ISO 14143-1 specifies that a functional size measurement (FSM) method must provide measurement procedures to quantify the functional user requirements (FURs) of software. Such quantitative information, functional size, is typically used, for instance, in software estimation. One of the international standards for FSM is the COSMIC FSM method – ISO 19761– which was designed to be applied both to...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) are an important sector of the economy and in some countries constitute more than 90% of businesses (OECD, 2002). The management issues, problems and opportunities faced by SMEs are very different from those faced by large corporations, therefore the need to focus specifically on this segment. In this paper the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) defin...

This paper analyzes the effects of intra-firm bargaining on the formation of firms in an economy with imperfect capital markets and contracting constraints. In a one-sided matching equilibrium endowment inequality induces a heterogenous distribution of firm sizes allowing for firms both too small and too large in terms of efficiency. The findings connect well to empirical facts such as the miss...

The relationship between the size and the variance of firm growth rates is known to follow an approximate power-law behavior sigma(S) approximately S(-beta(S)) where S is the firm size and beta(S) approximately 0.2 is an exponent that weakly depends on S. Here, we show how a model of proportional growth, which treats firms as classes composed of various numbers of units of variable size, can ex...

The positively skewed distribution of firm sizes, with a large number of relatively small firms coexisting alongside fewer larger firms, is an enduring empirical fact in market economies. Typically, when data points conform to a Gaussian distribution, they are supposed to be the result of multiple random factors and not worthy of further investigation. A skewed distribution, on the other hand, ...

The cost of health insurance has been the primary concern of small business owners for several decades. State small group health insurance reforms, implemented in the 1990s, aimed to control the variability of health insurance premiums and to improve access to health insurance. Small group reforms only affected firms within a specific size range, and the definition of the upper size threshold f...

This empirical study of organisational e-business adoption, utilising both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, examines four major factors influencing adoption in multiple e-business process domains. Support is found for the proposition that factors influencing e-business adoption behaviour have different levels of impact across different e-business process domains. Different ...

Business cycle statistics di er widely across countries for some aggregates, especially for trade-related variables. Part of these variations relates to the size of the economies and to their distance from each other. This paper asks whether a three-country model is able to display the marked diversity of business cycle statistics observed across countries. The model is calibrated to two speci ...

Small businesses need Internet service to be competitive, and their spending on IT activities continues to grow. How can Internet Service Providers tap into this potentially lucrative market? This study attempts to identify Internet service features that are important to small businesses. Specifically, it used a survey method to explore the relationships between the importance of various featur...

Organizations need more standardization and efficiency in business process execution, which is leading them to show an increasing interest in the business process management (BPM) approach. Stakeholders and workers from different departments are collaborating to obtain better products/services as a result of the BPM projects, but do not always achieve satisfactory outcomes. BPM projects must be...