Methods for estimating productivity and costs, and dependent equipment selection process, have needed to be increasingly reliable. Estimated productivity and costs must be as accurate as possible in reflecting actual productivity and costs experienced by mining operations to accommodate the long-term trend for diminishing commodity prices, For loading and hauling equipment operating in open pit mines, some of the interrelated estimating criteria have been investigated for better understanding; and, consequently, more reliable estimates of production and costs, also more effective equipment selection process. Analysis recognizes many of the interrelated criteria as random variables that can most effectively be reviewed, analyzed and compared in terms of statistical mathematical parameters. Emphasized throughout is the need for management of the cyclical loading and hauling system using conventional shovels/excavators/loaders and mining trucks to sustain an acceptable “rhythm” for best practice productivity and most-competitive unit-production costs. Outcomes of the research include an understanding that variability of attributes needs to be contained within acceptable limits. Attributes investigated include truck payloads, bucket loads, loader cycle time, truck loading time and truck cycle time. Selection of “ultra-class” mining trucks (≥ 290 -tonne payload) and suitable loading equipment is for specialist mining applications only. Where local operating environment and cost factors favourably supplement diminishing cost-benefits of truck scale, ultra-class trucks may be justified. Bigger is not always better – only where bigger can be shown to be better by reasons in addition to the modest cost benefits of ultra-class equipment. Truck over-loading may, to a moderate degree, increase productivity, but only at increased unit cost. / From a unit-cost perspective it is better to under-load than overload mining trucks. Where unit production cost is more important than absolute productivity, under-trucking is favoured compared with over-trucking loading equipment. Bunching of mining trucks manifests as a queuing effect – a loss of effective truck hours. To offset the queuing effect, required productivity needs to be adjusted to anticipate “bunching inefficiency”. The “basic number of trucks” delivered by deterministic estimating must provide for bunching inefficiency before application of simulation applications or stochastic analysis is used to determine the necessary number of trucks in the fleet. In difficult digging conditions it is more important to retain truck operating rhythm than to focus on achieving target payload by indiscriminately adding loader passes. Where trucks are waiting to load, operational tempo should be restored by sacrificing one or more passes. Trucks should preferably be loaded by not more than the nominal (modal) number plus one pass. The research has: • Identified and investigated attributes that affect the dispersion of truck payloads, bucket loads, bucket-cycle time, loading time and truck-cycle time. • The outcomes of the research indicate a need to correlate drilling and blasting quality control and truck payload dispersion. Further research can be expected to determine the interrelationship between accuracy of drilling and blasting attributes including accuracy of hole location and direction. • Preliminary investigations indicate a relationship between drill-and-blast attributes through blasting quality control to bucket design, dimensions and shape; also discharge characteristics that affect bucket cycle time that needs further research.

Since the late 1970s, the world has experienced a wave of microeconomic reform that has resulted in the privatisation of many previously State-owned assets, as well as other reforms directed at improving the efficiency of government business enterprises. This dissertation focuses on one important instrument of reform: outsourcing of public-sector service provision. Despite the prevalence of outsourcing, there has been relatively little empirical work analysing the effects of outsourcing at the contract level. This dissertation addresses three important empirical issues related to outsourcing. First, analysis of the magnitude and sources of cost savings associated with outsourcing was undertaken using a present value costing framework. Unlike other studies, this study includes transaction costs and considers how costs change over the life of the contract. The results indicate that savings of 37 per cent were achieved in the first year of contract operation ?savings that were achieved through a combination of reductions in pay and conditions, labour-saving technological change and reductions in inefficiency. Secondly, the dissertation considered why the level of savings achieved fell to 24 per cent following contract variations at the end of year 1. Some evidence indicated that this may have been due to opportunistic behaviour or hold-up: that the contract service provider may have taken advantage of contractual incompleteness and increased its price during the course of contract renegotiations. Although hold-up is an important theme in the literature on contracts, little empirical work has been undertaken in verifying its existence. Thirdly, the impact of contract design on the efficiency of outsourcing arrangements was analysed. It is well known that contract theory predicts a trade-off between incentives and risk. Using the standard principal-agent framework, a simple model is developed to analyse the effects of demand uncertainty on the risk-incentive trade-off. This model is then tested using data from maintenance services contracts at two corporatised water retailers in Melbourne: an environment that is characterised by high levels of both cost and demand uncertainty. Using a general linear regression model, the results obtained indicate that the moral hazard effect dominated the risk premium effect.

In project appraisal of infrastructure projects, cost benefit analysis has an important role. One of the central concerns is to adjust the distortions in markets to provide a better guide to a more effective allocation of scarce resources. The objectives of this thesis are : to establish the lack of a comprehensive estimation of the shadow wage rate (SWR) in most project appraisals in the Australian context; to develop a model for the estimation of the SWR for groups of occupations; to estimate the SWRs for the major groups of occupations in Australia; to forecast the number of employees required for Sydney's second airport project and to apply the estimated SWRs to the project, followed by estimation of the total social cost of the project. The latter estimation is done using a novel approach which, unlike many previous studies of transport infrastructure projects, estimates the SWR entirely from published statistical sources. Overall, the results are significant not only in the context of Sydney's second airport, but for other airports, the transportation sector, and in general for Australian project appraisal. The study proposes the need to change the traditional approach to the treatment of labour costs in project appraisal in Australia and provides a framework which can be useful to other researchers and analysts who wish to examine the pricing of labour in Australian project appraisal. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This is the first academic study of well costs and drilling times for Australia???s petroleum producing basins, both onshore and offshore. I analyse a substantial database of well times and costs sourced from government databases, industry and over 400 recent well completion reports. Three well phases are studied - Pre-Spud, Drilling and Completion. Relationships between well cost factors are considered, including phase time, phase cost, daily cost, rig day rate, well depth, basin, rig type, water depth, well direction, well objective (e.g. exploration), and type of completion (P&A or producer). Times and costs are analysed using scatter plots, frequency distributions, correlation and regression analyses. Drilling times are analysed for the period 1980 to 2004. Well time and variability in well time tend to increase exponentially with well depth. Technical Limits are defined for both onshore and offshore drilling times to indicate best performance. Well costs are analysed for the period 1996 to 2004. Well costs were relatively stable for this period. Long term increases in daily costs were offset to some extent by reductions in drilling times. Onshore regions studied include the Cooper/Eromanga, Surat/Bowen, Otway and Perth Basins. Offshore regions studied include the Carnarvon Basin shallow and deepwater, the Timor Sea and Victorian Basins. Correlations between regional well cost and well depth are usually high. Well costs are estimated based on well location, well depth, daily costs and type of completion. In 2003, the cost of exploration wells in Australia ranged from A$100,000 for shallow coal seam gas wells in the Surat/Bowen Basins to over A$50 million for the deepwater well Gnarlyknots-1 in the Great Australian Bight. Future well costs are expected to be substantially higher for some regions. This study proposes methods to index historical daily costs to future rig day rates as a means for estimating future well costs. Regional well cost models are particularly useful for the economic evaluation of CO2 storage sites which will require substantial numbers of petroleum-type wells.

Background: Many innovative ideas have been proposed to manage and improve the quality and cost of clinical care. For many innovations, like Total Quality Management (TQM), the &quotblack box&quot of implementation process is not well understood. Empirical work on the process of innovation implementation in health care is limited. Objective: This study was designed to explore how one organisation, Intermountain Health Care (IHC), an acute and primary health care provider in the USA, innovates in implementing TQM organisation-wide to improve and manage clinical quality. More broadly, the study aims to identify factors that contribute to innovation implementation in health care for clinical quality improvement, and to generate a model of innovation implementation in health care for clinical quality improvement. Method: This thesis takes a case study approach using multiple research methods. The main methods used comprise interviews with key personnel, assessment of organisational documents and a survey of clinicians' and managers' attitudes and beliefs. Findings: The main finding of the research is that innovation implementation at IHC was a journey, not a destination. Embedded in the journey were five periods and many actions and interactions, grouped into eleven elements. The five periods were: exposing to an innovative idea, embracing the idea, extending knowledge and experience on the idea, emerging of strategies to implement the idea organisation-wide, and enacting and adapting the strategies. The eleven elements were: gestation, shocks, plan, proliferation, fluid participation, setbacks, criteria shift, top executive involvement, relationships and infrastructure building, and adoption. To implement TQM organization-wide, integrated structures and systems were being instituted. The study found that resistance to change came from not only some physicians but also hospital administrators. The study also found that supportive environments played a critical role in the journey. While the TQM implementation at IHC resulted in some cost savings and some behavioural changes including clinical practice change, cultural change at the level of values and beliefs had yet to occur. Conclusion: A process-oriented integrative model of clinical service management is proposed. The elements of an innovation, the temporal change processes, lead to formation and changes of the ongoing organisational processes, which in turn evaluate and improve the important clinical processes. These processes integrate TQM with other quality improvement approaches; also ensure that quality is part of the dialogue between key stakeholders who are responsible for managing and improving clinical quality and costs. These processes also are capable of dealing with dilemmas faced in health care and the constantly created managerial ideas and clinical knowledge. Key Words: Innovation, Clinical Outcomes, Knowledge, Quality and Costs, TQM Management

In many areas of India and Australia, groundwater has been and is being withdrawn at rates far beyond the recharge capacity of the aquifer. The resulting depletion of groundwater supplies has a number of adverse social, economic and environmental consequences. These consequences and conflicts have led to a debate over the suitable institutional arrangements to manage common pool groundwater resources in a sustainable manner.

Doctor of Philosophy / The motivation for the research presented in this thesis stems from the recent availability of high frequency limit order book data, relative scarcity of studies employing such data, economic significance of transaction costs management, and a perceived potential of data mining for uncovering patterns and relationships not identified by the traditional top-down modelling approach. We analyse and build computational models for order submissions on the Australian Stock Exchange, an order-driven market with a public electronic limit order book. The focus of the thesis is on the trade implementation problem faced by a trader who wants to transact a buy or sell order of a certain size. We use two approaches to build our models, top-down and bottom-up. The traditional, top-down approach is applied to develop an optimal order submission plan for an order which is too large to be traded immediately without a prohibitive price impact. We present an optimisation framework and some solutions for non-stationary and non-linear price impact and price impact risk. We find that our proposed transaction costs model produces fairly good forecasts of the variance of the execution shortfall. The second, bottom-up, or data mining, approach is employed for trade sign inference, where trade sign is defined as the side which initiates both a trade and the market order that triggered the trade. We are interested in an endogenous component of the order flow, as evidenced by the predictable relationship between trade sign and the variables used to infer it. We want to discover the rules which govern the trade sign, and establish a connection between them and two empirically observed regularities in market order submissions, competition for order execution and transaction cost minimisation. To achieve the above aims we first use exploratory analysis of trade and limit order book data. In particular, we conduct unsupervised clustering with the self-organising map technique. The visualisation of the transformed data reveals that buyer-initiated and seller-initiated trades form two distinct clusters. We then propose a local non-parametric trade sign inference model based on the k-nearest-neighbour classifier. The best k-nearest-neighbour classifier constructed by us requires only three predictor variables and achieves an average out-of-sample accuracy of 71.40% (SD=4.01%)1, across all of the tested stocks. The best set of predictor variables found for the non-parametric model is subsequently used to develop a piecewise linear trade sign model. That model proves superior to the k-nearest-neighbour classifier, and achieves an average out-of-sample classification accuracy of 74.38% (SD=4.25%). The result is statistically significant, after adjusting for multiple comparisons. The overall classification performance of the piecewise linear model indicates a strong dependence between trade sign and the three predictor variables, and provides evidence for the endogenous component in the order flow. Moreover, the rules for trade sign classification derived from the structure of the piecewise linear model reflect the two regularities observed in market order submissions, competition for order execution and transaction cost minimisation, and offer new insights into the relationship between them. The obtained results confirm the applicability and relevance of data mining for the analysis and modelling of stock market order submissions.

論文摘要 我國經濟迅速發展的結果，造成所有權與經營權分離的企業經營模式。在這種專業經營的好處背後，隱藏代理問題的危機。欲解決代理問題，資訊的透明化是關鍵，而資訊的正確與否，則有賴於獨立公正的第三人加以驗證，因而促成對審計服務的需求。 由於審計服務的需求能否被滿足，繫於審計品質的優劣，因此本研究將代理成本的變動與審計品質需求的變動作一個連結，將國內上市公司更換會計師的行為視為對審計品質需求的變動，探討對有更換會計師的公司而言，當代理成本增加時，對高品質審計服務的需求是否增加；反之，當代理成本降低時，上述需求是否減少。 本研究以四個替代變數來衡量審計品質，即產業專業、聲譽、與美國大事務所結盟時間長短，以及以前述三種替代變數利用主成分分析所構建的審計品質總指標來衡量審計品質。至於代理成本，則以管理當局的持股比率、財務槓桿率、應計項目來衡量。四種審計品質的代理變數分別建立四個統計模式。在檢定個別自變數與應變數之間的關係時，由於聲譽、與美國大事務所結盟時間長短的模型，其應變數為類別性變數，因此係採鑑別分析，而產業專業與審計品質總指標模型的應變數則為分析性變數，故採用迴歸分析。 本研究發現，有關管理當局持股比率的假說，在產業專業的模型中獲得顯著的支持，但在聲譽、與美國大事務所結盟時間長短的模型中，則未獲支持；而財務槓桿比率的假說則獲得絕大部份的支持，顯示財務槓桿比率的變動與更換會計師審計品質的方向間具有正向的關係，惟在聲譽、與美國大事務所結盟時間長短的模型中，更換至品質較低的群組，未有顯著的支持；至於應計項目的假說則未獲支持，顯示應計項目的變動與更換會計師方向間並無顯著的正向關係。 / Abstract Name: Lu, Shiang-Ying Advisor: Ma, Sheree S., Ph.D. Title: A Study on the Association between Changes in Agent Costs and Audit Qualities Month/Year: July, 1999 With the development of economy, one of the impacts is the business style turns to be specialist resulting in the departure between management and owner incentives leads to agency conflict. To solve the conflicts, information transparency is the key point. The integrity of information lies to the independent audit of the third party, so the audit demand emerges. Whether the audit demands can be met depending on the audit quality. So, the study links the changes in agent costs to audit qualities; the extent of agency conflicts determines the degree of auditing needed to make management credible to current and potential investor. Specially, the higher (lower) the agent costs, the higher (lower) the demand for audit quality. This study measures audit quality by proxy variables which are industry expertise, brand, time span of allying with America large CPA firm and audit quality index. The audit quality index is a combination of first three proxy variables by principal component analysis. Agent costs are proxied by management ownership, leverage and accruals. Four audit quality proxy variables build four statistical models. The industry expertise and audit quality index models are analyzed by regression; the others are by discriminate analysis. The results do not provide support for the hypothesis that changes in accruals is associated with changes in audit quality. As to the hypothesis of management ownership and leverage, there is no consistent result.

<p>Bakgrund: I och med den rådande lågkonjunkturen har konsumenter i allmänhet blivit alltmer prismedvetna och konkurrensen inom försäkringsbranschen har hårdnat mer och mer. Det har dessutom visat sig att såväl privatkunder som företagskunder har blivit alltmer missnöjda med försäkringsbolag och är inte lika lojala som för några år sedan. </p><p>Syfte: Syftet är att utreda vad kundlojalitet bygger på för att därefter utarbeta förslag på åtgärder så att befintliga kundrelationer kan bli mer långvariga och kunderna mer lojala hos företag inom försäkringsbranschen. </p><p>Genomförande: För att uppfylla syftet har data samlats in dels genom intervjuer med anställda på vårt fallföretag, If Skadeförsäkring i Norge, och dels genom en enkätundersökning gjord på företagets kunder. I det här fallet småföretagskunder. </p><p>Resultat: För att få lojala kunder krävs det att försäkringsbolag i likhet med andra företag skapar en nära relation till sina kunder. En fungerande kommunikation blir därför en viktig faktor så att kunden får mer kunskap om själva försäkringarna. Det gäller att kunderna får en annan inställning till försäkringsbolag och detta skulle kunna göras genom att försäkringsbolagen visar mer på att de hjälper till att förebygga skador. Vidare gäller det att på bästa möjliga sätt skapa värde för kunden, det vill säga se till varje enskild kunds behov. Ju fler unika kundfördelar som kan erbjudas desto svårare blir det för kunden att byta försäkringsbolag. Dessutom är det viktigt att företaget bemöter kunden på det sätt som efterfrågas av vederbörande oavsett om kunden har råkat ut för en skada eller inte.</p>

<p>The legal situation of companies costs for investing in computer software in an income tax law perspective is described by a tax law guidance that generelly acount these costs according the principles of research and development. If there is any reason to classify the costs differently, it could mean that immediate deduction not will be allowed. For this reason it is important to establish what the legal situation would be in a more nuanced tax law classification. The tax law categories that will be analysed in the thesis are research and development, inventories, intangible assets, stocks and ongoing projects. The purpose of this thesis is mainly to give examples of what such an income tax law classification can look like.While dealing with the problems of classifying the costs some situations of competition will occure. My conclusion is that it is important to bring out the multiplicity and the comlpexity that marks the legal situation in question. In each specific case yet some situations can occure that I haven’t been close to border on. The income tax law classification of companies costs in computer software shall be descided with the very purpose of the specific investment in mind and as only parameter.</p>