This study comes to grips with the industrial outranking problem, one of the major outstanding problems of current operations research and managerial decision-making. The problem, simply stated, is this: given a large but finite set of criteria, and a large but finite number of alternatives, how...

What happens when fire strikes the manufacturing plant of the sole supplier for the brake pressure valve used in every Toyota? When a hurricane shuts down production at a Unilever plant? When Dell and Apple chip manufacturers in Taiwan take weeks to recover from an earthquake? When the U.S....

In the past decade, a number of Third World countries have emerged from their economic status as sources of raw materials or as sweatshops in which low-wage, low-skilled workers produced goods for the richer nations. Now they are themselves manufacturing and consuming high-quality,...

Most managers leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization’s intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. In this book,...

While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and...

From the foreword by Howard W. Johnson: "Philip Sporn's long and distinguished career has been at the interface of economics, engineering, and management. His accomplishments as an engineer, an engineering manager, and finally as an executive, have been marked by an innovative approach to...

Contained herein is an array of exciting and knowledgeable papers that discuss, from assorted disciplinary angles, the "present and future impact of computers on management organization and the nature of managerial work." No two papers cover the same ground or reach identical conclusions, for...

The past two decades have seen a gradual but noticeable change in the economic organization of innovative activity. Most firms used to integrate research and development with activities such as production, marketing, and distribution. Today, firms are forming joint ventures, research and...

Access to education increased enormously in the past century, and higher proportions of people are completing primary, secondary, or tertiary education than ever before. But efforts to universalize the provision of high-quality schooling face major problems. In Educating All Children (which grew...

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual presents pioneering work in macroeconomics by leading academic researchers addressed to a broad audience of public policymakers as well as to the academic community. Each paper is followed by comments and discussion to give a more complete context for the views...