Now is the time for global banks to strengthen their core. By implementing or converting to a new core banking platform, or upgrading to the latest version of their current system, financial institutions can create a simpler and more flexible IT environment, boost their efficiency and drive down total cost of ownership. New core banking systems also can add speed and responsiveness, and enhance...

The nature of the soft gamma-ray (20-200 keV) Galactic emission has been a matter of debate for a long time. Previous experiments have tried to separate the point source contribution from the real in-terstellar emission, but with a rather poor spatial resolution , they concluded that the interstellar emission could be a large fraction of the total Galactic emission. INTEGRAL, having both high r...

Since the 1990s, national green building certification indices have emerged around the globe as promising measurement tools for environmental-friendly housing. Since 2008, tools for countries in the Northern “colder” hemisphere have been adapted to tropical countries. In contrast, the Tropically Adapted Energy Performance Certificate (TEPC), established in 2012, translates the United Nations’ t...

The creation of quality e-learning material creates a cost dilemma for many institutions, since it has both high variable and high fixed costs. This cost dilemma means that economies of scale are difficult to achieve, which may result in a consequent reduction in the quality of the learning material. Based on the experience of creating a masters level course at the UK Open University, the artic...

This paper investigates the effect of using an end-of-period accounting scheme for inventory related costs when costs actually accrue in continuous time. Using a simple model, we show that (i) the end-of-period scheme results in higher than optimal order-up-to levels and inventory cost if the cost and demand parameters are unchanged, and (ii) it is possible to replicate both the optimal base st...

Competitive pressures in the custom software contracting business have driven contractors towards the use of staged contracts. The use of this business model demands accurate cost estimates, but existing cost-estimation approaches have not been tailored for this situation. Both light-weight and heavy-weight approaches are needed to support the modern, highly dynamic software business.

Jiangsu and Zhejiang are of two of China most prosperous and dynamic provinces. This paper first presents a factual account of two empirical phenomena: 1) FDI has played a more substantial role in the economic development of Jiangsu than in Zhejiang, and 2) ownership biases against domestic private firms in Jiangsu were more substantial than in Zhejiang. The paper hypothesizes that there is a c...

We study the joint delegation of operating and disclosure choices in a multiprincipal agent setting. We find that joint delegation alters both the incentives to deviate from profit– maximizing operating choices and disclosure policy adoption choices. Incentive weights on revenues are greater for the firm with greater ex ante cost uncertainty, greater expected market size and greater expected pr...

Public institutions generally consider only the features list and the price in tenders while acquiring commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) software products. Yet non-functional requirements of software often dominate them in terms of cost-benefit analysis and total cost of ownership (TCO). In this paper, we emphasize the non-functional requirements that need to be included in the technical scoring/e...

It is noticeable that the evaluation of computer software is often dominated by the license cost and the number of functionality boxes that can be ticked. This tends to disadvantage more intelligent software, which whilst it may perform the same functions, does so in a smarter way that will tend to provide a greater capability, robustness, and speed of operation, together with a lower total cos...