This paper presents a model incorporating endogenous firm entry (or product creation) that successfully translates positive news about the future into current expansions, and accounts for the positive comovements in output, consumption, investment and employment. The key elements are a time-variant sunk entry cost and variable capital utilization. In response to the expectation of future positi...

The primary objective of this article is to explore the feasibility of the application of cost minimization analysis in a teaching hospital environment. The investigation is concerned with the development of cost per admission and cost per patient day models. These models are further used for determining the value of the length of stay that would minimize cost per patient day (projected length ...

This paper presents an extension of a framework for synthesizing a composition of services, named Roman Model, such that it is able to model the best service composition synthesis problem. In such extension, which we call the Weighted Roman Model, the services are modeled as Weighted Transition Systems so that one can capture the cost of operations executed by a service. Within this setting, we...

Time-cost trade off problem is one of the highly important issues in project accomplishment and has been ever taken into consideration by project managers. Time and cost as two critical objectives of construction project management, are not independent but intricately related. Time-cost optimization may be defined as a process to identify suitable construction activities for speeding up, and fo...

This paper draws upon the results of a qualitative study on the procurement and adoption of open source software by public sector organizations spanning Europe, Brazil and the USA. The premise of this work was to understand the role ‘cost’ or total cost of ownership of software plays in government procurement decisions. We found, however, that this was more a rhetoric to gain acceptance for ope...

Technical support contributes 17% of the total cost of ownership of today’s desktop PCs [25]. An important element of technical support is troubleshooting misconfigured applications. Misconfiguration troubleshooting is particularly challenging, because configuration information is shared and altered by multiple applications. In this paper, we present a novel troubleshooting system: PeerPressure...

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.