This monograph focuses on the use of incomplete contracting models to study transfer pricing. Intrafirm pricing mechanisms affect division managers’ incentives to trade intermediate products and to undertake relationship-specific investments so as to increase the gains from trade. Letting managers negotiate over the transaction is known to cause holdup (underinvestment) problems. Yet, in the ab...

Robotics can contribute significantly to our understanding of the behaviour of organisms because of its emphasis on the role of the body and its physical interactions with the external environment in determining the organism’s behaviour. However, behaviour is the result of the interactions of an organism’s nervous system with both the external environment and the internal environment, i.e. with...

Segmentation and detection of individual actions from a stream of human motion is an open problem in computer vision. This paper analyzes the movements of the crucial points of the human body (hands, feet, head and center of gravity) in order to detect simple actions such as walking, jumping and displacing an object. The crucial points are considered as cooperative agents forming a team (the wh...