335,244 research outputs found
Credit Ratings as Coordination Mechanisms
In this paper, we provide a novel rationale for credit ratings. The rationale that we propose is that credit ratings can serve as a coordinating mechanism in situations where multiple equilibria can obtain. We show that credit ratings provide a "focal point" for firms and their investors. We explore the vital, but previously overlooked implicit contractual relationship between a credit rating agency and a firm. Credit ratings can help fix the desired equilibrium and as such play an economically meaningful role. Our model provides several empirical predictions and insights regarding the expected price impact of ratings changes, the discreteness in funding cost changes, and the effect of the focus of organizations on the efficacy of credit ratings.coordination, credit ratings, multiple equilibria
Information Technology as Coordination Infrastructure
Business information technology is traditionally viewed as information provision technology. In this view, organizations use their IT to implement databases that provide people with information when they want it. This view is persistent even though information provision is never an end in itself but always has the further purpose to support the coordination of activities of people. The role if IT as coordination technology became more prominent in the 1980s with the advent of network technology, that allowed activities across different businesses to be coordinated. This trend has accellerated since the growth of Internet usage, and today IT is used to support an increasingly varied range of processes performed by a variety of partners that do not all have a hierarchical relation to each other. This makes it difficult to analyze requirements for IT support and specify IT solutions: Business processes may not be well-defined, and interests of different businesses may clash. This report argues that to deal with this in requirements engineering and IT solution specification, business information technology should not be viewed as IT support for business processes but as IT support for the coordination of activities in one or more businesses. We will identify three basic coordination mechanisms, namely coordination by price, by management, and by shared norms, and for each of these mechanisms, we will identify requirements for IT support. The advent of flexible and standardized networking technology has facilitated the creation of novel coordination mechanisms within these three general paradigms, and we will give an inventory of generalized coordination mechanisms made possible by current IT. Finally, we will draw conclusions for requirements engineering methods for IT support for each of the coordination mechanisms identified by the framework
The essence of component-based design and coordination
Is there a characteristic of coordination languages that makes them
qualitatively different from general programming languages and deserves special
academic attention? This report proposes a nuanced answer in three parts. The
first part highlights that coordination languages are the means by which
composite software applications can be specified using components that are only
available separately, or later in time, via standard interfacing mechanisms.
The second part highlights that most currently used languages provide
mechanisms to use externally provided components, and thus exhibit some
elements of coordination. However not all do, and the availability of an
external interface thus forms an objective and qualitative criterion that
distinguishes coordination. The third part argues that despite the qualitative
difference, the segregation of academic attention away from general language
design and implementation has non-obvious cost trade-offs.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 3 table
Distributed coordination of self-organizing mechanisms in communication networks
The fast development of the Self-Organizing Network (SON) technology in
mobile networks renders the problem of coordinating SON functionalities
operating simultaneously critical. SON functionalities can be viewed as control
loops that may need to be coordinated to guarantee conflict free operation, to
enforce stability of the network and to achieve performance gain. This paper
proposes a distributed solution for coordinating SON functionalities. It uses
Rosen's concave games framework in conjunction with convex optimization. The
SON functionalities are modeled as linear Ordinary Differential Equation
(ODE)s. The stability of the system is first evaluated using a basic control
theory approach. The coordination solution consists in finding a linear map
(called coordination matrix) that stabilizes the system of SON functionalities.
It is proven that the solution remains valid in a noisy environment using
Stochastic Approximation. A practical example involving three different SON
functionalities deployed in Base Stations (BSs) of a Long Term Evolution (LTE)
network demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed method.Comment: submitted to IEEE TCNS. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap
with arXiv:1209.123
Authority inside the firm: multiple mechanisms of coordination
In the last twenty years, through a growing awareness of contractual incompleteness, the concept of authority has regained primacy in the analysis of the employment relationship. This article pursues two goals. First, we assess the famous controversy between Coase and Alchian and Demsetz via an analysis of the foundations of intra-firm authority. Second, we argue that intra-firm authority cannot hinge on a single variable and, to the contrary, rests on multiple mechanisms. The employer's authority over the employee is therefore not binary āinfinite or null ā and should be understood in terms of degree.authority; firm; incomplete contracts; law and economics
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