The term ‘enterprise search’ (ES) refers to the information retrieval applications that use a range of different core technologies to search enterprise repositories. It includes the search of the organisation’s external web site, intranets and other electronic text held by the organisation...

This paper analyses price competition between two firms producing horizontally and vertically differentiated goods. These are assumed to be credence goods, as consumers can hardly ascertain the quality of the commodities. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique price...

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities on firm performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontier technique is used on a unique unbalanced longitudinal dataset on top European R&D investors over the period...

This report explores how U.S. federal institutions fund and influence innovation in the knowledge economy context and if any agencies or particular policies could be replicated in other countries. Three key U.S. agencies are identified as having significantly contributed to innovation and...

Expanding variety and the number of offered products is attractive for a firm to fit customer needs. Nevertheless, the greater complexity and the proliferation of stock-keeping units (SKUs) without substantial differentiation may not substantially improve customer satisfaction while raising...

The aggregate black-box approach of conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) limits its usefulness in situations where the observation is the result of independent decision making in sub-units (sub-DMUs), sequentially linked through processes or semi-finished products. The situation is...

Effective supply chain management relies on information integration and implementation of best practice techniques across the chain. Supply chains are examples of complex multi-stage systems with temporal and causal interrelations, operating multi-input and multi-output production and services...

Supply chain management involves the selection, coordination and motivation of independently operated suppliers. However the central planner's perspective in operations management translates poorly to vertically separated chains, where suppliers may have rational myopic reasons to object to full...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a powerful tool for measuring the relative efficiencies of a set of decision making units (DMUs) such as schools and bank branches that transform multiple inputs to multiple outputs. In centralized decision-making systems, management normally imposes common...

An important aspect of Total Quality Management is to inspect work in process after each operation. One of the reasons to do this is that a quick feedback to the operator of the information gathered during inspection can greatly help in improving quality levels at that operation. This paper...