In 2007, although Tennessee was (and still is) the third largest tobacco¬producing state, it enacted the Non¬Smoker Protection Act (NSPA), making most enclosed public and workplaces, and restaurants 100% smoke-free. This study triangulates archival documents with interviews, legislative...

How to achieve the innovation is becoming more urgent for the firms, in general, process innovation and product innovation are two primary types of innovation which firms adopt. This paper aims to describe a mechanism on the choice between cost reduction and quality improvement in a duopoly. In...

Day-ahead energy market clearing relies on a deterministic equivalent model with a limited time horizon, which may lead to inefficient scheduling of generating units from the point of view of generators. For this reason, generators may wish to forgo the profit hedging offered by day-ahead...

In recent years, the price of traditional Chinese medicinal materials soars continuously, and the resulting price risk increasingly looms large, which has critically affected midstream and downstream industries and peoples' demand for drug, and imperiled healthy and orderly development of...

As the international service market continues its phenomenal growth, understanding the nature of effective interpersonal interactions between service providers and their customers is increasingly important. However, cross-national theory and research on this topic remain limited. In response,...

Continuous improvement in managing customer relationships is a necessity for companies wishing to remain competitive in today's global marketplace. The two studies presented herein respond to this need by developing and testing a new nomological net that features social presence and its...

Consider the extreme quantile region, induced by the halfspace depth function HD, of the form Q = fx 2 Rd : HD(x; P) g, such that PQ = p for a given, very small p 0. This region can hardly be estimated through a fully nonparametric procedure since the sample halfspace depth is 0 outside the...