Survey evidence on customer markets

This paper uses survey data from Iceland on 884 firms to test for the theory of customer markets proposed by Phelps and Winter (1970) and Okun (1981). The results provide support for the customer market theory in that managers agree that customers are valuable to firms – they rank them second only to employees – and they use various means of augmenting and retaining their customer base, such as advertising. Surprisingly, however, price setting appears not to be an important ploy for attracting and retaining customers. In this we confirm the earlier results of Lye and Sibly (1994) using Australian data. Instead, advertising and direct contact with customers are listed as significantly more important

Risks in enterprise cloud computing: the perspective of IT experts

Cloud computing has become an increasingly prevalent topic in recent years. However, migrating hitherto internal IT data and applications to the cloud is associated with a wide range of risks and challenges. The study reported in this paper aims to explore potential risks that organisations may encounter during cloud computing adoption, as well as to assess and prioritise these risks, from the perspective of IT practitioners and consultants. A questionnaire was designed and distributed to a group of 295 highly experienced IT professionals involved in developing and implementing cloud based solutions, of which 39 (13.2%) responses were collected and analysed. The findings identified a set of 39 cloud computing risks, which concentrated around diverse operational, organisational, technical, and legal areas. The most critical top 10 risks perceived by IT experts were found to be caused by current legal and technical complexity and deficiencies associated with cloud computing, as well as by a lack of preparation and planning of user companies

Local Doubling Dimension of Point Sets

We introduce the notion of t-restricted doubling dimension of a point set in Euclidean space as the local intrinsic dimension up to scale t. In many applications information is only relevant for a fixed range of scales. We present an algorithm to construct a hierarchical net-tree up to scale t which we denote as the net-forest. We present a method based on Locality Sensitive Hashing to compute all near neighbours of points within a certain distance. Our construction of the net-forest is probabilistic, and we guarantee that with high probability, the net-forest is supplemented with the correct neighbouring information. We apply our net-forest construction scheme to create an approximate Cech complex up to a fixed scale; and its complexity depends on the local intrinsic dimension up to that scale

Spin-lattice coupling mediated giant magnetodielectricity across the spin reorientation in Ca2FeCoO5

The structural, phonon, magnetic, dielectric, and magneto dielectric responses of the pure bulk Brownmillerite compound Ca2FeCoO5 are reported. This compound showed giant magneto dielectric response (10%-24%) induced by strong spin-lattice coupling across its spin reorientation transition (150-250 K). The role of two Debye temperatures pertaining to differently coordinated sites in the dielectric relaxations is established. The positive giant magneto-dielectricity is shown to be a direct consequence of the modulations in the lattice degrees of freedom through applied external field across the spin reorientation transition. Our study illustrates novel control of magneto-dielectricity by tuning the spin reorientation transition in a material that possess strong spin lattice coupling.Comment: 7 pages, 12 figure