Egon Franck, C Jungwirth, Reconciling rent-seekers and donators – the governance structure of open source, Journal of Management and Governance, Vol. 7 (4), 2003. (Journal Article)
Software developed and producedin open source projects has become an importantcompetitor in the software industry. Since itcan be downloaded for free and no wages arepaid to developers, the open source endeavorseems to rest on voluntary contributions byhobbyists. In the discussion of this puzzle twobasic patterns of argumentation stand out. Inwhat we call rent-seeker approaches, emphasisis put on the fact that although no wages arepaid to contributors, other pay-offs may turntheir effort into a profitable investment. Inwhat we call donator approaches the point ismade that many people contribute to open sourceprojects without expecting to ever receive anyindividual rewards.
We argue that the basic institutionalinnovation in open source has been the craftingof a governance structure, which enablesrent-seeking without crowding out donations.The focus of the presented analysis lies on thespecific institutional mechanisms, by which theopen source governance structure achieves toreconcile the interests of rent-seekers anddonators. |
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E Droste, M Kosfeld, M Voorneveld, Best-reply matching in games, Mathematical Social Sciences, Vol. 46 (3), 2003. (Journal Article)
We study a new equilibrium concept in non-cooperative games, where players follow a behavioral rule called best-reply matching. Under this rule a player matches the probability of playing a pure strategy to the probability that this strategy is a best reply. Kosfeld, Droste, and Voorneveld [Games and Economic Behavior 40 (2002) 270] show that best-reply matching equilibria are stationary states in a simple model of social learning, where newborns adopt a best-reply to recent observations of play. In this paper we analyze best-reply matching in more detail and illustrate the concept by means of well-known examples. For example in the centipede game it is shown that players will continue with large probability. |
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David Hausheer, Design of a Distributed P2P-based Content Management Middleware, In: 29th Euromicro Conference. 2003. (Conference Presentation)
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Carmen Tanner, Sybille Wölfing Kast, Promoting sustainable consumption: Determinants of green purchases by Swiss consumers Promoting Sustainable Consumption, Psychology & Marketing, Vol. 20 (10), 2003. (Journal Article)
Given that overconsumption in industrial countries is a main cause of environmental degradation, a shift toward more sustainable consumption patterns is required. This study attempts to uncover personal and contextual barriers to consumers' purchases of green food and to strengthen knowledge about fostering green purchases. Survey data are used to examine the influence of distinct categories of personal factors (such as attitudes, personal norms, perceived behavior barriers, knowledge) and contextual factors (such as socioeconomic characteristics, living conditions, and store characteristics) on green purchases of Swiss consumers. Results from regression analysis suggest that green food purchases are facilitated by positive attitudes of consumers toward (a) environmental protection, (b) fair trade, (c) local products, and (d) availability of action-related knowledge. In turn, green behavior is negatively associated with (e) perceived time barriers and (f) frequency of shopping in supermarkets. Surprisingly, green purchases are not significantly related to moral thinking, monetary barriers, or the socioeconomic characteristics of the consumers. Implications for policy makers and for companies and marketers engaged in the promotion and commercialization of green products are discussed. |
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Alexander Wagner, The efficiency of tradable permit markets: A few comments, In: 4th International Energy Symposium, London, 2003-10-01. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
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Fabio Rinaldi, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Jeremy Elleman, Gian Piero Zarri, Andreas Persidis, Luc Bernard, Haralampos Karanikas, Multilayer annotations in Parmenides, In: K-CAP2003 workshop on, Sanibel, Florida, USA, October 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Most of the thrust in the semantic web movement comes from the observation that existing NLP tools are not sophisticated or efficient enough to process the full richness of Natural Language, and therefore Machine Understandable annotations need to be added to Web Resources in order to make them accessible by remote agents. However, when the target application is not required to handle a huge amount of documents, but more limited sets, it is conceivable and practical to take advantage of NLP tools to pre-process textual documents in order to generate annotations (to be verified by human editors).
We discuss an approach based on a combination of various Natural Language Processing techniques that addresses this issue. Documents are analized fully automatically and converted into a semantic annotation, which can then be stored together with the original documents. It is this annotation that constitutes the machine understandable resource that remote agents can query. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Process Recombination: An Ontology Based Approach for Business Process Re-Design, SAP Design Guild, Vol. 7, 2003. (Journal Article)
A critical need for many organizations is the ability to quickly (re-)design their business processes in response to changing needs and capabilities. Current process design tools and methodologies, however, are very resource-intensive and provide little support for generating (as opposed to merely recording) new design alternatives.
This paper describes the 'process recombination,' a novel approach for template-based business process re-design based upon the MIT Process Handbook. This approach allows one to systematically generate different process (re-) designs using the repository of process alternatives stored in the Process Handbook. Our experience to date has shown that this approach can be effective in helping users produce innovative process designs.
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David Dorn, Alfonso Sousa-Poza, Why is the employment rate of older Swiss so high? An analysis of the social security system, Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance, Vol. 28 (4), 2003. (Journal Article)
Extracts of this paper were presented at the conference "Work Beyond 60: Preparing for the Demographic Shock", 6–7 March 2003 in Vienna organized by The Geneva Association, The Club of Rome, and The Risk Institute. Parts were also presented at the Bertelsmann Foundation conference "Strategien gegen den Fachkräftemangel" in Berlin, 2 July 2002 and at the Bertelsmann Foundation conference "Reformen zur Steigerung der Beschäftigungsfähigkeit älterer Arbeitskräfte" in Berlin, 26 October 2001. The authors would like to thank the participants as well as Jaap van Dam, Thomas Liebig, Fred Henneberger, and Geneviève Reday-Mulvey for their valuable comments and discussions. Alfonso Sousa-Poza would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for financial assistance. The usual disclaimer applies. |
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Marc Chesney, Pauline Barrieu, Optimal Timing to Adopt Environmental Policy in a Strategic Framework, Environmental Modeling & Assessment, Vol. 8 (3), 2003. (Journal Article)
In this paper, the problem of optimal timing, when to adopt an environmental policy in a strategic framework is considered. Using real options theory and some basic tools of game theory, we show that, under certain assumptions, a country behaving strategically should wait longer before adopting such a policy than if it behaves unstrategically or within a larger entity. Such a postponed decision is sub-optimal as regards to the environment protection. |
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Fabio Rinaldi, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Diego Mollà Aliod, Rolf Schwitter, Kaarel Kaljurand, Knowledge-Based Question Answering, In: Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems, KES-2003, Springer, Oxford, UK, September 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Large amounts of technical documentation are available in machine readable format, however there is a lack of effective ways to access them. In this paper we propose an approach based on linguistic techniques, geared towards the creation of a domain-specific Knowledge Base, starting from the available technical documentation. We then discuss an effective way to access the information encoded in the Knowledge Base. Given a user question phrased in natural language the system is capable of retrieving the encoded semantic information that most closely matches the user input, and present it by highlighting the textual elements that were used to deduct it. |
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N. Mileva, C. Martínez, C. Mediano, T. Bastiaens, T. Castro, S. Tzanova, S. Stoyanova, N. Mathieu, T. Yovcheva, D. Tokmakov, Helmut Schauer, Internet-Based Performance Support Systems with Educational Elements, In: IPSS_EE9 for Engineering Education – Experimental Design and some Results from the Experiments. Global Engineer: Education and Training for Mobility 31st SEFI Conference, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal, Sep 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
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Kjell G. Nyborg, Ilya A Strebulaev, Multiple Unit Auctions and Short Squeezes, Review of Financial Studies, Vol. 17 (2), 2003. (Journal Article)
This article develops a theory of multiunit auctions where short squeezes can occur in the secondary market. Both uniform and discriminatory auctions are studied and bidders can submit multiple bids. We show that bidders with short and long preauction positions have different valuations in an otherwise common value setting. Discriminatory auctions lead to more short squeezing and higher revenue than uniform auctions, ceteris paribus. Asymptotically, as the auction size approaches infinity, the two formats lead to equivalent outcomes. Shorts employ more aggressive equilibrium bidding strategies. Most longs strategically choose to be passive. Free riding on a squeeze by small, long players has no impact on these results, but affects revenue in discriminatory auctions. |
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Diego Mollà Aliod, Fabio Rinaldi, Rolf Schwitter, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Answer Extraction from Technical Texts, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 18, 2003. (Journal Article)
Describes the ExtrAns answer-extraction system which uses logical forms and lexical relations for semantic representation, to delve into and leverage the meaning of sentences, phrases, and words. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Scott Clearwater, Foster Provost, The Relational Vector-space Model and Industry Classification, In: IJCAI-2003 Workshop on Learning Statistical Models from Relational Data, August 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
This paper addresses the classification of linked entities. We introduce a relational vector-space (VS) model (in analogy to the VS model used in information retrieval) that abstracts the linked structure, representing entities by vectors of weights. Given labeled data as background knowledge/training data, classification procedures can be defined for this model, including a straightforward, “direct” model using weighted adjacency vectors. Using a large set of tasks from the domain of company affiliation identification, we demonstrate that such classification procedures can be effective. We then examine the method in more detail, showing that as expected the classification performance correlates with the relational autocorrelation of the data set. We then turn the tables and use the relational VS scores as a way to analyze/visualize the relational autocorrelation present in a complex linked structure. The main contribution of the paper is to introduce the relational VS model as a potentially useful addition to the toolkit for relational data mining. It could provide useful constructed features for domains with low to moderate relational autocorrelation; it may be effective by itself for domains with high levels of relational autocorrelation, and it provides a useful abstraction for analyzing the properties of linked data.
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Abraham Bernstein, The Product Workbench: An Environment for the Mass-Customization of Production-Processes, In: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 515 - 524, August 2003. (Book Chapter)
This article investigates how to support process enactment in highly flexible organizations. First it develops the requirements for such a support system. Then it proposes a prototype implementation, which offers its users the equivalent of a CAD/CAM-like tool for designing and supporting business processes. The tool enables end-users to take flexible building blocks of a production process, reassemble them to fit the specific needs of a particular case and finally export its description to process support systems like workflow management systems. |
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Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland, Chrysanthos Dellarocas, George Wyner, John Quimby, Abraham Bernstein, George Herman, Mark Klein, Charley Osborne, Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes, In: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, August 2003. (Book Chapter)
This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign and knowledge management. The project involves collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and organizing these examples in an on-line ìprocess handbook"". The handbook is intended to help people: (1) redesign existing organizational processes, (2) invent new organizational processes (especially ones that take advantage of information technology), and (3) share ideas about organizational practices.
A key element of the work is an approach to analyzing processes at various levels of abstraction, thus capturing both the details of specific processes as well as the ""deep structure"" of their similarities. This approach uses ideas from computer science about inheritance and from coordination theory about managing dependencies. A primary advantage of the approach is that it allows people to explicitly represent the similarities (and differences) among related processes and to easily find or generate sensible alternatives for how a given process could be performed. In addition to describing this new approach, the work reported here demonstrates the basic technical feasibility of these ideas and gives one example of their use in a field study. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Mark Klein, Thomas W. Malone, The Process Recombinator: A Tool for Generating New Business Process Ideas, In: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 203 - 422, August 2003. (Book Chapter)
A critical need for many organizations in the next century will be the ability to quickly develop innovative business processes to take advantage of rapidly changing technologies and markets. Current process design tools and methodologies, however, are very resource-intensive and provide little support for generating (as opposed to merely recording) new design alternatives.
This paper describes the Process Recombinator, a novel tool for generating new business process ideas by recombining elements from a richly structured repository of knowledge about business processes. The key contribution of the work is the technical demonstration of how such a repository can be used to automatically generate a wide range of innovative process designs. We have also informally evaluated the Process Recombinator in several field studies, which are briefly described here as well. |
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Abraham Bernstein, How can cooperative work tools support dynamic group processes? Bridging the specificity frontier, In: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 525 - 544, August 2003. (Book Chapter)
In the past, most collaboration support systems have focused on either automating fixed work processes or simply supporting communication in ad-hoc processes. This results in systems that are usually inflexible and difficult to change or that provide no specific support to help users decide what to do next.
This paper describes a new kind of tool that bridges the gap between these two approaches by flexibly supporting processes at many points along the spectrum: from highly specified to highly unspecified. The development of this approach was strongly based on social science theory about collaborative work. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Benjamin Grosof, Beyond Monotonic Inheritance: Towards Semantic Web Process Ontologies, No. IFI-2008.0006, Version: 1, August 2003. (Technical Report)
Semantic Web Services (SWS), the convergence of Semantic Web and Web Services, is the emerging next major generation of the Web, in which e-services and business communication become more knowledge-based and agent-based. In the SWS vision, service descriptions are built partly upon process ontologies – widely shared ontological knowledge about business processes – which are represented using Semantic Web techniques for declarative knowledge representation (KR), e.g., OWL Description Logic or RuleML Logic Programs.
In this paper, we give the first approach to solving a previously unsolved, crucial problem in representing process ontologies using SW KR: how to represent non-monotonic inheritance reasoning, in which at each (sub)class in the class hierarchy, any inherited property value may be overridden with another value, or simply cancelled (i.e., not inherited). Non-monotonic inheritance is an important, heavily-used feature in pre-SWS process ontologies, e.g., ubiquitous in object-oriented (OO) programming. The advantages of non-monotonicity in inheritance include greater reuse/modularity and easier specification, updating, and merging. We focus in particular on the Process Handbook (PH), a large, influential, and well-used process ontologies repository that is representative in its features for non-monotonic inheritance. W3C’s OWL, the currently dominant SW KR for ontologies, is fundamentally incapable of representing non-monotonicity; so too is First Order Logic. Using instead another form of leading SW KR – RuleML – we give a new approach that successfully represents the PH’s style of non-monotonic inheritance. In this Courteous Inheritance approach, PH ontology knowledge is represented as prioritized default rules expressed in the Courteous Logic Programs (CLP) subset of RuleML.
A prototype of our approach is in progress. We aim to use it to enable SWS exploitation of the forthcoming open-source version of the PH. |
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David Seidl, The role of general strategy concepts in the practice of strategy, In: 19th European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium. 2003. (Conference Presentation)
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