1 What Is Meant by Productivity? 1 The Productivity Dilemma: Balancing Revenues and Costs 2 Shortcomings of a Manufacturing-Oriented Productivity Concept 3 The Interrelationships Between Productivity, Quality, Customer Participation and Demand 6 A Service Productivity Model 8 Is Service Productivity a Productivity Concept? 10 Service Productivity as a Learning Relationship 10 Measuring Service ...

Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived under which the Tit-for-Tat strategy pair is a subgame perfect equilibrium in the standard discounted prisoner's dilemma. The sensitivity of the equilibrium to changes in the discount parameters is shown to be a common feature of all such nontrivial "reactive" equilibria. This appears to rule them out as reasonable solutions to the discounted pris...

We apply the idea of evolution to a spatial model. Prisoners’ dilemmas or coordination games are played repeatedly within neighbourhoods where players do not optimise but instead copy successful strategies. Discriminative behaviour of players is introduced representing strategies as small automata, which can be in different states against different neighbours. Extensive simulations show that co...

Plastic material devices, either arti"cial of biological, should be capable of rapidly modifying their internal state to acquire information and, at the same time, preserve it for long periods (the stability}plasticity dilemma). Here we compare, in a simple and intuitive way, memory stability against noise of two di!erent strategies based, respectively, on fully analog devices that accumulate l...

Collaboration and partnerships prevail in large and complex projects but may incur externalities that encourage deliberate delays and cost overruns. This paper characterizes the externalities under the popular loss-sharing partnership and designs alignment strategies in a project operations context. By integrating the economic theory of teams with project operations specifics on time-cost trade...

We study the properties of the well known Replicator Dynamics when applied to a finitely repeated version of the Prisoners’ Dilemma game. We characterize the behavior of such dynamics under strongly simplifying assumptions (i.e. only 3 strategies are available) and show that the basin of attraction of defection shrinks as the number of repetitions increases. After discussing the difficulties in...