (500 medium-size corporations with annual sales of more than $20 million) had problems with data quality. The Wall Street Jou...

We present a protocol for unlinkable serial transactions suitable for a variety of network-based subscription services. The protocol prevents the service from tracking the behavior of its customers while protecting the service vendor from abuse due to simultaneous or \cloned" usage from a single subscription. We present variants of the protocol supporting pay-per-use transactions within a subsc...

A method is proposed for obtaining a final list of raw material requirements, which must be available in the warehouse of automotive companies that produce rubber and rubber-metal parts for manufacturing engines, gearboxes, shock absorbers, etc. This method determines the critical materials considering the historical sales records. For each critical item, a distribution model of sales is determ...