The growing tension between China and a number of countries in Southeast Asia over the contested waters of the South China Sea has become one of the biggest potential flashpoints in the region—thus, a good indicator to use in testing the “China threat.” Concurrently, America’s handling of this “Asian problem” is becoming a litmus test for the future status of US primacy as the nation faces cruc...

The most influential approach of corporate governance, the view of shareholders’ supremacy does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the interests of top management and directors should be increasingly aligned to shareholder’ interests by...

Machine loading problem in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) encompasses various types of flexibility aspects pertaining to part selection and operation assignments. The evolution of flexible manufacturing systems offers great potential for increasing flexibility by ensuring both cost-effectiveness and customized manufacturing at the same time. This paper proposes a linear mathematical prog...

Public sector agencies are an important front in the day-to-day battle for political supremacy between the executive and the legislature. The executive’s key agents in this conflict are his appointees, who frequently play one of two roles: Congressional allies, where they help Congress implement policy and Congressional adversaries, where they fight with Congress to shift policy strongly toward...

Most of the research in comparative corporate governance has, implicitly or explicitly, taken the US as benchmark. But recent corporate scandals, such as Enron and Worldcom, question this alleged supremacy. What went wrong? In this chapter we claim that the problem is not just lack of appropriate disclosure or legislation, but a more fundamental one: deficient incentives for the media to expose...

The study investigates consumers’ preference for cowpea reflected in the Nigerian markets through price discounts and premiums that consumers pay for different cowpea characteristics. The price data used for this study were obtained through a market survey. A common data collection protocol was employed. Every month, between October 2009 to December 2010, five cowpea samples per seller were bou...