We are most grateful for the comments made by Earl (2014) on our paper, Frey and Gallus (2014). In particular, we are pleased that we can fully agree on the fundamental point we wanted to make: decisions by individuals (as well as by organizational units) do not map directly and in an unchanged way to the macro level. Rather, the aggregation process linking the microand the macro-level must be ...

In 1937, Ronald Coase argued that firms will exist only in environments in which firms perform better than markets could. To create space for firms, Coase suggested that some environments might be plagued by “transaction costs” that cause markets to perform poorly. Coase’s paper was to become the cornerstone of the economic theory of the firm (i.e., the “make or buy” decision: which activities ...

This paper proposes and evaluates a model of supply chains as networks of auctions. In this model, companies are represented according to the first level of the Supply Chain Council’s SCOR model and the trading strategy of the agents is adapted from a model proposed by Steiglitz and colleagues. Specifically, the highest level of SCOR treats a company as comprising three functions, namely Source...

In a programming project, it is easy to lose track of which files need to be reprocessed or recompiled after a change is made in some part of the source. Make provides a simple mechanism for maintaining up-to-date versions of programs that result from many operations on a number of files. It is possible to tell Make the sequence of commands that create certain files, and the list of files that ...

برای دانشجویان و دانشمندان جوان ممکن است این سؤال مطرح گردد که برای دانشمند شدن، کیفیت یا کمیت مقالات یک فرد است که دارای اهمیت می‌باشد؟ شخصاً، بارها با این سؤال به هنگام برگزاری کارگاه‌های مقاله نویسی مواجه شد‌ه‌ام. Salthammer در انتهای سخن سردبیری خود، دو مثال بسیار جالب می‌آورد تا به روشنی به سؤال فوق پاسخ دهد. او در ابتدا به شیمیدان روسی به نام Yuri Struchkov اشاره می‌کند که در سال 1926 میل...