Roughly three decades ago, the political dimensions of decision making about the technological hazards embedded in contemporary societies became publicly visible, provoking the emergence of a new politics of risk. Public controversies about what constituted “acceptable risk,” and who should decide and how, proliferated in a wide range of technical domains. Social movements challenged expert def...

This study focuses on how founding institutions impact intraorganizational capabilities and how such imprints may have different external manifestations in subsequent historical eras. We introduce the concept of exaptation to organizational theory, identifying an important process whereby the historical origin of a capability differs from its current usefulness. Three founding conditions—branch...

In this paper, we present a Capabilities-based Approach to the acceptability and the tolerability of risks posed by natural and man-made hazards. We argue that judgments about the acceptability and/or tolerability of such risks should be based on an evaluation of the likely societal impact of potential hazards, defined in terms of the expected changes in the capabilities of individuals. Capabil...

This paper examines how equity analysts affect corporate liquidity policy and the value of cash. Greater analyst coverage reduces information asymmetry between a firm and outside shareholders and enhances the monitoring process, in turn increasing the value of cash and allowing firms to hold more cash. The cash-to-assets ratio increases by 5.2 percentage points when moving from the bottom analy...

Entities define their own set of rules under which they are willing to collaborate, e.g., interact, share and exchange resources or information with others. Typically, these individual policies differ for different parties. Thus, collaboration requires the resolving of differences and reaching a consensus. This process is generally referred to as policy reconciliation. Current solutions for pol...

The pharmaceutical supply chain is composed of multiple firms interacting to produce and distribute drugs in an uncertain environment. In this work, we develop and validate a multi-agent simulation of the supply chains associated with the pharmaceutical industry. We demonstrate that the operating norms of a particular industry can be accurately represented to create an industry-specific model c...

Portfolios are selected in non-Gaussian contexts to maximize a Cherny and Madan index of acceptability. Analytical gradients are developed for the purpose of optimizing portfolio searches on the unit sphere. It is shown that though an acceptability index is not a preference ordering, many utilities will concur with acceptability maximization. A stylized economy illustrates the advantages from t...