Recent years have seen high levels of turbulence; companies that were market leaders a decade ago have in many cases encountered severe reversals of fortune. Rapid advances and complexity in technology, and the accompanying growing uncertainty in the business environment have brought about mergers and takeovers, and these have changed the shape of many markets. Traditional barriers betwee…
The metaphor of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants expresses the meaning of discovering truth by building on previous discoveries. Although it is originally attributed to Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century, Isaac Newton popularized the concept in 1676. The concept is as relevant for us today as it was for Newton in the seventeenth century. Since the early 1980s, pioneering…
This book is about an anomaly in political scientists’ understanding of congressional policy making. Distributive politics theory, which has been called the dominant theoretical approach to congressional politics (Krehbiel 1991), purports to account for the geographic distribution of the benefits of any policy that is paid for from general tax revenues and can be subdivided easily and al…
Why countries engage in military conflict, hostile relations, arms buildup, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a question that has attracted the attention of a number of analysts. Theories ranging from security concerns to the bureaucratic imperative have been expounded to explain this particular behavior. Such issues have become increasingly important, especially since th…
Authors usually struggle with finding the right way of presenting the subject matter of their book, because it is not an easy job to guide the readers through a large number of closely interrelated issues in a really effective and enjoyable manner. This is particularly true in case of addressing procurement since many of the work processes to be described are of iterative nature. It means …
Over the last couple of years, e-procurement has received tremendous attention from researchers and practitioners alike. However, research on e-procurement is still scarce and scattered. This chapter looks into prior research on inter-organizational information systems (IOIS), electronic data interchange (EDI), channel management, and procurement to develop a research framework and identif…
There are many ways to perform abdominal organ procurement (1–19). In this book, I describe the abdominal multiorgan procurement operation, which is performed on a hemodynamically stable, brain death donor. Brain death is defined as a complete, irreversible, and permanent cessation of electric activity of the brain, including the brain stem. The donor is defined as a heart-beating donor (…
To most hospitality students, the term “purchasing” means paying for an item or service. This conveys a far too restrictive meaning because it fails to suggest the complete scope of the buying function. Perhaps the terms “selection” and “procurement” are better. “Selection” can be defined as choosing from among various alternatives on various levels. For example, a buyer ca…
There is not a single job in the hospitality industry that does not involve purchasing in one way or another. A flight attendant must keep careful inventories of bottled water and soft drinks to know how much to request for restocking. The manager of a hotel must be able to find the best price for laundry detergent in a reasonable quantity for her size operation. An accountant for a hotel c…
This paper discusses the types of property investment vehicles available, high-lights the different valuation techniques used for direct and indirect property investments, and looks at the implications for property investment vehicles and valuation techniques. It discusses the opportunities and threats facing chartered surveyors given the changing nature of the property market. Keywords: …
This monograph examines the domain of classical political economy using the method- ologies developed in recent years both by the new discipline of econo-physics and by computing science. This approach is used to re-examine the classical subdivisions of political economy: production, exchange, distribution and finance. The book begins by examining the most basic feature of economic life – pr…
A search for “human ecology” on the Google search engine produces an over- whelming 55 million results. A more traditional academic search, at the University of California, Berkeley library produces 903 references, which are scattered in various libraries ranging from Bioscience to Business and Economics and Environmental Design. Textbooks proposing to summarize this field include the early…
Would you rather live in a world without blood transfusions or a world without maritime insurance? Blood transfusions are dramatic and memorable (which is why we see them on prime-time hospital shows), while the facilitation of commerce through risk sharing is routine and easily taken for granted. But I'd be willing to bet that by almost any measure, three centuries of organized insurance marke…
In the last two decades there has been a flourishing of research carried out jointly by economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. This meltdown of barriers between competences has led toward original approaches to investigate the mental and cognitive mechanisms involved in the way the economic agent collects, processes, and uses information to make choices. This research field involves …
This book looks at the specific institutional arrangements and the policy choices that underpin the management of public finances in the Latin American and Caribbean region. It draws primarily from a sample of publicly available Country Financial Accountability Assessments and Country Procurement Assessment Reports undertaken at regular intervals by the World Bank and its development partn…
This book has been written in order to contribute to the debate about best practice in construction procurement. At the outset it should be made plain that the authors do not subscribe to the view that there is any such thing as best practice. The main argument in this book is that there can never be a best practice, only better practice, in construction procurement. The reason for arrivi…
One clearly evident dimension is research. Certain authors introduce quite new intellectual approaches into scientific debate. This requires a special frame of mind and a searching curiosity about social reality. Carl Gustav Jung identified a phenomenon which he called systematic blindness: when a science reaches a stage of maturity and equilibrium, it categorically refuses, from a sense of sel…
Public procurement and competition law are both important fields of EU law and policy, intimately intertwined in the creation of the internal market. Hitherto their close connection has been noted, but not closely examined. Th is work is the most comprehensive attempt to date to explain the many ways in which these fields, oft en considered independent of one another, interact and overlap i…
'Building procurement' has become a fashionable subject. It seems that hardly a week goes by without my receiving a note that a student is writing a dissertation on an apparently new angle to the subject or that a course, conference, seminar or whatever is offering to explain the challenge of con struction procurement now and in the future. Consultancies and contractors who should know bet…
The standard approach to the legal foundations of corporate governance is based on the view that corporate law promotes separation of ownership and control by protecting non-controlling shareholders from expropriation. This book takes a broader perspective by showing that investor protection is a necessary, but not sufficient, legal condition for the efficient separation of ownership and contro…
An essential question to ask before embarking on any exercise or enterprise beyond that of the transitory or trivial is 'Why?' An exercise, that is a set of movements, tasks and so on designed to train, improve or test abilities may perhaps be transitory or trivial especially to those not involved. But an enterprise, that is a project or undertaking especially one requiring boldness or eff…
Have you ever wondered about the meaning of a word, a phrase, or an acronym in international economics? I often do. So I have looked them up, written their definitions, and listed these in a glossary that I have assembled over the last several years on my web site. With that I have frequently been able to refresh my own failing memory, since having written the definitions, I often forget them…
The material in the main text ranges from a revision of high-school mathematics to applications of calculus (single-variate, multivariate and integral) to economics and finance. For example: linear and quadratic functions are introduced in the context of demand and supply analysis; geometric sequences, exponential and logarithmic functions are introduced in the context of finance; single-variat…
In this book, we synthesize a rich and vast literature on econometric challenges associated with accounting choices and their causal effects. Identification and esti- mation of endogenous causal effects is particularly challenging as observable data are rarely directly linked to the causal effect of interest. A common strategy is to employ logically consistent probability assessment via Bayes…
This is a collection of my main essays on econometric methodology from the period 1974– 85 during which the approach developed into its present form, integrated by a commentary on the motivations, personalities and ideas central to its formalization. Sue Corbett of Blackwell Publishers initiated the idea of drawing together the main steps through which the methodology had evolved,since a deve…
Starbucks’, the Seattle-based coffee store mission is to inspire and nurture the human spirit: one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time. The company is well-known for its ethical sourcing of coffee from farmers all over the world, environmental stewardship (by 2015 all cups will be reusable or recyclable), and community involvement through volunteer work in neighborhoods wh…
The proposition that the economic and social wellbeing of society, and those in it, is substantially dependent on the effective and efficient performance of organisations of all kinds, that this in turn depends on adequate or excellent management and leadership capability, and that this in turn can be learnt and developed, would be accepted by many as likely to be true in common sense and e…