Patch management is a crucial component of information security management. An important problem within this context from a vendor's perspective is to determine how to release patches to fix vulnerabilities in its software. From a firm's perspective, the issue is how to update vulnerable systems...

Proper configuration of security technologies is critical to balance the access and protection requirements of information. The common practice of using a layered security architecture that has multiple technologies amplifies the need for proper configuration because the configuration decision...

The overall goal of this paper is to analyse the political economy of food price policies in China during the global food crisis. The results show that given China’s unique economic and political context and the nature of its agricultural markets, the government’s reaction to the...

Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) has been the flagship labouratory of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and open-door policy and the forerunner of China’s capitalist transformation. The initiation of the Shenzhen SEZ was driven by the imperative of political and economic survival along the state...

The generally held belief that China’s consumption is too low is a myth based on inadequate theory, a misreading of official statistics and the use of market exchange rates for making international comparisons. Chinese official statistics underestimate consumption expenditure on housing,...

How much do the market values of housing reflect its interior design? Does the interior design interact with other housing attributes? Following the recent research based on “graph theory,” this paper confirms the importance of internal design variables in a hedonic pricing model, which is...

Will generous return policies in auctions benefit bidders? We investigate this issue using second-price common-value auctions. Theoretically, we find that the bidding equilibrium is unique unless returns are free, in which case there exist multiple equilibria with different implications for...

This paper focuses on designing a hybrid generation bioethanol supply chain (HGBSC) that will account for economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability under various uncertainties. A stochastic mixed integer linear programming model is proposed to design an optimal HGBSC. A case...

This paper studies tools for checking the validity of a parametric regression model, when both response and predictors are unobserved and distorted in a multiplicative fashion by an observed confounding variable. A residual based empirical process test statistic marked by proper functions of the...