Rival firms often cooperate horizontally in order to share risks and achieve scale advantages in production or in their research and development projects. The output of these strategic alliances is usually sold by the individual ally company under its own brand and using its own marketing mix strategies. Marketing strategies create a cumulative effect that is reflected in brand value. Although ...

A user is only anonymous within a set of other users. Hence, the core functionality of an anonymity providing technique is to establish an anonymity set. In open environments, such as the Internet, the established anonymity sets in the whole are observable and change with every anonymous communication. We use this fact of changing anonymity sets and present a model where we can determine the pr...

All voting protocols proposed so far, with the exception of a few, have the property that the privacy of the ballot is only computational. In this paper we outline a new and conceptually simple approach allowing us to construct a protocol in which the privacy of the ballot is unconditional. Our basic idea is to modify the protocol of Fujioka, Okamoto and Ohta[10], which uses blind signatures so...

mebudipine is a new dihydropyridine calcium channel blocker, synthesized in our laboratory, for treatment of hypertension. it has shown a better efficacy than other drugs in this group. for assessing the risks of this drug, certain safety tests in the preclinical stage have been performed. in this study mutagenic effect of mebudipine was evaluated using ames assay that could assess the mutageni...

The Patient Safety Consortium included a group of 26 diverse hospitals in or near California. In 2001 and 2002, many consortium hospitals were surveyed using the Patient Safety Climate in Healthcare Organizations (PSCHO) tool to present quantitative measures of hospital safety climate and qualitative reports on safety practices over 2 years. Investigators engaged in discussions with consortium ...