Online advertising has become increasingly popular among SMEs in service industries, and thousands of service advertisements are published on the Internet every day. However, there is a huge barrier between service-provider-oriented service information publishing and service-customer-oriented service information discovery, which causes that service consumers hardly retrieve the published servic...

The Great Lakes Geographer, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2001 41 Prior to the 1990s, Union Township, located near the geographic center of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (Figure 1), was experiencing predictable, if unspectacular growth. That began to change when several championship golf courses opened, along with the Soaring Eagle Casino. New service industries such as restaurants, hotels, and gas stations open...

We analyze investment incentives and market structure under oligopoly competition in service industries with congestion effects. We consider situations where firms compete by simultaneously choosing prices and investments; increasing investment reduces the congestion disutility experienced by consumers. We define a notion of returns to investment, according to which congestion models inspired b...

This paper presents the results of our empirical research in measuring the size and structure of the US information economy in 1992 and 1997, and in assessing the growth experienced by different industries and sectors since Porat’s research on the US information economy in 1967. The study indicates that the share of the information economy in total GNP grew from about 46 percent in 1967 to abou...

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions have been serving as the basis for collaborative product definition, manufacturing, and service management in many industries. They capture and provide access to product and process information and preserve integrity of information throughout the lifecycle of a product. Efficient growth in the role of Building Information Modeling (BIM) can benefit v...

Competition in the service industry is intense. To deliver value-added services, more companies are focusing on consumers as a powerful means of establishing firm performance through dialog, participation, and engagement. However, scant research has been conducted to examine whether customer value co-creation can boost brand equity, particularly among SMEs. To address these shortcomings in the ...

FMEA was formally introduced in the late 1940s for military usage by the US Armed Forces. Later, it was used for aerospace/rocket development to avoid errors in small sample sizes of costly rocket technology. FMEA enables the team to design those failures out of the system with the minimum of effort and resource expenditure, thereby reducing development time and costs. It is widely used in manu...

In the UK, there are more than 9,000 reports of adverse events involving medical devices annually. The regulatory processes in Europe and in the US have been challenged as to their ability to protect patients effectively from unreasonable risk and harm. Two of the major shortcomings of current practice include the lack of transparency in the safety certification process and the lack of involvem...

The purpose of this study was to establish the validity and reliability of a hydrostatic weighing method using total lung capacity (measuring vital capacity with a respirometer at the time of weighing) the prone position, and a small oblong tank. The validity of the method was established by comparing the TLC prone (tank) method against three hydrostatic weighing methods administered in a pool....