February 2013

Evaluation of customer satisfaction with services of a micro-finance institution: Empirical evidence from Women Association for Social and Economic Gain customers’ in Togo

Nowadays, Microfinance industry is affected by competition leading to customers’ switching across MFIs (Microfinance Institution). Thus, MFIs are concerned about customer satisfaction and have to pay attention to understand their customers’ preferences to survive in a competitive environment. Using data from 353 Women Association for Social and Economic Gain customers in Togo, this study aimed to: (1)...

Author(s): Eddy BALEMBA Kanyurhi

February 2013

A hybrid method for improving forecasting accuracy utilizing genetic algorithm and its application to J-REIT (office type) stock market price data

We proposed earlier that the equation of the exponential smoothing method (ESM) is equivalent to (1,1) ARMA model equation, a new method of estimating the smoothing constant in the exponential smoothing method which satisfied the minimum variance of forecasting error. Generally, the smoothing constant is selected arbitrarily, but in this paper, we utilize the above theoretical solution. Firstly, we estimate the ARMA...

Author(s): Yasuo Ishii, Keiko Nagata and Kazuhiro Takeyasu