With the rapid growth of modern service economics and the popular adoption of web services, more and more service industries are beginning to deliver services with web service technology. One of the key issues is how the service consumer should search for services within the plentiful service...

Companies have been aware of the benefits of developing Cluster Supply Chains (CSCs), and they are spending a great deal of time and money attempting to develop the new business pattern. Yet, the traditional techniques for identifying CSCs have strong theoretical antecedents, but seem to have...

This study attempts to shed some light on the extent of non-realtor broker listings on the MLS and their resulting price and time-on-the markets effects. Using duration, probit and selling price models, this study empirically examines whether the REALTOR designation provides a signal of quality...

We test the impact of idiosyncratic risk on stock returns for emerging markets that experience financial market liberalizations. Idiosyncratic risk is positively associated with returns prior to financial market liberalization, but liberalization diminishes this effect. Moreover, prior to...

With the rapid development of industry and projects for ensuring the amounts of water that those industries require, the capacities and scales of hydraulic structures including reservoirs, dams, and weirs have increased sharply. Numerous dams experience some seepage, when water is held behind...

China has become a net importer of natural gas as a result of rapidly increasing consumption in recent years. A production peak would exist since natural gas is an exhaustible resource. As conventional natural gas production peak approaches, the development of unconventional natural gas is...

A way of combining a hidden Markov model (HMM) and mutual information analysis is proposed to detect possible precursory signals for earthquakes from Global Positioning System (GPS) data. A non-linear filter, which measures the short-term deformation rate ranges, is introduced to extract...

China's natural gas consumption is growing rapidly and it has being driven by economic growth, industrialization and urbanization. In addition, the country's low-carbon development strategy, government-controlled gas price, and some other factors also contribute to the surging gas consumption....

We find the minimum probability of lifetime ruin of an investor who can invest in a market with a risky and a riskless asset and who can purchase a reversible life annuity. The surrender charge of a life annuity is a proportion of its value. Ruin occurs when the total of the value of the risky...