In contrast with conscious decision-making, there are numerous subconscious decisions that we make without thinking about them. Some are biological and are made by different parts of our body to keep it alive and functioning normally. Others are a result of repetition and training that we can then do without thinking about them. The mathematics of conscious decisions with the Analytic Hierarchy and Network Processes is discrete, and has been discussed in the first three parts published on the subject. The mathematics of subconscious decisions is continuous. Here, we generalize the discrete mathematics of conscious decisions to the continuous case and develop it in some depth to apply to the synthesis of firings in the brain.

The article presents an overview of the literature on customer equity and how customer equity provides an opportunity for marketers to make marketing strategy financially accountable. Traditionally, Return on Investment (ROI) models have been used to evaluate the financial expenditures required by the strategies as well as the financial returns gained by them. However in addition to requiring lengthy longitudinal data, these models also have the disadvantage of not evaluating the effect of the strategies on a firm’s customer equity. The dominance of customer-centered thinking over product-centered thinking calls for a shift from product-based strategies to customer-based strategies. Hence, it is important to evaluate a firm’s marketing strategies in terms of the drivers of its customer equity. The article summarizes a unified strategic framework that enables competing marketing strategy options to be traded off on the basis of projected financial return, which is operationalized as the change in a firm’s customer equity relative to the incremental expenditure necessary to produce the change.

The Periodic Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (PCARP) generalizes the well known NP-hard Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP) by extending the single period to multi-period horizon. The Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP) is defined on an undirected network in which a fleet of identical vehicles is based at a depot node. A subset of edges, called tasks, must be serviced by a vehicle. The CARP consists of determining a set of feasible vehicle trips that minimizes the total cost of traversed edges. The PCARP involves the assignment of tasks to periods and the determination of vehicles trips in each period, to minimize the total cost on the whole horizon. This new problem arises in various real life applications such as waste collection, mail delivery, etc. In this paper, a new linear programming model and preliminary lower bounds based on graph transformation are proposed. A meta-heuristic approach-Scatter Search (SS) is developed for the PCARP and evaluated on a large variety of instances.

By integrating system thinking and social psychology, this paper presents an Activity System Theory (AST) approach to the platform design of e-service systems in general, and e-healthcare systems in specific. In the first part, some important principles of AST and a sustainable model of human activity system are introduced. Then a project ‘Integrated Mobile Information System for Healthcare (IMIS)’ is presented to demonstrate how to construct a comprehensive platform for various complex e-service systems based on the sustainable model of AST. Our research focused on the complex e-healthcare system in Sweden, and the results showed that the model of AST can provide the designers of e-service system with a comprehensive and sustainable platform for designing various kinds of e-service systems.

Agent architectures are gaining popularity for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by e-commerce applications. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining patterns and languages for agent architectural design. This paper proposes a modern approach based on organizational structures and architectural description languages to define and specify agent architectures notably in the case of e-commerce system design.

Services may be investigated from many perspectives. They encapsulate over 65% of global business, yet many gaps in the services knowledge base exist — particularly from areas including information technology, operational, customer targeting, and services provision. This research investigates an emerging and truly disruptive business scenario — the service value network, from a marketing, an operations and services approach. The service value network is defined as the flexible, dynamic, delivery of a service, or product, by a business’s coordinated value chains (supply chains and demand chains working in harmony), such that a value-adding, specific, service solution is effectively, and efficiently, delivered to the individual customer.

The ‘physical and virtual service value network customer — business encounter model’ is developed. Impediments to the development of a service value networks are investigated. Eight key areas related to website customer encounters are offered as investigation areas. The customer ‘touch-points’ across the virtual service encounter offers a raft of new research possibilities and possible new pathways to competitive advantage. Approaches to measure service network encounter effectors are explained. Current and future areas of business research are described. This paper frames the research agenda for service value networks.

This paper adopts agent-based simulation to study the horizontal competition among homogenous price-setting retailers in a one-to-many supply chain (a supply chain consists of one supplier and multiple retailers). We model the supplier and retailers as agents, and design their behavioral rules respectively. The results show that although the agents learn individually based on their own experiences, the system converges asymptotically to near Nash equilibrium steady states. When analyzing the results, we first discuss the properties of these steady states. Then based on these properties, we analyze the effects of the retailers’ horizontal competition on the retail prices, retailers’ profits and supplier’s revenue.