The ARIMA(0,1,1) demand model has been analysed extensively by researchers and used widely by forecasting practitioners due to its attractive theoretical properties and empirical evidence in its support. However, no empirical investigations have been conducted in the academic literature to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report how a small, family-owned children's play centre can achieve competitive advantage by developing a differentiated service. The aim is to show how this differentiation strategy is operationalized in a small family business using safety critical...

The concept of a risk-averse maintenance policy is introduced, and two approaches to modelling it are discussed, the first being via utility functions, and the second via inflation of the costs of unscheduled failures. After introducing a general methodology, several examples of its application...

Successful strategies for maintenance and replacement require good decisions. We might wish to determine how often to perform preventive maintenance, or the optimal time to replace a system. Alternatively, our interest might be in selecting a threshold to adopt for action under condition...

Forecasting and inventory control for intermittent demand items has been a major problem in the manufacturing and supply environment. Croston (Operational Research Quarterly 23 (1972) 289), proposed a method according to which intermittent demand estimates can be built from constituent events....

In this paper copulas are used to generate novel bivariate discrete distributions. These distributions are fitted to soccer data from the English Premier League. An interesting aspect of these data is that the primary variable of interest, the discrete pair shots-for and shots-against, exhibit...

We use regression methods to predict the expected monthly return on stocks and the covariance matrix of returns, the predictor variables being a company's ‘fundamentals’, such as dividend yield and the history of previous returns. Predictions are evaluated out of sample for shares traded on...

A large number of not-for-profit organisations, especially charities, have become more receptive to brands and brand management issues in their search for differentiation and the communication of their services and values (Stride, 2006). However, it is argued that a majority of small to medium...

cues, this paper argues that marketers need a gestalt approach to understand how consumers perceive online shopping environments. Following a systematic review of the literature on categorizations of online shopping environments, this paper develops and tests a gestalt model of consumer...

The paper employs data from 2884 matches in the English Football League Championship. It builds a model of determinants of attendance designed to yield results relevant to decision-taking at individual clubs. The model has two innovatory features. It controls for the market size of home and away...