In the realm of counterinsurgency (COIN), the currency is intelligence. In other words— as the Counterinsurgency Field Manual succinctly puts it—intelligence drives operations. “Good” intelligence provides precision, helping the counterinsurgent eliminate insurgents from the populace “like surgeons cutting out cancerous tissue while keeping other vital organs intact.” Within this surgical effor...

Consumer behaviour at pure Internet players has been analysed thoroughly in earlier work. When it comes to retailers with multiple distribution channels, however, new behaviour patterns can be observed. Given the fact that multi-channel retailing is much more common than Internet-only, the analysis of consumer behaviour in a multi-channel context constitutes a challenge for the deeper understan...

A significant portion of the electricity network capacity is built to run only a few days a year when demand peaks. As a result, expensive power generation plants and equipment costing millions of dollars are sitting idle most of the time, which increases costs for everyone. We present randomized load control, a simple distributed approach for scheduling smart appliances. Randomized load contro...

The amount of products and services available over the Internet increases significantly and it soon becomes beyond users ability to analyze and compare them. At the same time the number of potential customers available via the Internet also increases dramatically and starts to be beyond the service providers ability to perform efficient targeted marketing. A possible way for relaxing the above-...

The paper considers the use of a Consumer Price Index (CPI) for three possible purposes: (1) as a Cost of Living Index (COLI); i.e., as a measure of the relative cost of achieving the standard of living when facing two different sets of prices for the same group of commodities; (2) as a consumption deflator; i.e., the price change component for a decomposition of a value ratio into price and qu...

In the present era of information explosion and media influence, these advertisements play a major role in changing the settled perception or thinking, which is otherwise called attitude, of the consumer and also the consumption pattern of the society in general. Across the world, celebrities have been used for a wide variety of brands. The crescendo of celebrities endorsing brands has been ste...

BACKGROUND Accurate assessment of the difficulty of consumer health texts is a prerequisite for improving readability. General purpose readability formulas based primarily on word length are not well suited for the health domain, where short technical terms may be unfamiliar to consumers. To address this need, we previously developed a regression model for predicting "average familiarity" with ...

Rapid transformation in marketing information technologies has enabled corporations to build ample consumer databases and analyze those using sophisticated data-mining techniques to obtain extensive knowledge about those consumers’ personal life styles and private matters. Considering that the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has relied on fair information principles to guide privac...

This paper explains a technique and presents empirical results for measuring the change in elderly consumer’s welfare due to price changes in items in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). A new approach for measuring welfare changes due to price changes in owner-occupied housing in a static and dynamic setting is the cornerstone of this research. The model treats housing as an asset with the fundame...