Graduation date: 2004

The acquisition and elimination of products and the resources needed to create them constitutes an important part of the business decision-making process. Activity-based costing (ABC) supports this process by providing a tool for evaluating the relative profitability of various products. It accomplishes this by allocating costs to products based on the activities, and in turn the resources demanded by those activities, required to produce them. In allocating indirect costs traditionally considered "fixed," such as equipment, administrative overhead, and support staff salaries, ABC treats all costs as variable in the long-run. However, many costs can only vary in discrete steps. For example, one usually cannot purchase a fractional piece of equipment; one chooses either to buy it or not to buy it. Also, in adding support staff, one will typically find that people demand full-time positions, so increments will come in discrete amounts. This stairstep semivariable nature of many costs runs counter to ABC's treatment of all costs as variable. In addition, different products often draw upon the same resources. This creates complex interactions, making it difficult to predict the ultimate consequences of adding or eliminating a particular product. Mixed integer programming (MIP) provides another tool for making these product/resource mix decisions. Unlike ABC, however, it can handle variables that take on integer values, and hence deal appropriately with stairstep semivariable costs. It also ensures that the decision recommended by the model will optimize profitability, given that a solution exists and the underlying assumptions hold true. In doing this, MIP automatically adjusts for all of the complex interactions that exist among the various products and resources. Using a simplified two product/two resource model, one can detail the mathematics behind ABC and MIP, and then link the two approaches through a common variable. This allows one to establish the conditions under which ABC and MIP will yield the same results, and those under which they will differ. Since MW produces an optimal solution, the fact that ABC yields a different result under specific circumstances underscores the danger of relying solely on the product margins generated by an ABC model. / Graduation date: 1998

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Computer and Information Science

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 193 p. : ill. (some col.), maps. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-159).

It is observed that there are many different models about housing price. Yet, this is relatively smaller number of studies about housing starts. This thesis is an empirical study to work out the relationship between housing starts, housing price and other economic and policy instrumental factors. To achieve this objective, a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model is built since there is inter-relationship between housing starts and housing price. By applying previous models filled with the research gaps, a new VAR model about the housing starts and housing price in Hong Kong is built. Four hypotheses are tested in the thesis. The first and second hypotheses are if housing starts and housing price are affected by the given exogenous variables. The third hypothesis is if the past movement of economic variables reliable in predicting future values of that variable. The last hypothesis is to test if the “high-land-price” policy really pushes up the housing price. The empirical results found in this thesis are a little bit different to previous studies in Hong Kong and overseas. Factors which are frequently proved to be statistically significant are not significant in this study (e.g. interest rate and tender price index). Developers in Hong Kong are found to care more about the future market rather than the current market conditions. Many factors do not exert an influence directly on housing starts but indirectly through their impact to the change of the change of the housing price. It is interesting to know that housing starts react negatively to a change in housing price. An increase in the change of housing price is a bullish signal for the developers. They will hold the land for a while until they expect the peak is coming upon the completion of a project. Therefore, the empirical results suggest the government has to introduce some policies which will lead to a fall in housing price in case that she wants to increase the supply of new private residential housing. Developers will accelerate the applications to commence construction when they expect there will be a downward trend in the housing price (which is shown by a negative change of the housing price.. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This dissertation consists of three independent essays. We briefly introduce these essays in chapter 1 and leave a comprehensive introduction to each essay. Chapter 2 considers a vertically separated industry where production takes time and vertical mergers shorten production time. We investigate the impact of vertical mergers on the downstream firms' ability to collude and show that vertical mergers facilitate downstream collusion. Chapter 3 provides a theoretical foundation for a puzzling empirical observation that advertising follows an inverted U shape for some new products. Chapter 4 analyzes an incumbent's response to a competitive entry. We show that if the quality of the entrant is uncertain, the incumbent can "jam" the quality signalling of the entrant. Finally, chapter 5 summarizes main conclusions of three essays. / text

published_or_final_version / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

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