Business

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • (2005) Zhu, Liming; Aurum, Aybuke; Jeffery, David; Gorton, Ian
    Journal Article
    Software architecture evaluation involves evaluating different architecture design alternatives against multiple quality-attributes. These attributes typically have intrinsic conflicts and must be considered simultaneously in order to reach a final design decision. AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), an important decision making technique, has been leveraged to resolve such conflicts. AHP can help provide an overall ranking of design alternatives. However it lacks the capability to explicitly identify the exact tradeoffs being made and the relative size of these tradeoffs. Moreover, the ranking produced can be sensitive such that the smallest change in intermediate priority weights can alter the final order of design alternatives. In this paper, we propose several in-depth analysis techniques applicable to AHP to identify critical tradeoffs and sensitive points in the decision process. We apply our method to an example of a real-world distributed architecture presented in the literature. The results are promising in that they make important decision consequences explicit in terms of key design tradeoffs and the architecture`s capability to handle future quality attribute changes. These expose critical decisions which are otherwise too subtle to be detected in standard AHP results.

  • (2005) Janson, Marius; Cecez-Kecmanovic, Dubravka
    Journal Article
    Purpose – To provide a social-theoretic framework which explains how e-commerce affects social conditions, such as availability of information and equality of access to information, influences actors’ behavior, shapes e-commerce business models, and in turn impacts industry structure. Design/methodology/approach – Empirical investigation based on one-hour interviews with owners/managers of nine vehicle dealerships and six vehicle buyers in a large US metropolitan region. The hermeneutic method of understanding was used, involving a circular process from research design and attentiveness to data, to data collection and interpretation. This circular process exemplified the dialectic relationship between the theoretical framework (derived from Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action) and empirical data, through which interpretation and theoretical explanations grounded in the data emerged. Findings – Demonstrates that e-commerce gives rise to increasing competition among the dealers, decreasing prices and migration of competition to price, decreasing profitability of the average dealer, and erosion of traditional sources of competitive advantage. Moreover, e-commerce emancipates and empowers vehicle purchasers while reducing the power of automobile dealers. Research limitations/implications – The research findings focus on the effects of e-commerce on the automobile distribution industry. However, one could argue that a number of the findings extend to other retailing-based industries. Practical implications – The paper illustrates a research methodology that may be useful to study other e-commerce applications. Originality/value – This paper illustrates the application of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action to studying the effect of e-commerce.

  • (2005) Kim, Suk-Joong
    Journal Article
    This paper investigates the nature of the stock market linkages in the advanced Asia-Pacific stock markets of Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore with the US and the information leadership of the US and Japan in the region since the early 1990s. It has been found that both the contemporaneous return and volatility linkages were significant and tended to be more intense after the 1997 Asian crisis period. However, the investigation of the dynamic information spillover effects in terms of returns, volatility and trading volume from the US and Japan did not produce such time-varying influence. In general, significant dynamic information spillover effects from the US were found in all the Asia-Pacific markets, but the Japanese information flows were relatively weak and the effects were country specific. J. Japanese Int. Economies 19 (3) (2005) 338-365. School of Banking and Finance, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  • (2005) Kim, Suk-Joong; Moshirian, Fariborz; Wu, Eliza
    Journal Article
    We examine the influence of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on the dynamic process of stock market integration over the period 2 January 1989-29 May 2003 using a bivariate EGARCH framework with time-varying conditional correlations. We find that there has been a clear regime shift in European stock market integration with the introduction of the EMU. The EMU has been necessary for stock market integration as unidirectional causality was found. Linear systems regression analysis shows that the increase in both regional and global stock market integration over this period was significantly driven in part, by macroeconomic convergence associated with the introduction of the EMU and financial development levels.