In many applications to which DEA could be applied, there is often a ®xed or common cost which is imposed on all decision making units. This would be the case, for example, for branches of a bank which can be accessed via the numerous automatic teller machines scattered throughout the country. A problem arises as to how this cost can be assigned in an equitable way to the various DMUs. In this ...

n engl j med 368;1 nejm.org january 3, 2013 6 requirement substantially burdens the religious beliefs of employers. Two courts have observed that the rule does not require employers to use contraceptives or even to approve of their use. It asks the employer only to make a benefit available, which the employee must then decide whether or not to use. Employers object, however, that they should no...

We develop and analyze a model of pricing for digital products with discontinuous supply functions. This characterizes a number of information technology-based products and services for which variable increases in demand are fulfilled by the addition of "blocks" of computing or network infrastructure. Examples include internet service, telephony, online trading, on-demand software, digital musi...

We develop and analyze a model of pricing for digital products with discontinuous supply functions. This characterizes a number of information technology-based products and services for which variable increases in demand are fulfilled by the addition of "blocks" of computing or network infrastructure. Examples include internet service, telephony, online trading, on-demand software, digital musi...

The quest to determine how cooperation evolves can be based on evolutionary game theory, in spite of the fact that evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) for most non-zero-sum games are not cooperative. We analyse the evolution of cooperation for a family of evolutionary games involving shared costs and benefits with a continuum of strategies from non-cooperation to total cooperation. This cost...

Creating shared services requires a coordinated integration of four change programs: business process redesign (BPR), organizational redesign, sourcing redesign, and technology enablement. If managed properly, shared services reduce costs, improve services, and can even generate revenues. However, surveys show that many executives fail to achieve the promised results. In this article, we presen...

Shared Messaging Communication (SMC) has been introduced in [8] as a model of communication which reduces communication costs (both in terms of communication latency and memory usage) by allowing tasks to communicate data through special shared memory regions. Sending a reference to an otherwise inaccessible memory regions rather than the data itself, the model combines the advantages of messag...

Collaboration has its benefits, but coordination has its costs. We explored the potential for remotely located pairs of people to collaborate during visual search, using shared gaze and speech. Pairs of searchers wearing eyetrackers jointly performed an O-in-Qs search task alone, or in one of three collaboration conditions: shared gaze (with one searcher seeing a gaze-cursor indicating where th...