The present paper develops a basic framework for evaluating and optimizing profits in a business operation. In developing a business we are often faced with an infinity of choices ranging from what products or services to sell and what customers to target to how to structure and manage the...

This article provides a cognitive foundation of the parameters that regulate a model of the learning curve. Organizational learning and its actual occurrence are linked to the number of available categories and to the amount of information to be processed.

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of...

The diffusion of health care technology is influenced by both the total market share of managed care organizations as well as the level of competition among them. This paper differentiates between HMO penetration and competition and examines their relationship to the adoption of cardiac...

We analyze a dynamic model of strategic interaction between a professional sport league that organizes a tournament, the teams competing to win it, and the broadcasters paying for the rights to televise it. Teams and broadcasters maximize expected profits, while the league's objective may be...

The paper analyses the forces that shape demand and supply processes in the market for cocoa powder. A brief statistical summary is given of the main trends in international demand and production, and the spatial shifts in cocoa processing. Ample attention is given to the role of technology...

Paper is under revision, pdf is not available. Competitive balance is what makes the sport becoming an attractive event. Contrary to other industries, a reduction in competition and a hypothetically dominant position could mean the end of the championship. If there is only one team, the...

After a characterization of the cost-oriented assembly line balancing problem it will be shown that by loading the stations maximally the cost-oriented optimum can be missed. Instead of loading the stations maximally the criterion two-stations-rule a has to be used. For generating optimal...

This paper is focused on the solution quality and computing time requirements of heuristic methods for cost-oriented assembly line balancing. It is based on a recent paper (Amen, International Journal of Production Economics 68 (2000), which describes in detail the solution process of existent...

This work is focused on identifying a circular pull production control system (PPCS) and make emphasis on the presence of a stability attribute. It is an introductory paper to an extended study of macroeconomic financial stability in a physically open but systemic closed system. Previous work...