Funding natural monopoly infrastructure expansion: auctions versus regulated uniform access prices

Journal of Regulatory Economics - This paper characterizes equilibrium behavior in an auction where firms bid a unit price in order to fund and gain access to a new piece of infrastructure. Firms...     

Social capital,knowledge sharing,and innovation capability: an empirical study of R&D teams in Iran

Effectively encouraging employees to share valuable knowledge can increase and sustain a firm's competitive advantages. This study adopted an integrated approach to understand casual relationships among knowledge sharing (KS) enablers (social capital factors), mechanism of forming KS behaviours (knowledge collecting and knowledge donating) through individuals’ KS intention, and KS outcome (innovation capability) within research and development teams. The research model was developed by reviewing literature and tested with survey data collected from 230 employees in multiple companies in Iran. Results of partial least squares analysis indicated that social interaction ties (as a structural capital factor), trust, reciprocity, and team identification (as relational capital factors) significantly associated with KS intention. KS intention, in turn, was significantly related to KS behaviours (knowledge colleting and knowledge donating). In addition, findings revealed that members’ willingness to collect and donate knowledge can affect team innovation capability. This study also discusses the implications for fostering social capital and KS behaviours to enhance team innovation capability.     

Negotiating Complex Contracts

Work to date on computational models of negotiation has focused almost exclusively on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-optimal social welfares for negotiations with binary issue dependencies.     

Enhancing the quality of municipality services using four-dimensional house of quality

Quality & Quantity - In some organizations, there are various departments, each having customers with different wants. The purpose of this research is to use a new tool named 4-Dimensional...     

A causal relationship between trade efficiency and economic efficiency: Evidence from dynamic simultaneous equations models

The objective of this study is to examine the causal relationship between economic efficiency and trade efficiency using dynamic panel data in simultaneous equations models for global panel of 50 countries over the period 2000–2014. The study also implements this interrelationship for two groups of countries based on their level of development. Two models applying different factors reflecting countries’ economic and trade policies are proposed to measure the targeted efficiencies using data envelopment analysis method. Evidence from the simultaneous equations models to identify a relationship between economic efficiency and trade efficiency supports the bidirectional causality between them in all three categories of countries. It has been also found that both economic and institutional factors have a significant positive influence on trade and growth performance, with the effect of political factors being especially pronounced for developing countries that suffer from weak institutional capacity. These empirical findings are of particular interest to policy-makers as they help to build sound policies in order to maximize trade performance as well as economic efficiency.