LOGISTICS SALIENCE IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT

The primary purpose of this paper was to empirically explore some of the reasons that logistics has become more important, or salient, in comparison to other functions within the firm. A survey of 296 managers across multiple industries in the U.S. found logistics becomes more important within the firm when the industry increases in uncertainty, when there is an emphasis on time‐based competition, when there is greater adoption of information technology, and when there is an emphasis on cross‐functional integration.     

Technology,science and American innovation

This article offers for consideration four propositions about business, government, and innovation in the post-World War Two United States, points which may have a wider resonance as well. They concern the long term role of continuous innovation, technology–science relationships, state-led problem setting for innovation, and the ‘permanent uncertainties’ that arise from Cold War-era technological advance. Each of these has implications for the practice of business history, for conceptualizing innovation, and for our understanding of post-war science–technology trajectories.     

Historical resources, uncertainty and preservation values: An application of option and optimal stopping models

State agencies and private historical organizations frequently acquire historical sites with unknown characteristics. In this paper, we provide two approaches to evaluating the preservation decision. In the first approach, we show that a historical site which is not permanently preserved provides citizens with a certain flexibility whose value can be measured as an option on the maximum between the current real estate value and the preservation value. In the second approach, we assume that the organization has an infinite planning horizon and chooses the optimal sale date. Using a contingent valuation estimate of the public's willingness to pay for preservation of a specific historical site and the real estate price, we provide simulation values of the preservation option value and the optimal stopping rule.     

Annual Meeting of the Catholic Economic Association

This paper attempts to demonstrate that Keynes's practical writings on the crisis in the Lancashire cotton spinning industry in the 1920s were consistent with the 1930s theoretical conceptualisation of user costs in the General Theory. It is suggested that the key (common) link between these analyses is Keynes's concern with how uncertainty is distributed, in specific historical circumstances, between institutions at the levels of the firm, industry, the industry-financial institution interface, and the local and global economies. It is this concern which still has important, if not more, research and policy relevance today.     

论项目投资评价中的时间风险值效应及其选择

基于现行现金流折现的项目投资评价的有效性取决于对项目现金流量预测的正确性,而项目现金流量具有预测发生的时间越遥远,现金流量不确定性的程度越大但又趋于相对稳定的特征.从这一特征出发,本文引入时间风险值进行折现调整这种系统可循的方法来解决在投资评价时难以预计的项目现金流量未来的不确定性问题,从而使不确定性条件下的项目投资评价更具有客观性.