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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Implementation Of Slowly Changing Dimension To Data Warehouse To Manage Marketing Campaigns In Banks, Lihui Wang, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong May 2013

Implementation Of Slowly Changing Dimension To Data Warehouse To Manage Marketing Campaigns In Banks, Lihui Wang, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Management of updating and recording campaign leads in data warehouse of any banking environment is complex especially with multiple campaigns are active simultaneously. As a way to avoid overly contacting customers for sales-based marketing contacts, the concept of Recency Frame is introduced to “lock” the customers who are targeted in Sales-based campaign for a specified time period. During this Recency Frame, the customer cannot be targeted by other Sales-based campaign under the same channel. This approach increased the difficulties of managing the customers’ data with proper data updating and storing and procedures have to be placed and made sufficiently robust …


Tesla: An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Milind Tambe May 2013

Tesla: An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative application paper presents TESLA, an agent-based application for optimizing the energy use in commercial buildings. TESLA’s key insight is that adding flexibility to event/meeting schedules can lead to significant energy savings. TESLA provides three key contributions: (i) three online scheduling algorithms that consider flexibility of people’s preferences for energyefficient scheduling of incrementally/dynamically arriving meetings and events; (ii) an algorithm to effectively identify key meetings that lead to significant energy savings by adjusting their flexibility; and (iii) surveys of real users that indicate that TESLA’s assumptions exist in practice. TESLA was evaluated on data of over 110,000 meetings held …


Demand Forecasting Using A Growth Model And Negative Binomial Regression Framework, Cally Yeru Ong, Murphy Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong May 2013

Demand Forecasting Using A Growth Model And Negative Binomial Regression Framework, Cally Yeru Ong, Murphy Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we look at demand forecasting by using a growth model and negative binomial regression framework. Using cumulative sales, we model the sales data for different wristwatch brands and relate it to their sales and growth characteristics. We apply clustering to determine the distinctive characteristics of each individual cluster. Four different growth models are applied to the clusters to find the most suitable growth model to be used. After determining the appropriate growth model to be applied, we then forecast the sales by applying the model to new products being launched in the market and continue to monitor …


Core Versus Peripheral Information Technology Employees And Their Impact On Firm Performance, Ling Liu, Daniel Q. Chen, Nan Hu, Indranil Bose, Garry D. Bruton Apr 2013

Core Versus Peripheral Information Technology Employees And Their Impact On Firm Performance, Ling Liu, Daniel Q. Chen, Nan Hu, Indranil Bose, Garry D. Bruton

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scholars have widely argued, but not previously examined, that core employees with firm specific skills are critical to the firm's strategic success. This argument has led to the belief that employees whose skills are not firm specific can be readily replaced in the external market and are peripheral to the firm's strategic goals. Employing a resource based view of the firm, we find that the core information technology (IT) employees with firm specific skills are value-adding resources that aid the firm's performance whereas peripheral employees with less firm specific skills provide no value to the firm's performance. Examining the issue …


Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion Strategy For Online Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan Mar 2013

Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion Strategy For Online Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online portfolio selection has been attracting increasing attention from the data mining and machine learning communities. All existing online portfolio selection strategies focus on the first order information of a portfolio vector, though the second order information may also be beneficial to a strategy. Moreover, empirical evidence shows that relative stock prices may follow the mean reversion property, which has not been fully exploited by existing strategies. This article proposes a novel online portfolio selection strategy named Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion (CWMR). Inspired by the mean reversion principle in finance and confidence weighted online learning technique in machine learning, CWMR …


The Informavore Shopper: Analysis Of Information Foraging, System Design, And Purchasing Behavior In Online Retail Stores, Jeff Min Teck Hong Jan 2013

The Informavore Shopper: Analysis Of Information Foraging, System Design, And Purchasing Behavior In Online Retail Stores, Jeff Min Teck Hong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Global online retail sales are on the rise and are predicted to experience a double digit growth annually over the next three years. Given little marginal cost involved in adding new products and brands to their catalogues, online retailers tend to increase product and brand offerings to increase sales by selling products that could not have been sold due to space constraints in physical stores. Frank Urbanowski, Director of MIT Press, attributed the 12% increase in sales of backlist titles directly to increased accessibility to these titles through the Internet. For consumers, the ability to buy products that they would …


Automated Parameter Tuning Framework For Heterogeneous And Large Instances: Case Study In Quadratic Assignment Problem, Linda Lindawati, Zhi Yuan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Feida Zhu Jan 2013

Automated Parameter Tuning Framework For Heterogeneous And Large Instances: Case Study In Quadratic Assignment Problem, Linda Lindawati, Zhi Yuan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper is concerned with automated tuning of parameters of algorithms to handle heterogeneous and large instances. We propose an automated parameter tuning framework with the capability to provide instance-specific parameter configurations. We report preliminary results on the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) and show that our framework provides a significant improvement on solutions qualities with much smaller tuning computational time.


Analyzing The Impact Of Cloud Services Brokers On Cloud Computing Markets, Richard D. Shang, Jianhui Huang, Yinping Yang, Robert J. Kauffman Jan 2013

Analyzing The Impact Of Cloud Services Brokers On Cloud Computing Markets, Richard D. Shang, Jianhui Huang, Yinping Yang, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research offers a theoretical model of brokered services and provides an analysis of their impact on the cloud computing market with risk preference-based stratification of client segments. The model structures the decision problem that clients face when they choose among spot, reserved and brokered services. Although all the three types of services do not indemnify the cloud services client against other kinds of service outages, due to changes in market demand, service interruptions occur most frequently in the spot market, and are lower when brokered services are offered, and no risk of inter-ruption is involved in reserved services. Based …


Regret Based Robust Solutions For Uncertain Markov Decision Processes, Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet Jan 2013

Regret Based Robust Solutions For Uncertain Markov Decision Processes, Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we seek robust policies for uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Most robust optimization approaches for these problems have focussed on the computation of maximin policies which maximize the value corresponding to the worst realization of the uncertainty. Recent work has proposed minimax regret as a suitable alternative to the maximin objective for robust optimization. However, existing algorithms for handling minimax regret are restricted to models with uncertainty over rewards only. We provide algorithms that employ sampling to improve across multiple dimensions: (a) Handle uncertainties over both transition and reward models; (b) Dependence of model uncertainties across state, …


The Pricing Model Of Cloud Computing Services, Jianhui Huang, Dan Ma Jan 2013

The Pricing Model Of Cloud Computing Services, Jianhui Huang, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing service providers offer computing resource as a utility and software as a service over network. Many believe that Cloud computing is making an industry-wise paradigm shift for IT use. Besides its technique issues, the business feature of Cloud computing attracts our interests. Specifically the practice of Amazon EC2 introduces an interesting pricing scheme. Amazon provides users with virtual computing instances as a combination of interruptible service (i.e., spot instance) and uninterruptible service (i.e., on-demand and reserved instance). Spot instance is charged at a per use price which is dynamically changing over time; users of spot instance face the …


Uncertain Congestion Games With Assorted Human Agent Populations , Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng Jan 2013

Uncertain Congestion Games With Assorted Human Agent Populations , Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Congestion games model a wide variety of real-world resource congestion problems, such as selfish network routing, traffic route guidance in congested areas, taxi fleet optimization and crowd movement in busy areas. However, existing research in congestion games assumes: (a) deterministic movement of agents between resources; and (b) perfect rationality (i.e. maximizing their own expected value) of all agents. Such assumptions are not reasonable in dynamic domains where decision support has to be provided to humans. For instance, in optimizing the performance of a taxi fleet serving a city, movement of taxis can be involuntary or nondeterministic (decided by the specific …


Decision Support For Assorted Populations In Uncertain And Congested Environments, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng Jan 2013

Decision Support For Assorted Populations In Uncertain And Congested Environments, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research is motivated by large scale problems in urban transportation and labor mobility where there is congestion for resources and uncertainty in movement. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly interact with other agents, they effect other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed deterministic movements of agents. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents that are identical and have involuntary movements in dynamic environments. For instance, in a taxi fleet serving a city, …


Technology Investment Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: The Case Of Mobile Payment Systems, Robert J. Kauffman, Jun Liu, Dan Ma Jan 2013

Technology Investment Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: The Case Of Mobile Payment Systems, Robert J. Kauffman, Jun Liu, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent launch of Google Wallet has brought the issue of technology solutions in mobile payments (m-payments) to the forefront. In deciding whether and when to adopt m-payments, senior managers in banks are concerned about uncertainties regarding future market conditions, technology standards, and consumer and merchant responses, especially their willingness to adopt. This study applies economic theory and modeling for decision-making under uncertainty to bank investments in m-payment systems technology. We assess the projected benefits and costs of investment as a continuous-time stochastic process to determine optimal investment timing. We find that the value of waiting to adopt jumps when …


How Strong Are The Effects Of Technological Disruption? Smartphones' Impacts On Internet And Cable Tv Services Consumption, M. R. Chang, Robert J. Kauffman, K.S. Kim Jan 2013

How Strong Are The Effects Of Technological Disruption? Smartphones' Impacts On Internet And Cable Tv Services Consumption, M. R. Chang, Robert J. Kauffman, K.S. Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emerging technologies have created disruptions in organizational, business process and industry contexts. They act as shocks to a system. We focus on a retail telecom service provider’s offerings of different bun-dles, including mobile phones, Internet and cable TV services. We conduct empirical regularities analysis for Singapore, which was affected by the emergence of smartphones in 2009. We assess the impacts on the service bundle choices of a provider’s customers. We analyze customer switching among service bundles involving three services. We compute switching proba-bilities for each of the service levels offered, as well as between bundles. We use Markov chain transition …


Dynamic Two-Sided Pricing Under Sequential Innovation, Mei Lin, Xiajun Pan Jan 2013

Dynamic Two-Sided Pricing Under Sequential Innovation, Mei Lin, Xiajun Pan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many two-sided platforms offer innovative hardware products that improve in quality and enter the market sequentially. We analyze the impact of the decrease in the production cost on a monopoly platform owner's dynamic two-sided pricing problem, in which buyers are strategic and exert a cross-side network effect to the seller side. Our findings show that a greater decrease in cost raises the optimal price of the low-quality product and allocates more buyer-side demand to the future market. Furthermore, such decrease in cost may also lead to a higher optimal price for the future higher-quality product, given a sufficiently significant quality …


Valuation Of Participation In Social Gaming, Kwansoo Kim, Byungjoon Yoo, Robert J. Kauffman Jan 2013

Valuation Of Participation In Social Gaming, Kwansoo Kim, Byungjoon Yoo, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study examines the value of the time that a user spends to participate in a social game. We focus on how a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) vendor can establish prices to encourage participation and retain its players. We estimate value through an application of the hedonic pricing model and analyze a data set for an MMORPG in Korea. The results permit us to estimate the value of game-playing time in monetary terms. Based on our empirical results, we propose an economic model and conduct numerical simulation to show how a game vendor can apply differential pricing in …


Firm Strategy And The Internet In U.S. Commercial Banking, K. H. Goh, Robert J. Kauffman Jan 2013

Firm Strategy And The Internet In U.S. Commercial Banking, K. H. Goh, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As information technology (IT) becomes more accessible, sustaining any competitive advantage from it becomes challenging. This has caused some critics to dismiss IT as a less valuable resource. We argue that, in addition to being able to generate strategic advantage, IT should also be viewed as a strategic necessity that prevents competitive disadvantage in rapidly changing business environments. We test a set of hypotheses on strategic advantage and strategic necessity in the context of Internet banking investments among the entire population of the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) banks from 2003 to 2005. We seek to understand whether …


Seller Diversity On A Technology-Based Platform, Ruhai Wu, Mei Lin Jan 2013

Seller Diversity On A Technology-Based Platform, Ruhai Wu, Mei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Managing a technology portfolio is one of the great challenges for sustained success, especially in high-technology industrieswhere technologies can be a major selling point. For engineers, this portfolio is more of a toolbox for solving design problems,but in large organizations there can be so many technologies used in different business areas that even the engineers may not beaware of all of them. When the same technologies are used in different types of products, knowledge about them can also begenerated by various groups within an organization. To improve the usefulness of a company's technology base, this paperproposes the use of a …


Not All That Glitters Is Gold: The Effect Of Attention And Blogs On The Investors' Investing Behaviors, Nan Hu, Yi Dong, Ling Liu, Lee J. Yao Jan 2013

Not All That Glitters Is Gold: The Effect Of Attention And Blogs On The Investors' Investing Behaviors, Nan Hu, Yi Dong, Ling Liu, Lee J. Yao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article investigates the relationship between a firm’s visibility in blogspaces, termed blog exposure, and the cross-sectional stock returns. We show that blog exposure is fundamentally different from the traditional media coverage, and securities with low blog exposure earn higher returns than stocks with high blog exposure. We further illustrate that such an effect is more prominent for stocks with low institutional ownership. Contrary to traditional media coverage, the return premium associated with blog exposure cannot be explained by either the illiquidity hypothesis or the investor recognition hypothesis based on the rational-agent framework. Instead, our results suggest that blog effect …