965 research outputs found
Is the Viable System Model of organization inimical to the concept of human freedom?
This paper examines the sensitivity of Stafford Beerâs Viable System Model of organization to the concept of human freedom. The paper notes the many critics who have suggested that the Viable System Model is inimical to human freedom and their especial reference to its application to the social economy of Chile in the early 1970s. Drawing on the work of philosophers, a conceptual analysis of freedom is provided that suggests a complex ordinary language usage of the term. At least three determinants of freedom, that are logically independent of one another, are identified as being of relevance to its ordinary usage. The paper finds that these determinants are implicitly addressed and acknowledged within Beerâs own writings, but that they are ignored by the critics of the Viable System Model and that this makes for a lack of clarity and precision in the debate. The paper also applies a further criterion, formulated in political philosophy, to judge whether the leadership of the government that applied the Viable System Model to the Chilean social economy was itself hostile to political freedom or democracy. This application of the criterion suggests that they were not
Speculation in Standard Auctions with Resale
In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculatorâa bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of inefficient equilibria in which the speculator wins the auction and makes positive profits. First-price and Dutch auctions have an essentially unique equilibrium, and whether or not the speculator wins the auction and distorts the final allocation depends on the number of bidders, the value distribution, and the discount factor. Speculators do not make profits in first-price or Dutch auctions
Stafford Beer in memoriam â âan argument of changeâ three decades on.
Purpose
This paper is written in memory of the late Stafford Beer. The paper engages with only one dimension of the whole man: Stafford Beer as the diagnostician and prognostician of the social conditions that he so keenly observed.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper revisits a talk that Stafford Beer gave, over three decades ago, to administrators of the UK National Health Service (NHS). It uses the content of the talk, entitled âHealth and Quiet Breathingâ, to diagnose the problems that have been encountered in the development of NHS information management strategies. The paper concludes with some brief personal recollections of Stafford Beer as a friend and as a teacher.
Findings
The paper finds Stafford Beerâs managerial cybernetics to be a useful tool in understanding many of the problems that have beset NHS information management strategies: lack of operational research, problems in the commodification of information, financial scandal, and bureaucracy. In its examination of these issues, the paper recognises Stafford Beerâs status as a legatee of not only Norbert Wiener, but also of the great philosophers.
Value
The paper demonstrates how the problem-orientation of Stafford Beerâs managerial cybernetics continues to be fresh and relevant to todayâs society and provides a brief portrait of him both as a friend and as a teacher
Electromagnetism, metric deformations, ellipticity and gauge operators on conformal 4-manifolds
On Riemannian signature conformal 4-manifolds we give a conformally invariant
extension of the Maxwell operator on 1-forms. We show the extension is in an
appropriate sense injectively elliptic, and recovers the invariant gauge
operator of Eastwood and Singer. The extension has a natural compatibility with
the de Rham complex and we prove that, given a certain restriction, its
conformally invariant null space is isomorphic to the first de Rham cohomology.
General machinery for extending this construction is developed and as a second
application we describe an elliptic extension of a natural operator on
perturbations of conformal structure. This operator is closely linked to a
natural sequence of invariant operators that we construct explictly. In the
conformally flat setting this yields a complex known as the conformal
deformation complex and for this we describe a conformally invariant Hodge
theory which parallels the de Rham result.Comment: 30 pages, LaTe
Speculation in Standard Auctions with Resale
In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator - a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of inefficient equilibria in which the speculator wins the auction and makes positive profits. First-price and Dutch auctions have an essentially unique equilibrium, and whether or not the speculator wins the auction and distorts the final allocation depends on the number of bidders, the value distribution, and the discount factor. Speculators do not make profits in first-price or Dutch auctions.standard auctions, speculation, resale, efficiency
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