A note on Lee's model of intraurban employment location

By using the two-stage approach, this note provides an alternative derivation of Lee's theoretical model. In the process, we will demonstrate that the two-stage approach provides a compact way to define the bid-rent function rigorously and to avoid the weakness contained in Lee.     

Applying repertory grids technique for knowledge elicitation in quality function deployment

The repertory grids technique is applied in quality function deployment to elicit the voice of the customers and to derive the importance for each customer requirement from a group of customers. In addition, the repertory grids technique can be used in the relationship matrix to quantify the numerical relationships between customer requirements and technical measures from a group of team members. An integration of the repertory grids technique and quality function deployment would make quality function deployment systematically to gather customer needs for better product or service planning and to determine the relationships between customer requirements and technical measures since the final analyses rely heavily on the results of this relationship matrix. A case illustration is provided to show the usefulness of applying the repertory grids technique in quality function deployment.     

Applying a hidden Markov chain model in quality function deployment to analyze dynamic customer requirements

This study applies a hidden Markov chain model in quality function deployment to analyze dynamic customer requirements from probabilities viewpoints. In reality, the needed probabilities can be computed based upon the experts’ opinions for economic conditions as well as the customers’ surveys by asking customers’ preferences under different economic conditions. Each customer requirement can be analyzed as time goes by. In addition, the changes for each technical measure can be closely examined from time to time. More importantly, when new customers’ surveys are conducted and available as well as the new economic conditions analyzed by experts have been updated, both customer requirements and technical measures can be adjusted in a timely basis to reflect and fulfill the dynamic customer requirements. As a result, this proposed approach provides a decision maker to analyze and satisfy both past and present customer needs early on such that a better strategy can be made based upon the most updated customers’ surveys and economic conditions.     

Performance evaluation of special education in China based on Data Envelopment Analysis

The existence of special schools aims to provide education opportunities and environment for physically and mentally disabled people. The provision of more exquisite and diversified services for parents, at ease, placing the children in the schools becomes an essential issue for current special schools. The special needs of students are more complicated that special schools have to overall study the service being more exquisite and diversified to correspond to the needs of students and parents. For this reason, the management of special schools takes the priority when discussing the function of special education institutions. Data Envelopment Analysis is applied to evaluate efficiency in this study. Shanghai, being the municipal city and the national central city of People’s Republic of China, presents the education quality at the head nationally. Special schools in Shanghai are therefore selected as the evaluated units in this study. The research results show strong efficiency of 1 DMU, revealing the good efficiency of special education execution, 4 DMUs with the efficiency between 0.9 and 1, revealing the efficiency being easily promoted, and 5 DMUs with the efficiency below 0.9, presenting obvious inefficiency. Moreover, the efficiency analysis with Malmquist shows the improvement of efficiency changes between two periods of special schools. Finally, suggestions are proposed according to the conclusion, expecting to assist in the development of special education in China.

     

Quantifying uncertainty in applying importance-performance analysis

In a traditional importance-performance analysis (IPA), the information of uncertainty for importance and performance does not normally take into account from the survey but does commonly exist in practice. To further consider the uncertainty for each item from the survey results, the IPA under uncertainty method is proposed in this study. The traditional IPA possesses the ease of calculation and can be further viewed as a special case of the proposed IPA under uncertainty method, which is more complicated for computation but provides much more information for a decision maker to judge the strengths and weaknesses effectively by considering sampling, instrument effects, measurement conditions, sample effects, computational effects, random effects, etc. Finally, a brief case is illustrated to show how the proposed IPA under uncertainty method works and what the differences are between the traditional IPA and proposed methods.     

Applying information-based methods in importance�Cperformance analysis when the information of importance is unavailable

Importance?Cperformance analysis (IPA) is very useful for practitioners to improve service quality and increase customer satisfaction by identifying the major strengths and weaknesses. A survey is typically conducted to gather the needed information about importance and performance. If the survey does not include the information about the importance, this study introduces two information-based methods, namely entropy and mutual information methods. These two methods can be applied in either ordinal or metric data without the assumption of data to be Gaussian or symmetric distributed. Moreover, mutual information method uses the objective function to reduce the uncertainties when the outcome of the dependent variable is predicted where the dependent variable is the overall satisfaction. In this study, integrated frameworks of these two methods are proposed, and each framework consists of four steps to describe how the information of importance can be derived when the matrix of importance?Cperformance analysis is to be constructed. Finally, a case study of Hi-Life convenient store in the university is illustrated to examine the service quality by these two proposed frameworks when the importance is unavailable directly from the survey.     

Applying a markov chain model in quality function deployment

The relationships between customer requirements and technical measures are typically resolved by a cross-functional team with the assumption that the relationships are able to be identified objectively. However, due to the limited knowledge and experiences, determining the appropriate relationship could be difficult since the decision makers might not have enough information to evaluate the actual relationship. Moreover, the importance of technical measures is typically expressed in the current time period. It would be of interest to trace the future trends of technical measures since customer needs are fulfilled by technical measures. Under such circumstances, a Markov chain model could be an approach to model the relationship and monitor the trends of technical measures from probabilities viewpoints. With the needed probabilities, the dynamic relationships as well as the trends of technical measures can be performed by different time periods. Finally, the relationships and future trends of technical measures can be updated when the new information is available.