This paper considers a world of two symmetric countries with two factors and two sectors. Outputs of the two sectors are imperfect substitutes and sectors differ in relative factor intensity. Each sector contains a continuum of heterogenous firms that produce differentiated goods within their sector. Trade is costly and there are both variable and fixed costs of exporting. The paper shows that ...

PURPOSE The authors analyzed online consumer health information related to screening tests to see how well this information meets known standards for supporting the understanding of test uncertainty. SETTING/SUBJECTS MedlinePlus documents regarding maternal serum screening (6), prostate-specific antigen testing (6), and screening mammography (6) were analyzed. METHODOLOGY The content of the...

An important aspect of e-business is the area of e-commerce. One of the most severe restraining factors for the proliferation of e-commerce, is the lack of trust between customers and sellers, consumer privacy concerns and the lack of security measures required to assure both businesses and customers that their business relationship and transactions will be carried out in privacy, correctly, an...

In this paper, we evaluate the stability of a plan solution at the task level and argue that it is important for task structure based multi-agent replanning. With a plan solution represented by a TÆMS (Task Analysis, Environment Modeling and Simulation) task structure, we define new metrics of the stability of a TÆMS solution and use it to rank and recommend plan candidates. We preliminarily ev...

One of the most important aspects of consumer health information services and programs is the emphasis on best practices. As a consumer health librarian, I am always looking for successful examples of services and programs that I can offer to the patients and families of my hospital. This book is an invaluable resource for consumer health librarians, especially those who are solo, as I am. I us...

Many organizations are adopting radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies. These technologies can provide many benefits to the organizations that use them. However, many of these RFID tags remain active after the consumers purchase them. We call these RFID tags, placed in a product for one purpose and left in the product after it has served that purpose, Residual RFIDs. Residual RFID t...

This paper explores the regulatory philosophies underlying the debates on privacy in e-commerce in the European Union and the United States. It offers a framework to grasp these differences and suggests that, in the ultimate, e-commerce players with transatlantic ambitions may need different organizations to deal with the EU and US

The likelihood of consumers to use commercial location-based services significantly depends on their perception of privacy protection by the service provider. In this paper we discuss existing privacy-enhancing architectures for LBS and argue that they are either not applicable or insufficient for services requiring continuous location queries. In order to offer such services providers often pr...

This paper surveys the recent literature on price discrimination. The focus is on three aspects of pricing decisions: the information about customers available to firms; the instruments firms can use in the design of their tariffs; and the ability of firms to commit to their pricing plans. Developments in marketing technology mean that firms often have access to more information about individua...

The current credit crunch and volatility in the financial markets is primarily blamed on two circumstances: some consumers’ misuse of mortgage credit and some mortgage lenders’ making credit available to borrowers who could hardly satisfy their credit obligations. This is an ideal time to reexamine the long-run experience concerning consumer’s use of both mortgage credit and non mortgage consum...