Case-based research was conducted on strategy and IT evolution in the Boeing Company. Results showed IT investment in the 20th century supported an increasingly decentralized hierarchical functional corporate organization structure, and shifted during the early decades of the 21st century toward an IT-enabled global network organization structure. IT investment context changed from an inward fo...

The behavior of agents in multi-agent systems is hard to control without restricting the agents’ autonomy. Normative organizations have been deployed successfully to deal with this. A core requirement of a normative organization is that norm violations can be observed and dealt with. Due to the distributed nature of multi-agent systems it is often fitting that this is done decentrally. In this ...

The repeated pattern of emergent human organization at a societal level going from small-scale, egalitarian decentralized societies to complex, stratified, and centralized societies is well-documented in the archaeological record of past societies. In this paper, I outline a multitrajectory model that relates to the broad features of this sequence of societal change. Competition is shown to pla...

in this paper, the competition between two supply chains and their elements is studied. each chain consisted of a manufacturer and a distributor and the two chains compete in a market with single type of customer sensitive to price and delivery time. therefore, this is a two-supply chain game and during the competition between two supply chains, elements of each supply chain (manufacturer and/o...

Decentralized probabilistic reasoning, constraint reasoning, and decision theoretic reasoning are some of the essential tasks of a multiagent system (MAS). Many frameworks exist for these tasks, and a number of them organize agents into a junction tree (JT). Although these frameworks all reap benefits of communication efficiency and inferential soundness from the JT organization, their potentia...

Since the 1980s throughout the Western world, attempts have been made to introduce more decentralized types of management control in government bureaucracies. Decentralization of competences and responsibilities within government organizations should improve efficiency in the public sector specifically in ‘core business’ activities, where access to the market mechanism or transfer to independen...

This study is intended to analyse several mechanisms available to companies in order to appropriate the results of their innovative activities. These mechanisms include patents, industrial secret, cost and time of imitation and continuous innovation. Specifically, this paper focuses on studying the factors that determine the choice of one appropriation method over another. To this end, we propo...

Multi-agent planning in stochastic environments can be framed formally as a decentralized Markov decision problem. Many real-life distributed problems that arise in manufacturing, multi-robot coordination and information gathering scenarios can be formalized using this framework. However, finding the optimal solution in the general case is hard, limiting the applicability of recently developed ...