How to achieve high customer satisfaction in Sabancı University Information Center

The Sabancı University is a young private university, which started providing education in 1999 in Istanbul. A “Search Conference” had been organized in order to find out “what kind of a university the country needed” and of its structure had been established on this understanding. At the first stage, the vision, the mission and the design of the university were completed, and the foundation of administrative infrastructure and selection of technology systems were materialized. Starting from the days of its foundation, the planning of the information services and facilities had been one of the main issues of the project. The university, which aims to become a world university, was accepted to be a member of the “European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM)” regarding its activities in the stage of its foundation. A “Student and Staff Tendency Survey” which was implemented in 2001 indicated that the Information Centre was the strong side of the university. At the same time the Center's the statistics covering period of 1999-2007 also indicated that the targets were achieved under the strategic planning of the Center. In 2007, an user satisfaction survey in order to evaluate the conformity of the services and facilities, to identify its strong and weak areas, opportunities and threats through comparison and SWOT analysis for the future, and set up 2007-2011 five-years strategic planning and operational activity plan. The survey indicated that 95% of the participants are satisfied in general with the Center. In addition to these, the results of usage statistics between the years 1998-2009 indicated that utilizing of the services and facilities of the Information Center has increased from year to year. On the other hand, the results of the survey after the orientation programs show that the customer satisfaction is very high. We believe that the followings are the reasons of high user satisfaction. The Centre has a user and process focused pro-active management, learning organization structure, the availability of the suggestion system, continues benchmarking with the competitors and observing management and technological developments in the world. This paper presents to share our applications and plans on high user satisfaction rate, customer relation management activities and future planning

Proceedings of the Conference on Globalization and Its Discontents

Poverty is increasing around the world while the world appears to globalize. Even the wealthiest nation has the largest gap between rich and poor compared to other developed nations. In many cases, international politics and various interests have led to a diversion of available resources from domestic needs to western markets. The fight against poverty is interest in as a social goal and many governments have some dedicated institutions or departments. In general, the government can directly help those in need. However, another method in helping to fight poverty is to use microfinance system. Microfinance tries to fight global poverty and bring opportunities to the world's poorest people. Of course, microfinance approach does not offer sufficient solutions reduce to poverty. Otherwise, with tiny loans and financial services, it helps the poor, mostly women, start businesses and escape poverty. Micro-finance programs targeting women have become a major plank of donor poverty alleviation strategies in the 1990s and funding is set to further increase into the next century under governments, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s), some initiatives and donor agencies activities. This study focuses on some solutions for global poverty problem such as mikrofinance approach. In addition, it examines Turkish conditions the aspect of microfinance practices.microfinance, microcredit, poverty of women, globalization

Sensitivity analysis for network aggregative games

We investigate the sensitivity of the Nash equilibrium of constrained network aggregative games to changes in exogenous parameters affecting the cost function of the players. This setting is motivated by two applications. The first is the analysis of interventions by a social planner with a networked objective function while the second is network routing games with atomic players and information constraints. By exploiting a primal reformulation of a sensitivity analysis result for variational inequalities, we provide a characterization of the sensitivity of the Nash equilibrium that depends on primal variables only. To derive this result we assume strong monotonicity of the mapping associated with the game. As the second main result, we derive sufficient conditions that guarantee this strong monotonicity property in network aggregative games. These two characterizations allows us to systematically study changes in the Nash equilibrium due to perturbations or parameter variations in the two applications mentioned above

Bernstein's Lethargy Theorem in Frechet Spaces

In this paper we consider Bernstein's Lethargy Theorem (BLT) in the context of Fr\'{e}chet spaces. Let $X$ be an infinite-dimensional Fr\'echet space and let $\mathcal{V}=\{V_n\}$ be a nested sequence of subspaces of $X$ such that $\bar{V_n} \subseteq V_{n+1}$ for any $n \in \mathbb{N}$ and $X=\bar{\bigcup_{n=1}^{\infty}V_n}.$ Let $e_n$ be a decreasing sequence of positive numbers tending to 0. Under an additional natural condition on \sup\{\{dist}(x, V_n)\}, we prove that there exists $x \in X$ and $n_o \in \mathbb{N}$ such that \frac{e_n}{3} \leq \{dist}(x,V_n) \leq 3 e_n for any $n \geq n_o$. By using the above theorem, we prove both Shapiro's \cite{Sha} and Tyuremskikh's \cite{Tyu} theorems for Fr\'{e}chet spaces. Considering rapidly decreasing sequences, other versions of the BLT theorem in Fr\'{e}chet spaces will be discussed. We also give a theorem improving Konyagin's \cite{Kon} result for Banach spaces.Comment: 20 page

Finite Ball Intersection Property of the Urysohn Universal Space

In a paper published posthumously, P.S. Urysohn constructed a complete, separable metric space that contains an isometric copy of every complete separable metric space, nowadays referred to as the Urysohn universal space. Here we study various convexity properties of the Urysohn universal space and show that it has a finite ball intersection property. We also note that Urysohn universal space is not hyperconvex

Financial Development and Economic Growth - A Comparative Analysis

This paper investigates the relationship between financial development and economic growth for developed and developing countries comparatively. The impacts of both stock markets and banks on economic growth are examined by using a panel data set of 21 developing and 16 developed economies for the period 1975-2006. Generalized method of moments technique developed for dynamic panel is applied. While the results of the econometric evidence relevant to developing economies indicate that both stock markets and banks positively influence the economic growth, the results of econometric evidence relevant to developed economies indicate that only stock markets positively influences the economic growth.economic growth, stock markets, banks, financial markets, dynamic panel