Nonlinear and chaotic patterns in Japanese video game console sales and consequences for management control

This paper investigates the behaviour of weekly hardware sales in the Japanese video game sector. It is found that weekly hardware sales exhibit significant linear and non-linear behaviours during the product cycle. We are going to analyse the implications of our findings for management control in the video game sector.forecasting, marketing, time series, systems dynamics, chaos theory

Hotel management in Cuba and the transfer of best practices.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the management challenges faced by international hotel operators when applying universally accepted management principles to the Cuban hospitality market. The authors use both secondary and primary research sources based on fieldwork carried out in Cuba during the first semester of 2003 and a later visit during the months of December 2003 and January 2004. Eight in depth interviews were conducted with senior executives of Cuban, Spanish and French hotel corporations. The paper presents a scenario where the state’s role in the protection of the socialist revolutionary principles, combined with the need to adopt some market based management practices, constitutes a singular case in the world of hotel management. In the current Cuban institutional context, the implementation of some western best management practices can produce significant results, while others produce negative outcomes, and therefore, should be held back until the institutional context is changed. The paper has implications for managers in suggesting that from a hotel perspective, the application of universally accepted best management practices must be carried out practice by practice and country by country. This paper contributes to increased knowledge about the dilemmas of managing hotels in a still highly centralised socialist country but with an increasingly market based economyCuba; Best practice; Hospitality management; Hotel and catering industry;

Global integration without expatriates.

A paper provides a case study of a company that, while it has a fully international operation, makes no use at all of expatriates. The global activities of the giant retail clothing company Zara, and the way in which it adapts to cultural differences, are outlined. By exploring why the company does not use expatriates, and how it develops organizational learning without them, the example provides a challenge to many of the assumptions on which international staffing are basedCase studies; Retailing industry; Multinational corporations; Employment policies; Expatriate employees; Corporate planning; Multiculturalism & pluralism;

PABRE-Proj: applying patterns in requirements elicitation

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Software requirement patterns have been proposed as a type of artifact for fostering requirements reuse. In this paper, we present PABRE-Proj, a tool aimed at supporting requirements elicitation and specification.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Personal recommendations in requirements engineering : the OpenReq approach

[Context & motivation] Requirements Engineering (RE) is considered as one of the most critical phases in software development but still many challenges remain open. [Problem] There is a growing trend of applying recommender systems to solve open RE challenges like requirements and stakeholder discovery; however, the existent proposals focus on specific RE tasks and do not give a general coverage for the RE process. [Principal ideas/results] In this research preview, we present the OpenReq approach to the development of intelligent recommendation and decision technologies that support different phases of RE in software projects. Specifically, we present the OpenReq part for personal recommendations for stakeholders. [Contribution] OpenReq aim is to improve and speed up RE processes, especially in large and distributed systemsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Best evidence synthesis on the link between budgetary participation and managerial performance

By using the best evidence synthesis (Slavin, 1995), we want to find out an accurate synthesis on the budgetary participation -BP- and managerial performance-PM- link. The use of criteria of selection has allowed to decrease the heterogeneity. The results explain the presence of the heterogeneity by cultural and industrial contengencies. The best evidence synthesis based on an homogeneous subgroup (managers in publicly traded firms in Taiwan Stock Exchange) shows a time dependency of BP-MP link and some recommandations for further research: 1/to continue the study of the traded firms in Taiwan Stock Exchange to analyse the causal BP-PM link with a Granger test, 2/to study the evolution of this link over time in other countries.best evidence synthesis, subgroup analysis, managerial performance, budgetary participation, management control

Los estudios de casos como estrategia de investigación : características, críticas y defensas

En este trabajo se analiza la naturaleza, ámbito de aplicación, y status epistemológico de la metodología del caso como estrategia de investigación. Tras defInir los estudios de casos, se señalan una serie de confusiones en tomo a ellos, relativas a su denominación, su relación con la metodología cuantitativa, y su base teórica. Seguidamente, contraponiéndolos a los estudios cuantitativos, se explican sus características distintivas, y se especifIcan las situaciones en que deben o pueden ser elaborados. El artículo concluye con una revisión de las críticas y defensas de esta estrategia de investigació

On the learnibility of Mildly Context-Sensitive languages using positive data and correction queries

Con esta tesis doctoral aproximamos la teoría de la inferencia gramatical y los estudios de adquisición del lenguaje, en pos de un objetivo final: ahondar en la comprensión del modo como los niños adquieren su primera lengua mediante la explotación de la teoría inferencial de gramáticas formales.Nuestras tres principales aportaciones son:1. Introducción de una nueva clase de lenguajes llamada Simple p-dimensional external contextual (SEC). A pesar de que las investigaciones en inferencia gramatical se han centrado en lenguajes regulares o independientes del contexto, en nuestra tesis proponemos centrar esos estudios en clases de lenguajes más relevantes desde un punto de vista lingüístico (familias de lenguajes que ocupan una posición ortogonal en la jerarquía de Chomsky y que son suavemente dependientes del contexto, por ejemplo, SEC).2. Presentación de un nuevo paradigma de aprendizaje basado en preguntas de corrección. Uno de los principales resultados positivos dentro de la teoría del aprendizaje formal es el hecho de que los autómatas finitos deterministas (DFA) se pueden aprender de manera eficiente utilizando preguntas de pertinencia y preguntas de equivalencia. Teniendo en cuenta que en el aprendizaje de primeras lenguas la corrección de errores puede jugar un papel relevante, en nuestra tesis doctoral hemos introducido un nuevo modelo de aprendizaje que reemplaza las preguntas de pertinencia por preguntas de corrección.3. Presentación de resultados basados en las dos previas aportaciones. En primer lugar, demostramos que los SEC se pueden aprender a partir de datos positivos. En segundo lugar, demostramos que los DFA se pueden aprender a partir de correcciones y que el número de preguntas se reduce considerablemente.Los resultados obtenidos con esta tesis doctoral suponen una aportación importante para los estudios en inferencia gramatical (hasta el momento las investigaciones en este ámbito se habían centrado principalmente en los aspectos matemáticos de los modelos). Además, estos resultados se podrían extender a diversos campos de aplicación que gozan de plena actualidad, tales como el aprendizaje automático, la robótica, el procesamiento del lenguaje natural y la bioinformática.With this dissertation, we bring together the Theory of the Grammatical Inference and Studies of language acquisition, in pursuit of our final goal: to go deeper in the understanding of the process of language acquisition by using the theory of inference of formal grammars. Our main three contributions are:1. Introduction of a new class of languages called Simple p-dimensional external contextual (SEC). Despite the fact that the field of Grammatical Inference has focused its research on learning regular or context-free languages, we propose in our dissertation to focus these studies in classes of languages more relevant from a linguistic point of view (families of languages that occupy an orthogonal position in the Chomsky Hierarchy and are Mildly Context-Sensitive, for example SEC).2. Presentation of a new learning paradigm based on correction queries. One of the main results in the theory of formal learning is that deterministic finite automata (DFA) are efficiently learnable from membership query and equivalence query. Taken into account that in first language acquisition the correction of errors can play an important role, we have introduced in our dissertation a novel learning model by replacing membership queries with correction queries.3. Presentation of results based on the two previous contributions. First, we prove that SEC is learnable from only positive data. Second, we prove that it is possible to learn DFA from corrections and that the number of queries is reduced considerably.The results obtained with this dissertation suppose an important contribution to studies of Grammatical Inference (the current research in Grammatical Inference has focused mainly on the mathematical aspects of the models). Moreover, these results could be extended to studies related directly to machine translation, robotics, natural language processing, and bioinformatics

Are innovative and fashion goods sales chaotic? The case of Game Boy sales in Japan

This paper aims to test Granovetter and Soong's (1986) article conclusions. I test the hypothesis of cyclicity or chaoticity of the sales of new or/and fashion goods. This test is realised on the weekly Game Boy sales in Japan from 1989 to 2005.chaos; BDS statistics; Lyapunov's exponent; sales forecasting; nearest-neighbor

Definition and use of software requirement patterns in requirements engineering activities

The final quality of software products and services depends on the requirements stated in the Software Requirements Specification (SRS). However, some problems like ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistency, have been reported in the writing of SRS, especially when natural language is used. Requirements reuse has been proposed as a key asset for requirement engineers to efficiently elicit, validate and document software requirements, and as a consequence obtain SRS of better quality through more effective engineering processes. Among all the possible techniques to achieve reuse, patterns hold a prominent position. Although there have been several techniques proposed to reuse requirements, it may be observed that no concrete proposal has achieved a wide acceptance. Due to that, this research proposes the PABRE framework, which uses Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) as a means to capture and reuse requirements knowledge in the context of IT projects.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version