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.     

Wealth effects, treasury bill financing, perpetuity financing, and stability

This note re-examines the stabilities of government financing by (a) treasury bills, and (b) perpetuities. In contrast to Currie and Gazioglou, it is shown that the wealth effect on expenditures plays the same role in the financing by treasury bills and by perpetuities.     

Addictive behavior and endogenous growth

This paper sets up an endogenous-growth model in which the consumer's preference is subject to habitual consumption, and examines how consumption habits will govern the rate of sustained growth. It is found that the habitual behavior may be either growth-enhancingor growth-reducing, depending upon whether the substitution between intertemporal consumption is inelastic and whether the consumption experience is harmful or beneficial to the agents. It is also found, given that the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is less than unity, that the learning speed of consumption habits has a positive (negative) impact on the balanced-growth rate if the consumption experience is harmful (beneficial) to the agents.     

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.