Canadian construction participants have long recognized that accepting the lowest price bid does not guarantee maximum value. Achieving a value-based procurement approach is a challenge, particularly for the Canadian public sector clients who are limited in their ability to evaluate the competitive bids based solely on the low-bid award system. Bid and cost data from 218 projects from three major public sector construction clients in the Greater Toronto Area are evaluated. Compared to the other clients, the cost escalation is significantly higher for the client that does not have a standard prequalification policy. Increased contractor competition (high number of bids) and a large price gap between low bid and other bids are correlated to higher cost escalation for the non-prequalifying client. Also, the organizational culture of the non-prequalifying client is less results-oriented. The research demonstrates the importance of prequalifying for clients that award based solely on the low bid.

The internship company does not have a standard procedure for preparing an engineer’s estimate of probable construction cost document (engineer’s estimate) for municipal projects. Every project manager employs a methodology that is a slightly different variation of the historical data approach. The internship objective was to develop a construction unit price estimation model that provides more accurate results than the company’s existing unit price estimation methodology for the City of Fort Worth construction projects. To accomplish the internship objective several tasks were conducted, including; gathering City of Fort Worth construction projects bid tabulation data (including all bids) for the past three years; developing three construction item unit price databases using the data collected; conducting statistical analyses using the unit price databases;developing tables and graphs showing the construction cost items and their appropriate estimated unit prices to be used by the project managers in their cost estimates; developing an approach to apply construction unit costs which adjusts for unique project characteristics; developing guidelines for using the developed tables and graphs to estimate unit prices for municipal projects; using one recent project to compare the company’s existing unit price estimation methodology and the new developed model with actual unit bid prices; and developing guidelines for updating the unit price database, tables, and graphs. The study made use of both normal and log-normal distributions to model the unit bid price data collected from the City of Fort Worth. The factors that are perceived to influence a contractor’s unit bid price for a given item were identified and given a degree of impact on the project by the project managers. The factor that had the highest impact on the unit bid prices was discovered to be item quantity. The unit price estimating methodology presented in this study generated a better fit than the internship company’s original method for predicting the actual average unit bid prices for the one case study the methodology was applied.

Canadian construction participants have long recognized that accepting the lowest price bid does not guarantee maximum value. Achieving a value-based procurement approach is a challenge, particularly for the Canadian public sector clients who are limited in their ability to evaluate the competitive bids based solely on the low-bid award system. Bid and cost data from 218 projects from three major public sector construction clients in the Greater Toronto Area are evaluated. Compared to the other clients, the cost escalation is significantly higher for the client that does not have a standard prequalification policy. Increased contractor competition (high number of bids) and a large price gap between low bid and other bids are correlated to higher cost escalation for the non-prequalifying client. Also, the organizational culture of the non-prequalifying client is less results-oriented. The research demonstrates the importance of prequalifying for clients that award based solely on the low bid.

This paper provides a numerical method for demonstrating that bid-ask spreads increase with information asymmetry or the probability of insider trading. These spreads also decrease throughout the trading day. Average daily spreads are a non-monotone function of information asymmetry. This result brings into question empirical results showing that higher levels of inside information lead to higher expected returns.

Following the prevailing of the internet, the vigorous development e-commerce has given great impacts on traditional tangible stores and the whole marketing environments. Information Technology has not only changed our lives, but also changed consumers¡¦ behavior and marketing channels; and the e-commerce effect has already started to permeate into every stratum of business activities, including the exploitation, marketing, and after-sales service of new products, brings the industries infinite business chances. According to the reports of Institute for Information Industry, the market of internet shopping is going into its high development period, and as the idea of internet consumption disseminates gradually, the internet business transaction market of consumers¡¦ side also becomes an important internet business area. As the portal site operators think the environment of internet shopping in Taiwan as mature, now not only the B2C market seems full of potential, the C2C trend is also not far from breaking out. This research targets at the professional internet auctioneers who have used the auction websites to sell, exploratorily analyzes their operation strategy and performances. To be more specific, the main purpose of this research is to examine the relation between the individual characteristics, entrepreneurial motives, and operation strategies of the entrepreneur internet auctioneer and their operation performances, intending to realize if these differences in different economic situations would bring different influences into their performances. Accordingly, I chose the auctioneers of the 2003 best-scale auction website-Yahoo! as research objectives, using internet questionnaires and invited auctioneers to answer them, and finally gathered 155 valid samples to identify the relation between their marketing strategy combinations and performances. Various data statistic analyses including descriptive statistics, factor analysis, reliability analysis, Pearson correlations analysis and regression analysis are completed by SPSS Version 10.1. Through this research I find that in promotion strategies, if the auctioneers strengthen their sale skill and membership management system, the re-buy rate of members and the business volume can be heightened effectively; and by effectively holding the regular consumers, auctioneers can save a large amount of operation cost searching for new customers and thus can maintain their advantages in making profits. On the other hand, in product strategies, the auctioneers emphasize a lot in the best presentation of their product information (with pictures and texts), which obviously in turn helps them a lot in stimulating buying rates. Besides, the auctioneers also stress on the cultivation of their professional abilities and their knowledge about the products, along with the preservation of virtuous interactions with their customers, their operation performances can be enhanced even more.

The upregulation of apoptosis is a hallmark of several neurodegenerative disorders including ischemic stroke. In neurons, as in other cell types, Bax and tBid are critical regulators of the intrinsic pathway upstream of mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization (MOMP) and caspase activation. The characterization of the molecular events that occur during the early stages is therefore extremely important from a therapeutic standpoint. Here I show that two independent genetic pilot screens looking for novel regulators of Bax activation identified a common hit in the E3 ubiquitin ligase Trim17. Knockdown of Trim17 was found to protect against tBid-induced death in primary cortical neurons and allowed for the maintenance of mitochondrial function and oxidative phosphorylation under this apoptotic stress. The RING-domain of Trim17 was found to interact with Opa1 in mouse brain extracts. Furthermore, Opa1 co-immunoprecipitated with exogenously expressed full-length Trim17 from HEK293 cells. Knockdown of Trim17 in neurons increased Opa1 protein levels under steady-state conditions. These results suggest that Trim17 regulates Bax-dependent apoptosis in neurons via the modulation of Opa1 levels.

The upregulation of apoptosis is a hallmark of several neurodegenerative disorders including ischemic stroke. In neurons, as in other cell types, Bax and tBid are critical regulators of the intrinsic pathway upstream of mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization (MOMP) and caspase activation. The characterization of the molecular events that occur during the early stages is therefore extremely important from a therapeutic standpoint. Here I show that two independent genetic pilot screens looking for novel regulators of Bax activation identified a common hit in the E3 ubiquitin ligase Trim17. Knockdown of Trim17 was found to protect against tBid-induced death in primary cortical neurons and allowed for the maintenance of mitochondrial function and oxidative phosphorylation under this apoptotic stress. The RING-domain of Trim17 was found to interact with Opa1 in mouse brain extracts. Furthermore, Opa1 co-immunoprecipitated with exogenously expressed full-length Trim17 from HEK293 cells. Knockdown of Trim17 in neurons increased Opa1 protein levels under steady-state conditions. These results suggest that Trim17 regulates Bax-dependent apoptosis in neurons via the modulation of Opa1 levels.

Business Improvement Districts, BID, är en internationellt etablerad platssamverkansmodell som möjliggör samverkan mellan offentlig och privat sektor inom vilket offentliga och privata aktörer, fastighetsägare och handel samverkar för utveckling och förvaltning av den fysiska miljön. Det första BID-projektet lanserades i Toronto, Kanada, under 1960-talet och modellen har sedan dess utvecklats och idag tillämpas modellen i flertalet länder runt om i världen. Internationellt är BID ofta reglerat genom lagstiftning där fastighetsägare och näringsidkare, på geografiskt avgränsade platser, är förpliktade att bidra genom ekonomiska avgifter och engagemang för att öka attraktivitet och trygghet. I Sverige finns det i dagsläget ingen lagstiftning avseende BID-inspirerad platssamverkan. Istället samarbetar den offentliga och privata sektorn genom frivilligt engagemang och åtagande för att skapa attraktiva och trygga platser. En kombination av kvalitativ och kvantitativ forskningsmetod har tillsammans med en tolkande analys tillämpats för att besvara studiens forskningsfrågor. Studien påvisar demografiska och ekonomiska effekter som uppkommit till följd av BID-inspirerad platssamverkan i fem svenska kommuner. Vidare fastslås fyra generella framgångsfaktorer som anses väsentliga för ett lyckat projekt. Studien visar även att det ur ett svenskt perspektiv inte är relevant att ändra befintlig lagstiftning likt internationell implementering. Istället föreslås en nationell paraplyorganisation som tillhandahåller kunskap och erfarenheter kring BID-inspirerad platssamverkan. / Business Improvement Districts, BID, is an internationally established model which enables cooperation between the public and private sector together with real estate owners, retailers and actors to develop and manage the built environment. The first BID project was established in Toronto, Canada, in the 1960’s and the model has since been improved and applied in numerous countries worldwide. Internationally, BID is regulated by law where real estate owners and businesses, on a geographically delimited site, are obliged to contribute by tolls and engagement in order to increase the attractiveness and safety on site. In Sweden, such regulations are absent. Instead, collaboration between the private and public are conducted through non-compulsory work. By a qualitative and quantitative method, following study states that it is possible to distinguish demographical and economical effects created by BID in five Swedish municipalities. Further, the study identifies important key factors which generate a successful BID project. The study also discusses if Sweden should, like what has been done internationally, legislate a BID model suitable for Sweden.

Auctions have a long history and are an effective method to distributed resources. In the era of Internet and e-commerce, electronic sealed-bid auction play an important role in business. However, it is a risk to run a sealed-bid auction through the Internet, which is an open and unreliable environment. There are many security concerns about correctness and fairness of the auction and privacy of the bidders in electronic sealed-bid auctions. Cryptology seems to be the only security solution for electronic sealed-bid auction. On the other hand, a practical electronic sealed-bid auction scheme must be efficient. So efficient application of cryptographic tools to electronic sealed-bid auction is the focus of this thesis. Firstly, security requirements of sealed-bid auctions are surveyed. The auction result must be determined correctly according to the submitted bids and the pre-defined auction rule. The bidders must compete with each other in a fair play and none of them can take advantage of others. The auction must be publicly verifiable, so that the auction result is acceptable by everyone. Usually, a losing bidder hopes to keep his bid secret, so the losing bids should be kept secret. In different applications, different auction rules may be applied. So, to avoid a tie, a large number of biddable prices must be accepted in some applications. Secondly, the currently known sealed-bid auction schemes are classified. In recent years, many sealed-bid auction schemes based on various cryptographic primitives have been proposed. Nearly all of them can be classified into five models. In the Model 1, each bid is known to the auctioneers, who can find the winning bid and winner very efficiently. Bid privacy is not implemented in Model 1. In Model 2 homomorphic bid opening is employed, so that the winning bid and winner can be found while the losing bids are kept secret. In Model 3 very strong bid privacy is achieved through a Dutch-style bid opening, which is highly inefficient. In Model 4, the link between the bids and bidders instead of confidentiality of the bids is kept secret. This kind of confidentiality is weaker than normal bid privacy and called relative bid privacy in this thesis. (Complete confidentiality of the bids in the end of the auction is called absolute bid privacy.) Implementation of relative bid privacy can be very efficient if an efficient anonymous channel can be constructed. Model 5 uses secure evaluation to open the bids and find the auction result and makes it possible to achieve absolute bid privacy efficiently. Three main cryptographic primitives are explored and employed to design new auction schemes in four auction models. The first tool is batch verification, which can improve computational efficiency in auction schemes. The second is mix network, which can be used to implement anonymous channels in Model 4 and Model 5. Two new efficient mix networks are designed and used in Model 2, Model 4 and Model 5. The third is secure evaluation, which is employed in two new auction schemes in Model 5 to achieve strong bid privacy efficiently. Other cryptographic primitives employed in the auction schemes include efficient 1-out-of-w oblivious transfer in Model 2 and key chain in Model 3. Five new auction schemes are proposed. The first scheme in Model 2 batch verifies bid validity to improve efficiency. The second scheme optimises the key chain used in Model 3 to obtain a more advanced auction scheme. The third scheme implements a concrete anonymous channel in Model 4 for the first time and achieves relative bid privacy and high efficiency convincingly. The last two employ new secure evaluation techniques to achieve absolute bid privacy and high efficiency. With these five new auction schemes, better solutions are achieved in various auction applications.

EOC (epithelial ovarian cancer) is a leading cause of death from gynecological cancers. The majority of the patients with EOC are diagnosed at a late stage. The survival of these patients is limited due to recurrence of chemotherapy resistant disease. Therefore, the development of novel therapeutic agents for the treatment of EOC is urgently needed and it is a high priority in the field. TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) is a promising novel agent for the treatment of cancer, including EOC, because of its unique ability to trigger apoptosis in cancer cells and spare normal cells. Our laboratory has previously shown that a significant number of EOC cell lines and primary EOC samples are intrinsically resistant to TRAIL-induced apoptosis. The mechanisms leading to intrinsic resistance are largely unknown. TRAIL-resistant cells often display increased activation of the pro-survival PI3K/Akt pathway. Based on our observations that EOC ascites induced activation of the PI3K/Akt pathway in TRAIL-sensitive EOC cells which resulted in inhibition of the TRAIL-mediated apoptosis, we hypothesized that activation of the pro-survival PI3K/Akt pathway in EOC cells plays an important role in the resistance to TRAIL-induced apoptosis. The objectives of my project were to demonstrate that Akt is implicated in the regulation of TRAIL-induced apoptosis in EOC cells and to investigate the mechanisms by which Akt contributes to TRAIL resistance. We report that Akt activation reduces the sensitivity of ovarian cancer cells to TRAIL. TRAIL-resistant cells were sensitized to TRAIL-induced apoptosis by treatment with P13K or Akt inhibitors but inhibition of PI3K/Akt signaling pathway did not interfere with the recruitment and processing of the pro-caspase-8 to the death-inducing signaling complex (DISC). Conversely, overexpression of Akt1 in TRAIL-sensitive cells promoted resistance to TRAIL. Despite the fact that TRAIL-induced caspase-8 activation was observed in both TRAIL-sensitive and -resistant cell lines, Bid cleavage occurred only in TRAIL-sensitive cells. Akt activation in TRAIL-sensitive cells inhibited TRAIL-induced Bid cleavage. Furthermore, Bid expression was downregulated by Akt activation. Depletion of Bid by siRNA in TRAIL-sensitive EOC cells was associated with a decrease in TRAIL-mediated apoptosis and Bid overexpression in TRAIL-resistant cells resulted in increased TRAIL-mediated apoptosis. Altogether, these results suggest that Akt is a critical factor for mediating intrinsic TRAIL resistance among EOC cells and that an important mechanism by which Akt activation contributes to TRAIL resistance is by regulating the expression of pro-apoptotic protein Bid. Given these data, we speculate that Akt activation may be a potential biomarker to predict patient's response to TRAIL therapy and that the inhibition of the PI3K/Akt pathway can become one of the strategies to overcome resistance to TRAIL therapy in ovarian cancer.