We have benefited from our discussions with Kristian Kreiner, Paul Hirsch and Roger Dunbar. We have also benefited from inputs that were offered by participants at the Path Dependence and Creation workshop,

accuracy issues more directly. Moreover, this research attracts a great deal of attention because of what many take to be its dismal implications for the accuracy of human social reasoning. These implications are illusory, however, because an error is not the same thing as a "mistake. " An error is a judgment of an experimental stimulus that departs from a model of the judgment process. If this model is normative, then the error can be said to represent an incorrect judgment. A mistake, by contrast, is an incorrect judgment of a real-world stimulus and therefore more difficult to determine. Although errors can be highly informative about the process of judgment in general, they are not necessarily relevant to the content or accuracy of particular judgments, because errors in a laboratory may not be mistakes with respect to a broader, more realistic frame of reference and the processes that produce such errors might lead to correct decisions and adaptive outcomes in real life. Several examples are described in this article. Accuracy issues cannot be addressed by research that concentrates on demonstrating error in relation to artificial stimuli, but only by research that uses external, realistic criteria for accuracy. These criteria might include the degree to which judgments agree with each other and yield valid predictions of behavior. The accuracy of human social judgment is a topic of obvious

Understanding how organisations make decisions is a crucial step towards understanding organisations. Seeing

This article reviews shortcomings in the synoptic, or rational comprehensive planning tradition, as well as in other, countervailing theories that have attempted to fill specific deficiencies in the synoptic tradition. The chief problem of the synoptic approach appears to be its lopsided application due to the difficulties of simultaneously bringing to bear other counterpart planning traditions. Each tradition resists blending with others; each has its own internally consistent, mutually sustaining web of methods, social philosophies, professional standards, and personal styles. Yet real world problems are not so consistent or self-contained. Effective solutions require diverse perspectives and multiple levels of action,

For over a century, nations ’ telecommunications networks ─ whether privately or publicly owned ─ were established and maintained under monopoly regulatory regimes. In recent years, many nations have been transitioning from monopoly to competitive regimes and their telecommunications sectors are experiencing rapid rates of

The airport industry is changing. Once understood as stand-alone public infrastructures, many modern airports now operate within privatized multi-airport systems and contend with previously unknown competitive pressures. As a result, many of the same airports which once enjoyed natural monopolies and government protections must now compete with secondary facilities both for airline patronage and for passenger traffic. Further, changes in the airline industry such as the success of the low-cost carrier, ongoing consolidation, and possible changes to the hub structure now threaten to impose new demands on airport services. In this environment, airport owners are being made to tackle not only significant uncertainty in traffic levels and passenger demand but also the sometimes conflicting needs of varying airline customers. By referencing the experiences of airports across Europe and the US, this paper seeks to highlight strategies for confronting these uncertainties. In particular, research conclusions focus on providing flexible responses that may prove useful given the continued growth of multi-airport systems, expansion of low-cost carriers, and associated

Performance Excellence (CPE) have played a significant role in the practice of quality management, researchers have been slow to embrace the CPE framework. By viewing the CPE as an integrative model of organizational effectiveness that encompasses a number of cross-functional disciplines, one is led to speculate that a large body of literature relevant to the CPE framework exists. Indirectly, through their functional research, scholars from a variety of disciplines have been investigating the theoretical issues that embody the CPE. This article compares the strategic planning category of the CPE against the scholarly literature. The planning framework embedded in the CPE aligns considerably with the conceptual literature on strategic planning. These findings suggest some validity for the CPE framework, which demonstrates the translation of research into managerial practice and might inspire further research. Key words: action plans, long-range planning, strategy deployment, strategy development The Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (CPE) are designed to help organizations enhance competitiveness through the delivery of everimproving value to customers and improvements of overall organizational performance and capabilities. The CPE serve as a basis for organizational self-assessments, as well as the basis for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Numerous state and local agencies (Bobrowski and Bantham 1994) and other countries (Powell 1995) have adopted similar award frameworks. As such, the CPE have attracted considerable industry interest. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which manages the National Quality Program

Software architecture evaluation involves evaluating different architecture design alternatives against multiple quality-attributes. These attributes typically have intrinsic conflicts and must be considered simultaneously in order to reach a final design decision. AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), an important decision making technique, has been leveraged to resolve such conflicts. AHP can help provide an overall ranking of design alternatives. However it lacks the capability to explicitly identify the exact tradeoffs being made and the relative size of these tradeoffs. Moreover, the ranking produced can be sensitive such that the smallest change in intermediate priority weights can alter the final order of design alternatives. In this paper, we propose several in-depth analysis techniques applicable to AHP to identify critical tradeoffs and sensitive points in the decision process. We apply our method to an example of a real-world distributed architecture presented in the literature. The results are promising in that they make important decision consequences explicit in terms of key design tradeoffs and the architecture's capability to handle future quality attribute changes. These expose critical decisions which are otherwise too subtle to be detected in standard AHP results.

Recent studies indicate that bureaucrats and citizens are beginning to appreciate the opportunities and constraints for applications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for governance. Using the data collected from independently administered random surveys of citizens and bureaucrats in late 2001 by Hart-Teeter, this essay is designed to explore whether and how citizen and bureaucrat perspectives on egovernment coincide and/or diverge in terms of the effectiveness of e-government and pace of e-government implementation, equity (e.g. access), and safety (e.g. privacy and security).

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