Scholars have debated the manner in which religious beliefs influence economic organization. This paper examines a particular case–the craft guilds of medieval England–to show how religious doctrines influence the ability of a group to enforce cooperation. When mortality rates are high, repeated interaction alone cannot sustain cooperation, but spiritual sanctions in the afterlife can sustain c...

Open, distributed and multi-party systems provide an infrastructure on which electronic transactions between organizations can be performed, pervading social and political boundaries to facilitate the realization of novel organizational paradigms. Electronic transactions are, though, prone to uncertainty amongst organizations and which can lead to a perception of vulnerability to exploitative b...

Social organization among human foragers is characterized by a three-generational system of resource provisioning within families, long-term pair-bonding between men and women, high levels of cooperation between kin and non-kin, and relatively egalitarian social relationships. In this paper, we suggest that these core features of human sociality result from the learning- and skill-intensive hum...

"Environmental health" and "multidimensional development process" are two concepts that have been used and discussed since the last two decades within different conceptual frameworks. The present paper presents and discusses an interpretation concerning the interconnection between these two concepts in line with the integrated approach to health of environmental epidemiology and the multidimens...

despite the existence of vigorous theoretical basis lor cooperatives little attention has been paid to it in iran. at the same time, little use has been made of the quantitative models for analyzing the efiects and impacts of cooprative activities in economic literature. in this study, followed by a review of literature on cooperaion theory, a simple quantitative model was examined. this model ...

Coastal cities in China are challenged by multiple growth paths and strategies related to demands in the housing market, economic growth and eco-system protection. This paper examines the effects of conflicting strategies between economic growth and environmental protection on future urban scenarios in Ningbo, China, through logistic-regression-based cellular automata (termed LogCA) modeling. T...

Eco-innovation is any innovation that leads to sustainable development by limiting the negative impact of production activities on the environment, increasing the resilience of nature to loads or ensuring greater efficiency and responsibility in the use of natural resources. Eco-innovations are the opportunity for enterprises. Their introduction contributes to reducing the costs of doing busine...

XML-based frameworks or industry standatrds for Internet Commerce are rapidly launched and changed. The contribution of this paper is to increase the understanding and facilitate comparison and evaluation of the most commonly refered framworks. The paper provides a survey of the architecture and message definition of BizTalk, cXML, eCo Framework, ICE (Information and Content Exchange), IOTP (In...