Against the backdrop of over two hundred thousand people dead or missing and millions of people homeless after China's massive earthquake and Myanmar devastating cyclone, forecasts estimate that natural and man-made disasters are likely to increase five-fold both in number and impact over the...

One of the most fundamental principles in system dynamics is the premise that the structure of the system will generate its behavior. Such philosophical position has fostered the development of a number of formal methods aimed at understanding the causes of model behavior. To most in the field...

Hybrid seed suppliers experience excessive and costly rates of seed returns from dealers, who order in advance of grower demand realization and may return unsold seeds at the end of the season. Sales representatives know they must carefully gather information on grower demand for seed types and...

Prepositioning of emergency supplies is a critical task for the success of humanitarian relief operations. However, little is known about how humanitarian practitioners actually make prepositioning decisions. In a laboratory (lab) experiment based on the Newsvendor model, humanitarian...

This paper defines four basic business models based on what asset rights are sold (Creators, Distributors, Landlords and Brokers) and four variations of each based on what type of assets are involved (Financial, Physical, Intangible, and Human). Using this framework, we classified the business...

In this paper we analyzed an online community based on a mailing list that was created as an internal marketing tool for launching a new network service. We focused on the change in communication over time among dispersed Sales representatives and the employees in a centralized Service...

We investigated how sales representatives (Salespeople) and members of a service business development department (the Service Dept.) communicated within an informal online community, particularly in relation to their use of other informal and formal communication channels. We found that while...

Over the past decade, the rise of the Internet has enabled the emergence of surprising new forms of collective intelligence. Examples include Google, Wikipedia, Threadless, and many others. To take advantage of the possibilities these new systems represent, it is necessary to go beyond just...

This paper explores the possibility of solving supply chain capacity allocation problems using internal markets among employees of the same company. Unlike earlier forms of transfer pricing, IT now makes it easier for such markets to involve many employees, finegrained transactions, and...

Recent work by Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone and their colleagues finds evidence for a general collective intelligence factor that predicts a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks, like the general intelligence factor does for individuals. Credé and Howardson argue...