Harmful Freedom of Choice: Lessons from the Cellphone Market

This article focuses on the relationship between provider and customer, specifically on the complexity of available contracts in the cellphone market and the ways this complexity might be harmful to consumers. This article aims to elucidate the issues, fleshing them out both as a general phenomenon and as a specific implementation in the cellphone context. The aim is not to provide ultimate solutions, but to show the directions these solutions might take and the difficulties involved

Human-agent collectives

We live in a world where a host of computer systems, distributed throughout our physical and information environments, are increasingly implicated in our everyday actions. Computer technologies impact all aspects of our lives and our relationship with the digital has fundamentally altered as computers have moved out of the workplace and away from the desktop. Networked computers, tablets, phones and personal devices are now commonplace, as are an increasingly diverse set of digital devices built into the world around us. Data and information is generated at unprecedented speeds and volumes from an increasingly diverse range of sources. It is then combined in unforeseen ways, limited only by human imagination. People’s activities and collaborations are becoming ever more dependent upon and intertwined with this ubiquitous information substrate. As these trends continue apace, it is becoming apparent that many endeavours involve the symbiotic interleaving of humans and computers. Moreover, the emergence of these close-knit partnerships is inducing profound change. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines that wait until they are asked before doing anything, we will work in tandem with highly inter-connected computational components that act autonomously and intelligently (aka agents). As a consequence, greater attention needs to be given to the balance of control between people and machines. In many situations, humans will be in charge and agents will predominantly act in a supporting role. In other cases, however, the agents will be in control and humans will play the supporting role. We term this emerging class of systems human-agent collectives (HACs) to reflect the close partnership and the flexible social interactions between the humans and the computers. As well as exhibiting increased autonomy, such systems will be inherently open and social. This means the participants will need to continually and flexibly establish and manage a range of social relationships. Thus, depending on the task at hand, different constellations of people, resources, and information will need to come together, operate in a coordinated fashion, and then disband. The openness and presence of many distinct stakeholders means participation will be motivated by a broad range of incentives rather than diktat. This article outlines the key research challenges involved in developing a comprehensive understanding of HACs. To illuminate this agenda, a nascent application in the domain of disaster response is presented

Does the Doctor Need a Boss?

The traditional model of medical delivery, in which the doctor is trained, respected, and compensated as an independent craftsman, is anachronistic. When a patient has multiple ailments, there is no longer a simple doctor-patient or doctor-patient-specialist relationship. Instead, there are multiple specialists who have an impact on the patient, each with a set of interdependencies and difficult coordination issues that increase exponentially with the number of ailments involved. Patients with multiple diagnoses require someone who can organize the efforts of multiple medical professionals. It is not unreasonable to imagine that delivering health care effectively, particularly for complex patients, could require a corporate model of organization. At least two forces stand in the way of robust competition from corporate health care providers. First is the regime of third-party fee-for-service payment, which is heavily entrenched by Medicare, Medicaid, and the regulatory and tax distortions that tilt private health insurance in the same direction. Consumers should control the money that purchases their health insurance, and should be free to choose their insurer and health care providers. Second, state licensing regulations make it difficult for corporations to design optimal work flows for health care delivery. Under institutional licensing, regulators would instead evaluate how well a corporation treats its patients, not the credentials of the corporation's employees. Alternatively, states could recognize clinician licenses issued by other states. That would let corporations operate in multiple states under a single set of rules and put pressure on states to eliminate unnecessarily restrictive regulations

"System, power, and European monetary integration"

[From the Introduction]. Theories of international relations and comparative politics characterize the movement within Western Europe toward monetary integration primarily in regional terms. The global context within which European monetary integration is taking place is viewed in this literature as having little influence or influence which is only episodic, momentary, or ancillary to other, more primary forces. Regional political integration, regional economic interdependence, sectoral interests within European countries, and strategies of national executives and central bankers are instead given primary emphasis. This article argues, by contrast, that the international system has provided strong incentives for and greatly affected European monetary integration. Changes in and unpredictability of international monetary policies of the United States, in particular, have pushed European governments toward regional monetary integration at several critical historical junctures. Indeed, all of the major successes in monetary integration were closely, and causally, associated with transatlantic monetary conflict and the decline or weakness of the international monetary regime

Internal and External Factors on Firms’ Transfer Pricing Decisions: Insights from Organization Studies

Well understood in economics, accounting, finance, and legal research, transfer pricing has rarely been comprehensively explored in organization management literature. This paper explores some theoretical explanations of transfer pricing within multidivisional firms drawing insights from various organizational theories – primarily institutional theory, transaction cost economics, and social networks – to develop a conceptual model of transfer pricing. This model focuses on the nature of multidivisional firms’ internal transfers, internal and external technological environments, and internal and external social environments. We highlight the importance of transfer pricing as a key strategic dimension to understand intra-firm flows and their associated costs.theory, value, transfer pricing; intra-firm flows, multidivisional firm.

The new political economy of Dirigisme: French macroeconomic policy, unrepentant sinning and the stability and growth pact

This article traces the enduring influence of the dirigiste traditions on contemporary French macroeconomic policy-making, arguing that French policy both within and towards the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) is consistent with long-standing French dirigiste preferences and policy traditions. Specifically it explores how, within the SGP, French governments have created and defended significant fiscal policy space, and how the scope for discretionary policy-making has in fact been enhanced by the credibility accrued through European rule-based governance. Furthermore, it analyses how, in their policies towards the SGP, French governments have successfully influenced the reshaping of the fiscal policy architecture, introducing a more dirigiste interventionism in the interpretation and implementation of the SGP, loosening constraints in accordance with dirigiste preferences. French policy-makers have thus played a 'long-run game' with European economic governance—initially accepting ordo-liberal orthodoxy, only to subsequently 'move the goalposts' in a more dirigiste direction

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Institutions and the Management of Human Resources: Incentive Pay Systems in France and Great Britain

Using data from large-scale establishment surveys in Britain and France, we show that incentive pay for non-managers is more widespread in France than in Britain. We explain this finding in terms of the 'beneficial constraint' arising from stronger employment protection in France, which provides an impulse to develop incentive pay; employer networking activities in France, which facilitate joint learning about its development and operation; and government fiscal incentives for profit-sharing, which reduces the cost of its operation.incentive systems, merit pay, profit-sharing, employer networks