The invention of personal computers (PCs) brings a lot of convenience for many people¡¦s life. For a PC, its essential core is the operation system (OS) which is the most basic as well as important information system (IS). Because operation system is a requisite for each PC, many software companies have striven to develop and promote their own OSs. As well known, Microsoft is the most powerful company of OS and it dominated the market in the world. Microsoft is keeping designing new PC¡¦s OSs and promoting them with all its strength. It develops new version OS to fit the trade of information technology standard and users¡¦ requirements in specific product life cycle. In past, when Microsoft announced new OS version, they are quickly accepted and replaced to old ones. However, there is a strange situation for its latest OS Win 7 recently. Win 7 isn¡¦t quickly accepted to replace old version OS Win XP. The number of PC users whose platform is Win XP is still very large, and most of them have little willing to upgrade. It is a big problem for an OS company. However, this is also an interesting phenomenon and worth studying in academic. The issue is: why users would not like to upgrade a newer and more effective OS? This study focuses on the issue and tries to discover factors affecting upgrading intention and behavior. According to related research and actual observation, several critical constructs are applied such as switching costs, product qualities of relative advantages and over performance, and compatibilities. Moreover, environment factors like social influence and after-sales services expectations, and fashion effects. Demographic variables are included into the research model at the same time. Hypotheses are proposed after reviewing related studies and empirical survey. To verify this model and prove these hypotheses, PLS is applied to analyze and explain the result. On the other hand, discriminant analysis is also used to view the Win XP group and Win 7 group. The key discriminant function is made to distinguish and forecast these two kinds of groups. This study empirically validated and confirmed our research model by PLS and discriminant analysis. Furthermore, the relationships of factors those affecting upgrading intentions and behavior are verified and integrated. The findings are able to support OS suppliers to actually implement their product design. In academic, this study complement the field of IS switching about vertical upgrade to certain IS.

Increase in the cost of medical care services has become an important issue in many countries that have implemented national health insurance, including Taiwan. On July of 2002, the National Health Insurance of Taiwan implemented a global budgeting system for all hospital payments. It was hoped that such a system would control the increase of medical expenses within a certain expected range. However, in the absence of reasonable payment bases and effective utilization management and control mechanism, the outcome of implementing this new payment system has been difficult to measure. Therefore, the National Health Insurance (NHI) studied the possibility of implementing DRGs (diagnosis related groups) for all in-patient payments. To evaluate the impact of the new payment system, the medicinal datas collected 1 year before and after implementation of TW-DRGs were analyzed. The tested target is an orthopaedic department in a Public Medical Center. The tested items including average of days in hospital, medical costs, application of National insurance, and sub-item total knee replacement (TKR) and total hip replacement (THR). For overall investigation of the tested orthopaedic department, our findings revealed that implementation of TW-DRGs significantly diminished the average of days in hospital and the average of medical costs. However, implementation of TW-DRGs showed slight influence on the National Health Insurance Application. As to investigate common surgeries, TKR and THR, only the average of days in hospital of TKR was significantly decreased by implementation of TW-DRGs. In addition, other specific TW-DRGs numbered items were also examined to determine the alteration of the factors described above. Our results showed that implementation of TW-DRGs significantly diminished the days in hospital, the medical cost, and the National Health Insurance Application for the selected TW-DRGs numbered items. However, the quality in health care didn¡¦t have significant change after implementation of TW-DRGs. More complete data pools are needed for the more precise analysis to evaluate the influence of TW-DRGs system on the management of hospital and other medical factors in Taiwan.

The cost of design, construction and maintenance of facilities is on continual rise. The demand is to construct facilities which have been designed by apply life cycle costing principles. These principles have already given strong decision making power to the manufacturing industry. The need to satisfy the environmental sustainability requirements, improve operational effectiveness of buildings and apply value engineering principles has increased the dependency on life cycle costing analysis. The objective is to obtain economically viable solutions by analyzing the alternatives during the design of a building. Though the LCCA process is able to give the desired results, it does have some problems which have stood as hindrances to the more widespread use of the LCCA concept and method. The literature study has highlighted that the problem areas are the lack of frameworks or mechanisms for collecting and storing data and the complexity of LCCA exercise, which involves the analysis of a thousand of building elements and a number of construction-type options and maintenance activities for each building element at detailed design stages. Building Information Modeling has been able to repeatedly answer the questions raised by the AEC industry. The aim of this study is to identify the areas where BIM can be effectively applied to the LCCA process and become a part of the workflow. In this study, initially four LCCA case studies are read and evaluated from the point of view of understanding the method in which the life cycle costing principles have been applied. The purpose, the type alternatives examined, the process of analysis, the type of software used and the results are understood. An attempt has been carried out to understand the workflow of the LCCA process. There is a confidence that Building Information Modeling is capable of handling changes during the design, construction and maintenance phases of the project. Since applying changes to any kind of information of the building during LCC analysis forms the core, it has become necessary to use computer building models for examining these changes. The building modeling softwares are enumerated. The case studies have highlighted that the evaluation of the alternatives are primarily to achieve energy efficient solutions for the buildings. Applying these solutions involves high initial costs. The return on investment is the means by which these solutions become viable to the owners of the facilities. This is where the LCCA has been applied. Two of the important cost elements of the LCC analysis are initial costs and the operating costs of the building. The collaboration of these modeling tools with other estimating software where the initial costs of the building can be generated is studied. The functions of the quantity take-off tools and estimating tools along with the interoperability between these tools are analyzed. The operating costs are generated from the software that focuses on sustainability. And the currently used tools for performing the calculations of the life cycle costing analysis are also observed. The objective is to identify if the currently available BIM tools and software can help in obtaining LCCA results and are able to offset the hindrances of the process. Therefore, the software are studied from the point of view of ease of handling data and the type of data that can be generated. Possible BIM workflows are suggested depending on the functions of the software and the relationship between them. The study has aimed at taking a snapshot the current tools available which can aid the LCCA process. The research is of significance to the construction industry as it forms a precursor to the application of Building Information Modeling to the LCCA process as it shows that it has the capacity of overcoming the obstacles for life cycle costing. This opens a window to the possibility of applying BIM to LCCA and furthering this study.

The main purpose of this dissertation attempts to clarify the relations between imposed institutional change and social development in terms of Taiwan¡¦s development experiences. There are chiefly three studies in the dissertation. First of all, we reexamine Taiwan¡¦s democratic transition in institutional analysis. With regard to a political entrepreneur model, we shed light on the reasons why the transaction costs of Taiwan¡¦s democratic transition are not expensive and why the process of institutional change is relatively smooth. Secondly, we also explored the development of Taiwan¡¦s IC industry by virtue of imposed institutional analysis. We find it is the desirable government policies and appropriate institutional innovations that Taiwan¡¦s IC industry has made progress at a rapid rate in recent years. Finally, we analyze the interaction between technological choice and economic growth in terms of introducing adjustment costs of technology within a dynamic framework. We make a first attempt at exploring the technological adjustment costs on the rate of steady-state growth and the transitional behavior of the economy in an endogenous growth model.

This study focuses on the determinants of agglomerations, natural advantages, spillovers, and transaction costs respectively, and intends to form a location choice model with those agglomerative factors. Besides, we examine the geographic concentration scope overall and by region with the data set of manufacturing industries in Taiwan in 2003. We also explore some interesting empirical results. First, the overall geographic concentration level is slightly decreasing through 1996 to 2003. Second, the plants in the South and Middle regions of Taiwan are more concentrated than those in the North region. And each region has its own specific characteristic that draws different types of industries to locate. Third, with OLS regression we find that outsourcing dependence variable applied to proximate transaction costs effect is the most significant of all and represents that transaction costs have large influence to agglomeration scope. Finally this model can be improved from some aspects of involving distance into consideration and extending to entrepreneur across countries.

This dissertation modifies the model of Yang and Ng (1995) to investigate the condition of the emergence of the firm from a specialized exchange economy. It is assumed in this dissertation that there are fixed costs involved in the operation of a firm. After taking into account of this factor, I re-examine its effects on the division of labor and the structure of firm following Yang and Ng¡¦s framework. The model adopts an inframarginal framework to analyze the subject, in which a firm demonstrates diminishing returns, while both the final labor input and the intermediate labor input demonstrates increasing returns defined upon individuals. However, it is assumed that only the final labor input has the economies of specialization. It is argued in this dissertation that the existence of fixed learning costs may stimulate the economy to undergo structural changes if suitable conditions are met, which are largely related to relative market efficiency between markets.

Basically, to evaluate the operational performances of online auction is according to seller¡¦s transaction and investment in the auction website. Thus, how to maintain good relationship with the existing seller switching and attract new seller is the most attention and major care for auction service provider. However, there were few prior researches focused on the topic of online auction switching and examined from real case. In this study, we tried to develop a measuring model and explore the factors that relate to auction seller¡¦s switching. In July 2006, Yahoo! Kimo auction, the largest auction website in Taiwan, announced a new fee scheme which would charge 3 percent transaction handling fee on its sellers from Aug. 10. Many users expressed objection to the new charge scheme. During the same period, Ruten, a new joint venture auction website that combined eBay and Taiwanese portal operator PChome is nearly ready and makes some responding strategic approaches to attract new user. Many sellers of Yahoo! Kimo auction thought to switch auction provider. Base on the background, the study aim to explore auction seller¡¦s switching behavior through switching costs, including procedure costs, financial costs, and relational costs. Moreover, we examined how website quality, fee, anti-lock-in, and anti-switching affect switching intention and behavior. A total of 292 usable questionnaires were gathered through online surveys from auction discussion board and BBS. The data were analyzed by partial least squares (PLS) to test the hypotheses. We find that switching costs, website quality, fee have negative effect on seller¡¦s switching intention. Anti-lock-in and anti-switching have moderating effect in the model. According to the finding, we provide useful guidance for auction seller and auction service provider.

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A Study of Student Unit Costs for Public Senior Secondary Education in Taiwan Hsiu-Wen Tseng Abstract This research adopts the methodology of literature analysis, documentary one and empirical regression one to explore the current student unit costs of public senior secondary schools and the relevant issues. The purposes of this study are (a) to analyze the developmental trend and the current status of educational expenditures allocation for education at all levels, (b) to explore the cost drivers of student costs for public senior secondary schools through regression analysis and construct a calculating model for student unit costs, and (c) to offer relevant institutes some specific suggestions as improvements for the allocation system of educational funds according to this model so as to develop the maximum function of public education funds. The main conclusions are obtained as follows: 1. In the recent ten years, there is a great fluctuation in the structure of education at all levels in our country and the educational expenditures have increased a great deal yearly. 2. The context of student unit costs should be composed of current expenditures and capital ones. The former are the basic resource of funds for maintaining the normal operation of school-affairs, so these could be referred as the equivalent of the basic needs for every school; the latter are the expenditures for facilities and construction. The expenditures for facilities are mainly the expenses for teaching which are directly beneficial to the quality of learning. 3. Through descriptive statistics, we find that the expenditures of construction constitute the majority of capital expenditures in public senior secondary education, so the ratio for the expenditures of facilities is relatively low. 4. The current expenditures of public senior secondary schools have great regularity, so they could be predict the amount by the best regression model composed of three main cost drivers, which are the amounts of teachers, classes and staffs. According to the results of our research above, we propose the following suggestions: 1. The current expenditures and capital ones should be allocated by different methods because of their different cost behaviors. 2. The current expenditures have great regularity, so this kind of expenditures could be calculated and allocated by a funding formula through general educational grants. 3. The capital expenditures have no certain regularity, so this kind of expenditures is not suitable to be predicted from a normal viewpoint. This should be separated from general educational grants and continuously allocated by the method of plan grants. Besides, the central government should formulate the specific standards for the facilities and construction of education at all levels as the references of examining the proposals for capital grants. 4. The central government should establish a data base of the fundamental teaching equipment and educational expenditures of education at all levels for educational administrative institutes, schools and outsiders to examine, supervise and proceed relevant researches. 5. The central government should revise the accounting system of public educational institutes and establish a independent accounting system for public schools in order to fulfill School based management and develop the concept of accountability and ability to establish the features of schools for school authorities.

The determinants of the use of atypical employment and the effectiveness Abstract Atypical employment has been popular all over the world. Although there are plenty of articles about the current situation of the use of atypical employment, we still lack the studies about what determines of the use , how atypical employment influences labor costs, and what determines its future growth. Due to my interests upon the issues above, I made some analysis and got some conclusions: I. The determinants of the use of atypical employment 1. Contingent workers usually don¡¦t do nuclear work 2. Companies usually don¡¦t use atypical employment on professional jobs. 3. Companies usually use atypical employment when workload increases temporarily. 4. Temporary work is usually clerical and industrial. 5. Organizational size has positive effect upon atypical employment. 6. Labor collective contracts have positive effect upon atypical employment. 7. Companies in business-service industry use more atypical employment. 8. Benefit level has positive effect upon atypical employment. II. The determinants of cost saving after using atypical employment 1. The lower level of wage and benefits of contingent workers is the main reason to explain why cost saving happens after using atypical employment. 2. The use of professional temporary work has negative effect on cost saving after using atypical employment. 3. Low-skilled temporary work help firms to save labor costs. 4. Atypical employment causes higher mobility among regular workers and it has negative effect on cost saving. 5. Organizational size has positive effect upon cost saving after companies use atypical employment. 6. It is easier for companies of business-service and manufacturing industry to save labor costs after using atypical employment. III. The determinants of the future growth of atypical employment 1. Atypical employment growth is due to the need to get more employment flexibility and cost control. 2. Professional temporary work will grow significantly in the future. 3. Bad influences of atypical employment have positive effect on its future growth. 4. Collective labor contracts have positive effect on the future growth of atypical employment. 5. Both Taiwanese and foreign companies will increase atypical employment significantly in three years. 6. Organizational size has positive effect on the growth of atypical employment.