Auscultation, the act of listening to the heart and lung sounds, can reveal substantial information about patients’ health and other cardiac-related problems; therefore, competent training can be a key for accurate and reliable diagnosis. Standardized patients (SPs), who are healthy individuals trained to portray real patients, have been extensively used for such training and other medical teac...

Though economic growth has improved in recent years in Nigeria, there has been no evidence of significant manufacturing exports. A critical input that enables capacity for export is investment in technology especially at the firm-level. This study investigates investment in technology by firms in Southwest Nigeria and how technology investment related factors affect the export potential of firm...

Accurate prediction of medical operation times is of crucial importance for cost efficient operation room planning in hospitals. This paper investigates the possible dependence of procedure times on surgeon factors like age, experience, gender, and team composition. The effect of these factors is estimated for over 30 different types of medical operations in two hospitals, by means of ANOVA mod...

The ability to obtain relevant information in a timely and cost efficient manner is central to the effective performance of most tasks in our society. The widespread availability of computer-based information brokers will provide that ability to large communities by significantly facilitating effective access to the broad range of information that is rapidly becoming available on the Internet. ...

It still remains unclear whether the decision to outsource IT is governed by rule of efficiency or from institutional constraints imposed by the state and the professions in order to gain legitimacy through institutional isomorphism. Our analysis is based on a unique data set that contains all first-time decisions of publicly listed German firms to engage in large-scale IT outsourcing between 1...

Water authorities around the world are faced with the problem of ageing distribution networks and often only limited historical data on which to base a sound long term, cost efficient replacement policy. The LICAN approach to whole of life costing is introduced and a hypothetical case study is used to demonstrate the importance of such an approach. A selection of pipe networks utilizing differe...

This study investigates whether the capital market values the efficiency of firms. After tracing stock returns and efficiency changes of 399 listed insurance firms in 52 countries during the 2002-2008 period, the paper reports a positive and statistically significant relationship between profit efficiency change and market adjusted stock returns. However, there is no robust evidence that cost e...

Creating and monitoring a competitive and cost-effective pay-per-click advertisement campaign through the web-search channel is a resource demanding task in terms of expertise and effort. Assisting or even automating the work of an advertising specialist will have an unrivaled commercial value. In this paper we propose a methodology, an architecture, and a fully functional prototype for semiand...

Although banking has been widely studied using standard DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) models and its variations, these models do not in fact account for the internal structure relative to measures characterizing banking operations performance. In this paper, efficiency in Brazilian banking is measured using a two-stage process. In the first stage, called cost efficiency, number of branches an...

This paper examines the current state of IT benchmarking and the problem of using conventional IT benchmarking models to benchmark Information Security environments. A framework is presented as a starting point for further development to obtain a fully-fledged, operational Information Security benchmark model. This model will determine what money companies are spending on Information Security a...