INTERORGANIZATIONAL COOPERATION: THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AN EMPERECAL COMPARISON OF US AND JAPANESE SUPPLIER RELATIONS

This paper investigates the comparative role of several factors, including information technology (IT), predicting the level of cooperation between two independent organizations. Drawing upon multiple theoretical perspectives, we develop five hypotheses about the impact on interorganizational cooperation of three sets of factors: (1) the characteristics of the environment withm which the relationship operates, (2) the characteristics of the relationship itself, and (3) the characteristics of how IT is used within the relationship. Each of these conceptual constructs is operationalized and measured within the specific context of buyer-supplier relationships in the automobile industry. The hypotheses are tested across two national settings (the US and Japan) using multiple regression analyzes conducted on a data set of 447 distinct relationships. The results indicate that the use of IT and the characteristics of the environment do not play the same role in explaining interorganizational cooperation in the two country settings, while in both countries the characteristics of the relationship significantly contribute to change in 112

Fair Bandwidth Sharing Algorithms Based on Game Theory Frameworks for Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

This paper examines the theoretical aspects of bandwidth sharing in wireless, possibly mobile, ad-hoc networks (MANETs) through a game theoretic framework. It presents some applications to show how such a framework can be invoked to design efficient media access control protocols in a noncooperative, self-organized, topology-blind environment as well as in environments where the competing nodes share some basic information to guide their choice of channel access policies. For this purpose, contentions between concurrent links in a MANET are represented by a conflict graph, and each maximal clique in the graph defines a contention context which in turn imposes a constraint on the share of bandwidth that the links in the clique can obtain. Using this approach the fair bandwidth allocation problem is modeled as a general utility based constrained maximization problem, called the system problem, which is shown to admit a unique solution that can only be obtained when global coordination between all links is possible. By using Lagrange relaxation and duality theory, both a non-cooperative and a cooperative game formulation of the problem are derived. The corresponding mathematical algorithms to solve the two games are also provided where there is no need for global information. Implementation issues of the algorithms are also considered. Finally, simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithms

Board representation in international joint ventures

Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier

Treatment use in a prospective naturalistic cohort of children and adolescents with catatonia

Abstract We aimed to (1) describe the treatment used in a large sample of young inpatients with catatonia, (2) determine which factors were associated with improvement and (3) benzodiazepine (BZD) efficacy. From 1993From to 2011 patients between the ages of 9 and 19 years were consecutively hospitalized for a catatonic syndrome. We prospectively collected sociodemographic, clinical and treatment data. In total, 51 (77 %) patients underwent a BZD trial. BZDs were effective in 33 (65 %) patients, who were associated with significantly fewer severe adverse events (p = 0.013) and resulted in fewer referrals for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) (p = 0.037). Other treatments included ECT (N = 12, 18 %); antipsychotic medications, mostly in combination; and treatment of an underlying medical condition, when possible. For 10 patients, four different trials were needed to achieve clinical improvement. When all treatments were combined, there was a better clinical response in acute-onset catatonia (p = 0.032). In contrast, the response was lower in boys (p = 0.044) and when posturing (p = 0.04) and mannerisms (p = 0.008) were present as catatonic symptoms. The treatment response was independent of the underlying psychiatric or systemic medical condition. As in adults, BZDs should be the first-line symptomatic treatment for catatonia in young patients, and ECT should be a second option. Additionally, the absence of an association between the response to treatment and the underlying psychiatric condition suggests that catatonia should be considered as a syndrome