This paper employs sample path arguments to derive the following convexity properties and comparative statics for an M/M/S queue with impatient customers. If the rate at which customers balk and renege is an increasing, concave function of the number of customers in the system (head-count), then the head-count process and the expected rate of lost sales are decreasing and convex in the capacity...

For the purpose of developing a national system for outbreak surveillance, local outbreak signals were compared in three sources of syndromic data--telephone triage of acute gastroenteritis, web queries about symptoms of gastrointestinal illness, and over-the-counter (OTC) pharmacy sales of antidiarrhoeal medication. The data sources were compared against nine known waterborne and foodborne out...

Central in this paper is the question what choices customers make for specific channels (physical channel, mobile or Internet) in an eCommerce transaction processes and by what variables their choice is influenced. We are especially interested in the use of channels to collect specific information, initiate transactions, conclude actual fulfilment and offer after sales services. We argue that c...

F often have to make their production decisions under conditions of demand uncertainty. This is especially true for product categories such as automobiles and technology goods where the lead time needed for manufacturing forces firms to make production decisions well in advance of the selling season. Once the firm has produced the goods, the available production volume affects the firm’s subseq...

Recent work has shown that search query volume correlates well with a variety of phenomena, from influenza caseloads to economic indicators like real-estate prices, auto sales, and travel statistics. In this paper, we investigate the degree to which search behavior predicts the commercial success of cultural products, namely movies, video games, and songs. In contrast with previous work that ha...

Recent work has demonstrated that Web search volume can "predict the present," meaning that it can be used to accurately track outcomes such as unemployment levels, auto and home sales, and disease prevalence in near real time. Here we show that what consumers are searching for online can also predict their collective future behavior days or even weeks in advance. Specifically we use search que...

Recently digital items (e.g., avatars) have been widely used by people in virtual communities (VC) and online games. Some Internet companies generate revenue from sales of digital items to their customers. Sales of digital items provide revenue for Internet companies and VC providers who are suffering from lack of a profitable business model. However there is a lack of understanding about peopl...

We carried out a survey of the adjourned sales rate of the Japanese home video games from famitsu, a major weekly magazine, in order to construct a reference index of project management. We chose Playstation®(PS), Playstation2® (PS2) and Game Boy Advance® (GBA®) as the platform and measured the fraction of the titles which were postponed for sale once or more times. The results are as follows: ...

Recommender systems have emerged as a new weapon to help online firms to realize many of their strategic goals (e.g., to improve sales, revenue, customer experience etc.). However, many existing techniques commonly approach these goals by seeking to recover preference (e.g., estimating ratings) in a matrix completion framework. This paper aims to bridge this significant gap between the clearly-...

due to the fact that assets are recorded at their historical value and they may include unrealized gains (losses), managers may manipulate earnings through the sale of these assets and provide financial information which is not accurate and reliable. the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between income from asset sales, earnings change and leverage of companies listed on tehr...