Reliability is one of the key factors in transportation, both for passengers and for cargo. This paper examines reliability in public railway systems. Reliability of railway services is a complex matter, since there are many causes for disruptions and at least as many causes for delays to spread...

This note sketches opportunities for interdisciplinary research in management, and the distinctive contribution that might be made from a European perspective. It highlights a few major domains of research, conceptual issues, disciplines, and specific opportunities and needs in Europe. The...

This study examines the 'logic' or underlying causality of supply relationships. It develops and tests hypotheses, in a LISREL model, on detailed data for 553, 450 and 226 supply relationships in the US, Japanese and European automobile industries. The differences found between the three regions...

Airline revenue management is the practice of controlling the booking requests such that the planes are filled with the most profitable passengers. In revenue management the capacities of the business and economy class sections of the plane are traditionally considered to be fixed and distinct...

The production and delivery of rapidly perishable goods in distributed supply networks involves a number of tightly coupled decision and optimization problems regarding the just-in-time production scheduling and the routing of the delivery vehicles in order to satisfy strict customer specified...

We are concerned with evolutionary algorithms that are employed for economic modeling purposes. We focus in particular on evolutionary algorithms that use a binary encoding of strategies. These algorithms, commonly referred to as genetic algorithms, are popular in agent-based computational...

This article connects theory of learning with theory of governance, in the context of inter-firm relations. It recognizes fundamental criticism of transaction cost economics (TCE), but preserves elements from that theory. Two kinds of relational risk are identified: hold-up and spillover risk....

There is a tendency to see trust and control by formal agreements as substitutes. According to transaction cost economics trust is unreliable, and some form of control is needed to reduce hazards of opportunism. According to others, high trust allows for a limited extent of formal control....

This article investigates what learning groups there are in organizations, other than the familiar 'communities of practice'. It first develops an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for identifying, categorizing and understanding learning groups. For this, it employs a constructivist,...

Reverse Logistics has been stretching out worldwide, involving all the layers of supply chains in various industry sectors. While some actors in the chain have been forced to take products back, others have pro-actively done so, attracted by the value in used products One way or the other,...