We develop a model to study the implications of a legal environment on the organization of software production. We show that contract enforcement a®ects the organizational mode (i.e., in-house versus outsourcing) of customized software development while copyright protection determines the introduction of package software. When copyright protection is weak, only customized software will be devel...

Standard economic analysis holds that labor market rigidities are harmful for job creation and typically increase unemployment. But many orthodox reforms of the labor market have proved di±cult to implement because of political opposition. For these reasons it is important to explain why we observe such regulations. In this paper I outline a theory of how they may arise and why they ̄t together...

Context. Observations with the Hinode spectro-polarimeter have revealed strong horizontal internetwork magnetic fields in the quiet solar photosphere. Aims. We aim at interpreting the observations by means of results from numerical simulations. Methods. Radiative MHD simulations of dynamo action by near-surface convection are analyzed with respect to the relation between vertical and horizontal...

When parallel applications are run in large-scale distributed environments, such as grids, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, and clouds, the set of resources used can change dynamically as machines crash, reservations end, and new resources become available. It is vital for applications to respond to these changes. Therefore, it is necessary to keep track of the available resources—a problem which is...