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Full-Text Articles in Business

Managerial Assessments Of E-Business Investment Opportunities: A Field Study, Anandhi S. Bharadwaj, Amrit Tiwana Oct 2005

Managerial Assessments Of E-Business Investment Opportunities: A Field Study, Anandhi S. Bharadwaj, Amrit Tiwana

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Managers charged with assessing investment opportunities for information technologies such as e-business projects face considerable uncertainty in their decision-making processes. Contemporary theories of the firm and the normative prescriptions thereof emphasize the potential for such investments to augment firm-level knowledge and relational capabilities. However, prior research has not examined the relative emphases that managers place on the knowledge and relational capability-augmenting characteristics of the e-business investments. In this paper, we develop a model to assess whether managerial evaluations of e-business investment opportunities are consistent with these normative and theoretical prescriptions. A test of the model using survey data on 485 …


Towards Semantic Service Request Of Web Service Composition, Qianhui Althea Liang, Jen-Yao Chung, Steven M. Miller Oct 2005

Towards Semantic Service Request Of Web Service Composition, Qianhui Althea Liang, Jen-Yao Chung, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When meeting the challenges in automatic and semi-automatic Web service composition, capturing the user's service demand and preferences is as important as knowing what the services can do. This paper discusses the idea of semantic service requests for composite services, and presents a way to model the elements of a composite service request as user preferences and constraints. The model is based on an interactive and iterative strategy meant to obtain the exact requirements from potential service consumers. The markup vocabularies and associated inference mechanism of OWL-S are used as a means to bring semantics to service requests. Language constructs …


Evaluation Of Time-Varying Availability In Multi-Echelon Inventory System With Combat Damage, Hoong Chuin Lau, Huawei Song Aug 2005

Evaluation Of Time-Varying Availability In Multi-Echelon Inventory System With Combat Damage, Hoong Chuin Lau, Huawei Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The models for multi-echelon inventory systems in existing literatures predominantly address failures due to reliability in peacetime. In wartime or even peacetime operational scenarios, unexpected combat damage can cause a large number of systems to be heavily damaged, to the extent that they become irreparable. In this paper, we study a multi-echelon spare parts support system under combat damage, discuss the replenishment policy and propose an approximate method to evaluate the time-varying system performance operational availability considering the effect of passivation. Experiments show our model works well and efficiently against simulation.


Exploiting Belief Bounds: Practical Pomdps For Personal Assistant Agents, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Milind Tambe Jul 2005

Exploiting Belief Bounds: Practical Pomdps For Personal Assistant Agents, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Agents or agent teams deployed to assist humans often face the challenges of monitoring the state of key processes in their environment (including the state of their human users themselves) and making periodic decisions based on such monitoring. POMDPs appear well suited to enable agents to address these challenges, given the uncertain environment and cost of actions, but optimal policy generation for POMDPs is computationally expensive. This paper introduces three key techniques to speedup POMDP policy generation that exploit the notion of progress or dynamics in personal assistant domains. Policy computation is restricted to the belief space polytope that remains …


How Much You Watch, How Much You Pay, Yongdong Wu, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng Jul 2005

How Much You Watch, How Much You Pay, Yongdong Wu, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a pay-video scheme that manages video stream, key stream and payment stream efficiently. In our scheme, the owner segments a video into fragments and encrypts them with independent keys. The keys are generated with a novel concept called as hash interval, where each hash interval discloses a range of numbers without disclosing any information on numbers outside of the range. The video fragments are then broadcast on one or more channels. A buyer can purchase the keys to decrypt any fragments and, within each fragment, any desired quality level. The accompanying payment protocol is integrated with the …


Strategic Assessment Of Information Security Maturity, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu, Dayasindhu Nagarajan, Raghavan Subramanian Jul 2005

Strategic Assessment Of Information Security Maturity, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu, Dayasindhu Nagarajan, Raghavan Subramanian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

CXOs are becoming increasingly interested in the information security maturity of their enterprises. This paper presents a CXO dashboard that will allow better management of the information security resources in an enterprise.


Leveraging Global Resources: A Distributed Process Maturity Framework For Software Product Development, Narayan Ramasubbu, M. S. Krishnan, Prasad Kompalli May 2005

Leveraging Global Resources: A Distributed Process Maturity Framework For Software Product Development, Narayan Ramasubbu, M. S. Krishnan, Prasad Kompalli

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed software development is pervasive in the software industry today as companies vie to leverage global resources. However, popular quality and process frameworks don?t specifically address the key processes needed for managing distributed software development. This practitioner-oriented, evolutionary process maturity framework for globally distributed software development features 24 new key process areas essential for managing distributed software product development and for continuously improving product management capabilities. An assessment survey helps practitioners implement the framework. In this article, the authors detail the framework and assessment survey, as well as report their experiences implementing the framework at a leading global firm. The …


Walverine: A Walrasian Trading Agent, Shih-Fen Cheng, Evan Leung, Kevin M. Lochner, Kevin O'Malley, Daniel M. Reeves, Julian L. Schvartzman, Michael P. Wellman Apr 2005

Walverine: A Walrasian Trading Agent, Shih-Fen Cheng, Evan Leung, Kevin M. Lochner, Kevin O'Malley, Daniel M. Reeves, Julian L. Schvartzman, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

TAC-02 was the third in a series of Trading Agent Competition events fostering research in automating trading strategies by showcasing alternate approaches in an open-invitation market game. TAC presents a challenging travel-shopping scenario where agents must satisfy client preferences for complementary and substitutable goods by interacting through a variety of market types. Michigan's entry, Walverine, bases its decisions on a competitive (Walrasian) analysis of the TAC travel economy. Using this Walrasian model, we construct a decision-theoretic formulation of the optimal bidding problem, which Walverine solves in each round of bidding for each good. Walverine's optimal bidding approach, as well as …


Technology Competition And Optimal Investment Timing: A Real Options Perspective, Robert J. Kauffman, X. Li Jan 2005

Technology Competition And Optimal Investment Timing: A Real Options Perspective, Robert J. Kauffman, X. Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Companies often choose to defer irreversible investments to maintain valuable managerial flexibility in an uncertain world. For some technology-intensive projects, technology uncertainty plays a dominant role in affecting investment timing. This article analyzes the investment timing strategy for a firm that is deciding about whether to adopt one or the other of two incompatible and competing technologies.We develop a continuous-time stochastic model that aids in the determination of optimal timing for managerial adoption within the framework of real options theory. The model captures the elements of the decision-making process in such a way so as to provide managerial guidance in …


Partnering For Perfection: An Economics Perspective On B2b Electronic Market Strategic Alliances, Qizhi Dai, Robert J. Kauffman Jan 2005

Partnering For Perfection: An Economics Perspective On B2b Electronic Market Strategic Alliances, Qizhi Dai, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

New technological innovations have made it possible for new intermediaries to create value in business processes that involve the procurement of manufacturing and services supplies. Associated with these innovations is the emergence of business-to-business (B2B) electronic markets. These act as digital intermediaries that aim to reduce the transaction costs and mitigate the risks inherent in procurement. They improve buyers’ capabilities to search for attractive prices and also serve to increase the liquidity of sellers’ products. In this chapter, the authors explore the evolution of B2B e-market firms in terms of the strategies they employ to “perfect” their value propositions and …


A Multi-Agent Approach For Solving Optimization Problems Involving Expensive Resources, Hoong Chuin Lau, H. Wang Jan 2005

A Multi-Agent Approach For Solving Optimization Problems Involving Expensive Resources, Hoong Chuin Lau, H. Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a multi-agent approach for solving a class of optimization problems involving expensive resources, where monolithic local search schemes perform miserably. More specifically, we study the class of bin-packing problems. Under our proposed Fine-Grained Agent System scheme, rational agents work both collaboratively and selfishly based on local search and mimic physics-motivated systems. We apply our approach to a generalization of bin-packing - the Inventory Routing Problem with Time Windows - which is an important logistics problem, and demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.


Robust Temporal Constraint Networks, Hoong Chuin Lau, Thomas Ou, Melvyn Sim Jan 2005

Robust Temporal Constraint Networks, Hoong Chuin Lau, Thomas Ou, Melvyn Sim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose the Robust Temporal Constraint Network (RTCN) model for simple temporal constraint networks where activity durations are bounded by random variables. The problem is to determine whether such temporal network can be executed with failure probability less than a given 0 ≤ E ≤ 1 for each possible instantiation of the random variables, and if so. how one might find a feasible schedule with each given instantiation. The advantage of our model is that one can vary the value of ∊ to control the level of conservativeness of the solution. We present a computationally tractable and …


The Effects Of Shilling On Final Bid Prices In Online Auctions, Robert J. Kauffman, Charles A. Wood Jan 2005

The Effects Of Shilling On Final Bid Prices In Online Auctions, Robert J. Kauffman, Charles A. Wood

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An increasing number of reports of online auction fraud are of growing concern to auction operators and participants. In this research, we discuss reserve price shilling, where a bidder shills in order to avoid paying auction house fees, rather than to drive up the price of the final bid. We examine the effect that premium bids have upon the final selling price, since they are linked with reserve price shill bids. We use 10,260 eBay auctions during April 2001, and identify 919 auctions involving 322 sellers and 1583 bidders involved in concurrent auctions for the exact same item. We find …