Wal-Mart is a giant in the grocery industry and its influence is growing at a rapid pace. Despite Wal-Mart’s success with Everyday Low Pricing (EDLP), there is little to no evidence to suggest that other supermarket chains wish to follow a similar path. Why? This research addresses this question.

Ten years have passed since Wal-Mart’s public announcement about its RFID technology adoption plan in 2003. There has been a slowdown of RFID technology adoption since 2008. Many U.S. retailers do not consider adopting the RFID technology because of the uncertainty of return on investment and the lack of business cases. This paper evaluates labor productivity of RFID adopted retailers. This pap...

We explored how people learn to cope with the limited range of electric vehicles (EVs), and examined the relationship between personality traits and the amount of practice needed to achieve a maximum available range. Data from 56 participants who leased an EV in a 6-month field study were analyzed. The amount of practice needed until a participant achieved his maximum available range was assess...

We present results from a longitudinal study of 34 iPhone 3GS users, called LiveLab. LiveLab collected unprecedented usage data through an in-device, programmable logger and several structured interviews with the participants throughout the study. We have four objectives in writing this paper: (i) share the findings with the research community; (ii) provide insights guiding the design of smartp...

Previous academic research on the expansion of dominant retailers such as Wal-Mart has looked at implications for incumbent retailers, consumers, and the local community. Little is known, however, about Wal-Mart’s influence on suppliers’ performance. Manufacturers suggest Wal-Mart uses its power to squeeze their profits. In this paper we study the validity of that claim. We investigate the unde...

Third generation light sources are facilities requiring ultimate beam stability. Typically component design tries to suppress well known perturbations. During operations a crucial element of the control system is the logging of all signals that might be suited to identify unknown sources of performance degradation. As soon as correlatable data are available it is feasible to plan detailed addit...

Logging has been a common practice for monitoring and diagnosing performance issues. However, logging comes at a cost, especially for large-scale online service systems. First, the overhead incurred by intensive logging is non-negligible. Second, it is costly to diagnose a performance issue if there are a tremendous amount of redundant logs. Therefore, we believe that it is important to limit t...

Reliable and highly performant handling of large data stores constitutes one of the major challenges of cloud computing. In this paper, we propose a formalisation of a cloud solution implemented by F-Secure – a provider of secure data storage services. The solution is based on massive replication and the write-ahead logging mechanism. To achieve high performance, the company has abandoned a tra...

Logging has been a common practice for monitoring and diagnosing performance issues. However, logging comes at a cost, especially for large-scale online service systems. First, the overhead incurred by intensive logging is non-negligible. Second, it is costly to diagnose a performance issue if there are a tremendous amount of redundant logs. Therefore, we believe that it is important to limit t...