The New Economy is dead,long live the information economy

The arrival of the 2001–2003 recession caused many to suppose that the so-called “New Economy” was now defunct. This article addresses a number of related issues, including the question of the durability and viability of business cycles in the face of the technological developments of the information age. It asks what went wrong with the New Economy and examines its characteristics as well as its remaining possibilities and prospects for the future. Finally, it considers the spread of the Information Economy to Europe, especially to Germany, the country that one might expect to be the leading European player, but which is not at present actually a strong competitor for that role.     

Marginal distributions of sequential and generalized order statistics

Expressions for marginal distribution functions of sequential order statistics and generalized order statistics are presented without any restrictions imposed on the model parameters. The results are related to the relevation transform, to the distribution of the product of Beta distributed random variables, and to Meijers G-functions. Some selected applications in the areas of moments, conditional distributions, recurrence relations, and reliability properties are shown. Key words:Order statistics; Generalized order statistics; Sequential order statistics; Record values; Distribution theory; Meijers G-function; Recurrence relations; Reliability properties.     

Reduced Form Auctions Revisited

This note uses the Theorem of the Alternative to prove new results on the implementability of general, asymmetric auctions, and to provide simpler proofs of known results for symmetric auctions. The tradeoff is that type spaces are taken to be finite.     

Do norms of decision-making styles,organizational design and management affect performance of Japanese firms? an exploratory study of medium and large firms

The success and resilience of Japanese firms have led many scholars and practitioners to theorize and speculate about the impact of what they have termed the 'Japanese management style' upon performance. There have been few studies that have attempted to explore empirically the links between the way Japanese firms organize, manage and decide, and their performance. This paper investigates the association between norms of decision-making style, organizational design and management, and some measures of firm performance. The empirical pattern of norms was assessed on the basis of responses of a random sample (N = 349) of Japanese managers. The study demonstrates that while there appears to be no support for the proposition that certain norms universally affect performance, in some sectors the impacts of norms on decision-making style, organizational design and management may be significant. The study concludes with the implications for theory building of this empirical exploration.