a Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 It'enhua Road, Shenyang, 110015 China School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri-Columbia, 203M ABNR Building, Columbia, MO 65211 USA " Department of Forest Ecology and Management, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Dr., Madison, WI 53706 USA R' '-' $a Received 3 September 1999; received in revised form 29 Septem...

In a grid computing environment, it is important to be capable of agilely quantifying the quality of service achievable by each alternative composition of resources. This capability is an essential driver to not only efficiently utilizing the resources but also promoting the virtual economy. In this paper, we design an efficient scheduling algorithm of minimizing completion time for component-b...

We assume that consumer demand for an item follows a Brownian motion with a drift that is modulated by a continuous-time Markov chain that represents the regime of the economy. The economy may be in either one of two regimes. The economy remains in one regime for a random amount of time that is exponentially distributed with rate λ1, and then moves to the other regime and remains there an expon...

Engineering consulting services constitutes a key knowledge-intensive sector that has existed for a long time, but has gained new importance as a result of the intensification of knowledge-based competition. The emergence of the new economy challenges the ways that engineering consultants have traditionally created and applied new knowledge. Professional engineering services have typically been...

Inspired by Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, many economists have postulated the existence of invisible forces that drive economic markets. These market forces interact in complex ways making it difficult to visualize or understand the interactions in every detail. Here I show how these forces can transcend a zero-sum game and become a win-win business interaction, thanks to emergent social syne...

The emergence of profit-based online platforms for the peer-to-peer sharing of consumer goods provides new means for the end users to derive profit from their possessions. The success of these platforms relies heavily on the behavior of their participants. Using an agent-based model simulating these behaviors via different scenarios, we show how these mechanisms are efficient to improve the inf...