This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that the severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered political centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and remained politically fragmented. We test our hypothesis using data on the frequency of nomadic attack...

Centralization of intensive care units (ICUs) is a concept that has been around for several decades and the OECD countries have led the way in adopting this in their operations. Singapore Hospital was built in 1981, before the concept of centralization of ICUs took off. The hospital’s ICUs were never centralized and were spread out across eight different blocks with the specialization they were...

This paper applies the theory of real options to analyze how the value of information-based flexibility should affect the decision to centralize or decentralize data management under low and high uncertainty. This study makes two main contributions. First, we show that in the presence of low uncertainty, centralization of data-management decisions creates more total surplus for the firm as the ...

This article empirically investigates the role of organizational structure in the transformational leadership (TFL) process. We examine organizational centralization, formalization, and size as antecedents of an organization's TFL climate, and as moderators of the relationship between TFL climate and productive organizational energy (POE). Hypotheses are tested using a sample of 125 organizatio...

With the advent of time-based competition, the speed with which new products can be developed and introduced into a market is an important managerial aspect of time-based strategy. The relationship between the allocation of decision-making power within organization and new product development (NPD) speed is investigated empirically using Chinese data. The results of correlation analysis show th...

This paper discusses online power-aware routing in large wireless ad-hoc networks (especially sensor networks) for applications where the message sequence is not known. We seek to optimize the lifetime of the network. We show that online power-aware routing does not have a constant competitive ratio to the off-line optimal algorithm. We develop an approximation algorithm called max-min zPmin th...

This paper sheds light on the general mechanisms underlying large-scale social and institutional change. We employ an agent-based model to test the impact of authority centralization and social network technology on preference falsification and institutional change. We find that preference falsification is increasing with centralization and decreasing with social network range. This leads to gr...