Who drives climate-relevant policies in the rising powers?

The future of human life on our planet is influenced increasingly by what goes on in the rising powers. This paper provides a political economy analysis of the climate-relevant policies of China, India, Brazil and South Africa. It shows that alliances play a key role in driving such policies. However, most actors who support such policies have priorities other than climate change mitigation. Their support for such policies comes from concerns with securing energy, building competitive green industries, creating jobs or providing a basis for future public revenue. This insight is not just of analytical but also of political importance. It means that climate-relevant policies can draw on support from a wide constituency – not just those with green convictions. Such analysis provides the stepping-stone for understanding the political feasibility of low-carbon transformations.     

How to seek and destroy the root of quality inconsistency

Quality inconsistency, whether it exists in products, processes, communication, or services, should serve as a red flag signaling a need to make improvements. More consistency in the workplace can only come through the continual refining of performance. In order for "continual improvement" to become part of the company culture, each person in the organization needs to understand and apply a disciplined step-by-step approach to change. All effective, lasting change comes from the use of problem solving and an effective change process.     

Speed and quality of collective decision making: Imperfect information processing

This paper studies efficient programmed hierarchies as introduced by Radner [The organization of decentralized information processing, Econometrica 61(5) (1993) 1109-1146] in which agents cannot process information perfectly. A group of P identical managers has to make a choice between n alternatives. In order to learn which is the best option, the alternatives have to be compared. The evaluation of an alternative takes time and managers are only able to identify the better one of two alternatives with a positive probability. The skip-level reporting tree proposed by Radner is found to be efficient in terms of the dimensions decision cost, decision delay, and decision quality.