The prime objective of a client in a building project is to attain a successful project, a project that has been properly planned, designed and constructed in accordance with plans and specifications, and completed within time and cost originally anticipated. However the success of a building project depends on a number of variables one of them is the way the building team approach conflicts facing the project. This study examines the causes and management approaches of conflicts in building projects in Tanzania. The main objective of the study is to identify issues/areas on which conflicts occur, factors causing them and how conflicts are managed in building projects in Tanzania. As a means to achieve the above objective, the study was structured into two main parts; the first part aimed at mapping up the nature of conflicts in building projects in Tanzania by establishing critical symptoms of conflicts, factors causing them and the approaches used in resolving the conflicts. This was done through literature review, interviews and questionnaire survey. The second part aimed at in-depth study of conflicts from their root cause, how they develop/progress and how they are managed in a real building project setting. Four case studies of building projects were studied for this part. The study found that factors causing conflicts are in several forms. There are those related to the nature of contracts, where the contracts are unclear and ambiguous they give room for contracting parties to develop opportunistic behaviour when post adjustments are needed. There are those factors which are related to role functions when the parties fail to perform as expected. As such the study confirmed that contractual incompleteness and consequent post contract adjustments and opportunistic behaviour of some project participants are root causes of conflicts in building projects in Tanzania. However, the study established that there are sufficient mechanisms to deal with conflicts in the standard forms of building contracts used and when the provisions are against the interests of the parties, the parties resort to amicable resolution approaches. Notwithstanding the availability of mechanisms in the standard forms of contracts to deal with conflicts, the study proposes the framework as a strategy that could reduce effectively the occurrences of conflicts in building projects. / QC 20110223

Relay networks and cooperative transmission have spurred considerable interest in recent years, promising performance improvements in, e.g., system capacity, robustness and transmission rate. In this thesis, the focus is on the so-called half-duplex relay channels, where in the system, a source node wants to transmit a message to a destination node and a relay node can potentially assist this transmission. The relay is said to be half-duplex in the sense that it cannot transmit and receive at the same time within the same frequency band. It is natural to categorize the potential relaying schemes (operations of the relay node) into two kinds. The relay can either decode the message of the source node, or it can process its received signal without decoding. The thesis investigates various schemes of the second kind and they are termed as ``relaying schemes without decoding.'' The first part of the thesis is devoted to the approach of instantaneous relaying. The instantaneous relaying schemes belong to the relaying schemes without decoding, where the relay node is implemented by a deterministic single-variable function. Both linear and non-linear functions are investigated and it is demonstrated that the functions with sawtooth-like shape give higher achievable rates than other functions investigated. Furthermore, the work is extended to half-duplex multiple-access relay channels, where an extra source node is present. For such channels, the relay's operation is ``instantaneous'' in the sense that it is represented by a deterministic function of two variables. Essentially, the function handles the received signals from the two source nodes, combining them together and transmitting the combined signal to the destination node. Novel functions based on the Archimedean spiral mapping and sawtooth-like functions are proposed and demonstrated to perform well, using achievable rate regions and achievable sum rates of the two source nodes as figures of merit. In the second part of the thesis, the class of relaying schemes without decoding and with memory is investigated, where for such schemes, information theoretic source and channel coding with long codewords is used at the relay node. The two predominant schemes of such kind are the so-called compress-and-forward (CF) and quantize-and-forward (QF) schemes. The achievable rate results of the two schemes and some of their variants are derived for static channels. Furthermore, under the assumption of slow fading channels, with transmitter channel state information (CSIT) not available at the source and relay nodes, outage probabilities, expected rates as well as diversity--multiplexing trade-offs (DMT) of the respective schemes are derived and compared. In addition, to compensate for the loss due to the absence of relay CSIT, a finite-resolution feedback link from the destination node to the source node is designed for the CF and QF schemes to provide the relay node with partial CSIT, and thus, the performance of the respective schemes can be improved. Lastly, the thesis considers the problem of lack of relay CSIT from another viewpoint. The concept of hybrid digital-analog coding, as is first investigated in source-channel coding, is adapted and applied at the relay node. Such relaying schemes are termed hybrid digital-analog relaying schemes and their performance in terms of expected rate is studied. It is shown that the hybrid schemes significantly outperform the conventional digital-only (e.g., the CF scheme) and the analog-only schemes (e.g., the so-called amplify-and-forward scheme). / QC 20110222

The decision to vertically integrate services and deliver care has both management and policy concerns for healthcare in the United States. The change in reimbursement, which was enacted with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, influenced the availability of post acute services for acute hospital inpatients. Prior to this change, post acute services were reimbursed based on cost similar to the pre DRG era of Medicare reimbursement. The change in payment had the potential to make discharging patients more difficult resulting in a prolonged length of stay without additional payment and at increased costs for hospitals. As a result of this change hospitals made arrangements to provide care for this population. The choices included vertical integration, contracting or hybrid arrangement and simply relying on the spot market. This makes or buy decision is a focus of this study. Were hospital decisions different after the BBA, than before this legislation?This study utilizes Oliver Williamson's transaction cost economics theory as the framework for the study and is a replication of a prior study by Chiu (1995) hybrid arrangement and simply relying on the spot market. This makes or buy decision is a focus of this study. Were hospital decisions different after the BBA, than before this legislation?This study utilizes Oliver Williamson's transaction cost economics theory as the framework for the study and is a replication of a prior study by Chiu (1995) The Williamsons theory is based on the proposition that three transaction dimensions determine the most efficient method of operation for a firm: uncertainty, frequency, and asset specificity. Depending on the "market", organizations may elect to arrange services through the spot market, contract for services, or vertically integrate the service. The study uses data from the American Hospital Association survey as well as the Area Resources files to determine if individual hospitals have made contract arrangements, vertically integrated, or relied on the spot market to provide skilled nursing services. Data is collected before and after the BBA and analyzed using multiple regression analysis and then subjected to significance testing. Sixteen hypotheses are tested that focus on the three dimensions of transaction cost theory. Findings support the importance of transaction frequency and asset specificity, while only weak support is offered for transaction uncertainty. The results differ from the Chiu study, which found strong support for uncertainty and weak support for frequency. This study is unique in that it examines data from two time periods surrounding a major reimbursement change in Medicare. It makes an important contribution to the empirical testing of transaction cost economics and the decision to vertically integrate in health care.