Conventional wisdom holds that reducing disk latency leads to higher disk utilization, maximizing disk utilization leads to higher throughput, employing a faster disk leads to better performance. All of this is true when building a conventional le or database system. In this paper we show that these principles can be misleading when applied to a media server. We examine a number of techniques t...

Glossary Accounting prices Accounting or shadow prices are measures of the social opportunity cost of resource use. The accounting price of a resource is the increase in social wellbeing that would be enjoyed if a unit more of the resource was made available at no cost. Ecological functions The combinations of ecosystem component and ecosystem processes that enable ecosystems to support primary...

We study the interaction between interbank competition and accounting information quality and their effects on banks’ risk-taking behavior. We identify an endogenous false-alarm cost that banks incur when forced to sell assets to meet capital requirements. We find that when the interbank competition is less intense, an improvement in the quality of accounting information encourages banks to tak...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to focus on the history of cost accounting, costing, and time and motion studies, which were initially developed for industry and private sector organisations, in libraries. At the same time, the article attempts to deal with the question of when and why the need for the evaluation of costs and the standardisation of different library work processes emerged. D...

On December 21st 2007, the Swiss Federal Parliament passed the new financing of hospital care through a DRGbased performance payment system (SwissDRG). The new financing method is due to come into force on January 1st 2012 and hospitals are now facing the challenge of adapting their cost accounting systems to support both the tariff negotiation process with health insurers and the internal stra...

In this article, activity-based costing, an approach that has proved to be an improvement over the conventional costing system in product costing, is introduced. By combining activity-based costing with standard costing, health care administrators can better plan and control the costs of health services provided while ensuring that the organization's bottom line is healthy.

Recent studies such as the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health have highlighted the need for expanding the coverage of services for HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, immunisations and other diseases. In order for policy makers to plan for these changes, they need to analyse the change in costs when interventions are 'scaled-up' to cover greater percentages of the population. Previous studies...

We develop the first algorithmic approach to compute provably good ordering policies for a multi-period, capacitated, stochastic inventory system facing stochastic non-stationary and correlated demands that evolve over time. Our approach is computationally efficient and guaranteed to produce a policy with total expected cost no more than twice that of an optimal policy. As part of our computati...

office residual expenses, the company uses a base as provided in 9904.403. For the purpose of allocating the home office IR&D and B&P costs, the company removes the data of Segment X from the base used for the allocation of its residual expenses. This practice meets the requirements of 9904.420–50(e)(2). (g) Company G has 10 segments. Segment X performs IR&D projects, the results of which benef...

When international accounting standards were renamed to become international financial reporting standards, this seemed to imply that accounting no longer needed to exist, but rather had to be reconsidered as a part of financial communication and advertising. Does traditional accountability no longer matter? Betrayed investors and globalized stakeholders would dissent. A difference of nature co...