Introduction Around New Year 2004, a quiet year after the official launch, The Sims Online hit the global headlines. Disappointingly, the topic was not a celebration of how this " new virtual frontier, " this " daring collective social experiment, " had succeeded in bringing " our divided nation " together, as Time magazine had blithely prophesied [1]. Instead, the media reported that the onlin...

Cross-border E-commerce has grown exponentially in the past decade in global market. To gain global competition in product-convergent markets, China’s over 200 thousands cross-border E-commerce businesses have focused more on the service and cost control of supply chain downstream. In this study, we analyse three strategic cost control measures, summarise ten evaluation criteria for cost and de...

Security policies, in particular access control, are fundamental elements of computer security. We address the problem of authoring and analyzing policies in a modular way using techniques developed in the field of term rewriting, focusing especially on the use of rewriting strategies. Term rewriting supports a formalization of access control with a clear declarative semantics based on equation...

How do people explore in order to gain rewards in uncertain dynamical systems? Within a reinforcement learning paradigm, control normally involves trading off between exploration (i.e. trying out actions in order to gain more knowledge about the system) and exploitation (i.e. using current knowledge of the system to maximize reward). We study a novel control task in which participants must stee...

Complex economic decisions - whether investing money for retirement or purchasing some new electronic gadget - often involve uncertainty about the likely consequences of our choices. Critical for resolving that uncertainty are strategic meta-decision processes, which allow people to simplify complex decision problems, evaluate outcomes against a variety of contexts, and flexibly match behavior ...

Over the past decades, it has been recognised that outsourcing has become a cornerstone for manufacturing strategy. The reasons for outsourcing have been extensively elaborated in academic literature (Kremic et al., 2006, p. 467). Not only has management science embraced the concept of outsourcing, industrial companies have also done so, sometimes combined with different initiatives, such as do...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that only about 52 percent of the 70 million U.S. adults with high blood pressure have their condition under control. It costs an estimated $46 billion each year to address issues related to hypertension such as health care services, medications, and missed work. Seven to eight out of every 10 people have their first heart attack or s...

nowadays, strategic planning was very important for every company, many companies realize the importance of strategic planning. holding companies have considered this issue. strategic planning in holding multibusinessess company differs from other single companies based on complexities. holding companies are faced with two important strategic decisions: 1) what areas and how investments should ...