This paper presents evidence on the impact of managers on cost efficiency in banking. Stochastic frontier analysis is applied to a unique Finnish data set. The paper finds that manager age and education have strong yet complicated effects. University education enhances efficiency if the manager is running a large bank. Managing director changes are systematically followed by efficiency changes....

Basic infrastructure like Power and Water production has come into focus due to the rapid growth witnessed in the Middle East. Hybrid desalination plants have high flexibility and play a vital role in water and power production. Conservation of fuel resources in the existing scenario of increasing fuel prices make it necessary to produce power and water in a cost optimal way. The challenge in o...

Word-of-Mouth plays its great important role on the base of social network in affecting consumers’ shopping behaviour. However, it is little known how firms make a self-suitable marketing strategy according to both online and offline WOM effect in their product diffusion. This article investigates a new product diffusion process taking both offline WOM and online WOM effect into consideration. ...

Airline mergers and acquisitions (MAs) are on the rise across the globe and have been a growing trend in the U.S. aviation industry in the last few years. MAs are taking several factors into consideration, such as cost efficiency, competition, and geographic coverage. For airlines, these transactions can eliminate overlapping routes and help reduce competition, leading airlines to achieve highe...

Effective traffic management in urban areas is done by adapting traffic signal times to current traffic conditions. At isolated intersections this task is usually realised by fixed time or by conventional vehicle actuated signal controllers. The fixed time signals use predefined green times, they are reliable and cost-efficient but offer no opportunity to adapt on-line. Especially with rapidly ...

In this article we report on the effort of the university library of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration to integrate a digital library component for research documents authored at the university into the existing library infrastructure. Setting up a digital library has become a relatively easy task using the current data base technology and the components and tools f...

Along with the growing need for security, an increasing amount of surveillance content is created. To enable quick and reliable searches on the output of hundreds or thousands of surveillance sensors installed at a single facility, it is indispensable to index the content in advance. For this purpose, the concept of Smart Indexing and Retrieval (SIR) enables cost efficient searches by generatin...

e-Learning has opened a multitude of possibilities for teaching and learning. As the market matures there is a demand for more effective and cost-efficient learning interventions that meet the learning needs of the diverse learner population. Currently, however, very few teaching attempts have been made to match the pedagogical styles underlying e-Learning interventions to students’ diverse lea...

Although at the moment electronic payment via the Internet has no major impact on e-commerce sites, it will be a prerequisite for new business models, such as pay-per-view, and necessary for the success and cost efficiency of future e-commerce applications. Many payment protocols and frameworks for various business domains exist. However, they are incompatible which makes it hard for service de...