This survey characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordination from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations research, economics, linguistics, and psychology. A key insight of the framework presented here is that coordination can be seen as the process of managing dependencies among activities. Further progress, therefore, should be possible by characterizing different kinds of dependencies and identifying the coordination processes that can be used to manage them. A variety of processes are analyzed from this perspective, and commonalities across disciplines are identified. Processes analyzed include those for managing shared resources, producer/consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and tank/subtask dependencies. Section 3 summarizes ways of applying a coordination perspective in three different domains: (1) understanding the effects of information technology on human organizations and markets, (2) designing cooperative work tools, and (3) designing distributed and parallel computer systems. In the final section, elements of a research

This paper develops a unified growth model that captures the historical evolution of population, technology, and output. It encompasses the endogenous transition between three regimes that have characterized economic development. The economy evolves from a Malthusian regime, where technological progress is slow and population growth prevents any sustained rise in income per capita, into a Post-Malthusian regime, where technological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth. Ultimately, a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth, and the economy enters a Modern Growth regime with reduced population growth and sustained income growth. (JEL J13, O11, O33, O40) This paper analyzes the historical evolution of the relationship between population growth, technological change, and the standard of living. It develops a unified model that encompasses the transition between three distinct regimes that have characterized the process of

Will the Internet redefine the "core" and the "periphery," creating a new geography, with neighborhoods connected not with streams and roads but with wires and microwave transmissions? An analogy to previous transportation and communications improvements is frequently made today: the transportation revolution of the 20 century permitted the deagglomeration of much physical production, and the Internet will now permit the deagglomeration of the intellectual and immaterial activities of the economy. But this analogy is faulty, and its historical reasoning inaccurate. In this paper, we first point out that at the end of the 20 Century most exchanges of physical goods take place within geographically defined neighborhoods. Previous rounds of infrastructure improvement always had a double effect, permitting decentralization of certain activities while actually reinforcing the attraction of cities for others. This is because all technologies of economic transactions increase the complexity and timeliness of interactions, making possible new forms of variety and differentiation of outputs. This is then reflected in more complex intermediate divisions of labor, or overall roundaboutness of the economy. Many of the transactions required by such an economy are dependent on what we call "handshake" interactions, not mere "conversational" interactions, which are the kind made feasible at a distance by the Internet. Hence, the Internet , all the while permitting the further locational deconcentration of certain routinized activities will also participate in reinforcing the need for urban concentration as the principal means to carry out "handshaking" in the complex, variety-based parts of the economy whose development it will encourage.

In this paper, we investigate how corporate governance impacts firm value by examining both the value and the use of cash holdings in poorly and well governed firms. Cash represents a large and growing fraction of corporate assets and generally is at the discretion of management. We use several measures of corporate governance and show that governance has a substantial impact on firm value through its impact on cash: $1.00 of cash in a poorly governed firm is valued by the market at only $0.42 to $0.88, depending on the measure of governance. Good governance approximately doubles this value of cash. Furthermore, governance has a significant impact on how firms use cash. We show that firms with poor corporate governance dissipate cash quickly and in ways that significantly reduce operating performance. This negative impact of large cash holdings on future operating performance is cancelled out if the firm is well governed. All of our results hold after controlling for the level of acquisitions undertaken by cash rich firms, indicating that acquisitions are not solely responsible for the value destruction in poorly governed, cash rich firms. The findings presented in this paper provide direct evidence of how governance can improve or destroy firm value and insight into the importance of

The paper examines the relationship between cooperative work and the wider organizational context. The purpose of the exploration is not to contribute to organizational theory in general, but to critique the transaction cost approach to organizational theory from the point of view of cooperative work. The paper posits that the formal conception of organization – organization conceived of in terms of ‘common ownership ’ – is inadequate as a conceptual foundation for embedding CSCW systems in a wider organizational context. The design of CSCW systems for real-world application must move beyond the bounds of organizational forms conceived of in terms of ‘common ownership’. THE PROBLEM The current comprehensive transformation of the political

This research develops an evolutionary growth theory that captures the interplay between the evolution of mankind and economic growth since the emergence of the human species. This uni¯ed theory encompasses the observed evolution of population, technology and income per capita in the long transition from an epoch of Malthusian stagnation to sustained economic growth. The theory suggests that prolonged economic stagnation prior to the transition to sustained growth stimulated natural selection that shaped the evolution of the human species, whereas the evolution of the human species was the origin of the take-o ® from an epoch of stagnation to sustained growth.

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Bank of England. I would like to thank Colin Ellis, Simon Hall, Ian Small and Mark Walsh for the joint work on which this paper draws. I would also like to thank Andrew Haldane, Mervyn King, Peter Westaway, participants at Bank of England seminars, and the anonymous referee for helpful comments. Finally, I would like to thank Jim Thame, Kee Law and James Boxall for their excellent research assistance, and Janet Rayment for help in typing the final document. Issued by the Bank of England, London, EC2R 8AH to which requests for individual copies should be addressed: envelopes should be marked for the attention of Publications Group

Abstract. We simulate a multiagent market with production, consumption, and exchange mediated by a sealed-bid double auction. Marked price bubbles and subsequent crashes occur when valuebased (fundamentals-driven) and trend-based traders are both present, and the market equilibrium price is ramped up exogenously. Similarly, negative price bubbles and recoveries occur when the equilibrium price is ramped down. Because the simulated market is auction-mediated, we can observe the operations of traders during these events, and study the interactions that produce and resolve bubbles. Some preliminary circuit-breaker experiments are described, in which bubbles are interrupted during their formation. Key words: negative price bubbles, price bubbles, auction-mediated robot market. 1.

It is remarkable to think that even without any interest in finding suitable methods and concepts that would allow complex software systems to evolve and remain manageable, the ever growing open source movement has silently managed to establish highly successful evolution techniques over the last two decades. These concepts represent best practices that could be applied equally to a number of today 's most crucial problems concerning the evolution of complex commercial software systems. In this paper, the authors state and explain some of these principles from the perspective of experienced open source developers, and give the rationale as to why the highly dynamic "free software development process", as a whole, is entangled with constantly growing code bases and changing project sizes, and how it deals with these successfully.