Competitive Solutions is an entertaining and wideranging introduction to successful business methods applied to a variety of real-world situations. Rejecting the one-size-fits-all premise that underlies so many guides to business strategy, Preston McAfee develops the intellectual tools and insights needed to confront many marketplace problems. Drawing on his broad experience as a consultant for major U.S. companies, as well as extensive research, McAfee emphasizes cooperation, pricing, litigation, and antitrust as vital to a firm's competitive posture--and focuses more attention on these elements than do most business strategy accounts. McAfee begins by considering strategy as successfully applied by America OnLine, an example that introduces many of the tools discussed in greater depth throughout the book. From here he moves to industry analysis: By examining the context for developing a strategy, he points out uses of positioning and differentiation that enable a firm to weaken price competition and deter rivals from stealing customers. McAfee's exploration of a product's life cycle proves an invaluable guide to positioning new technology in order to maximize the potential for future customers. In the centerpiece of the book, McAfee lays out a how-to manual for cooperation, providing tactics crucial for setting standards, lobbying the government, and fostering industry growth. Writing in a conversational manner, McAfee also addresses such deep topics as organizational design and employee compensation and incentives. More detailed discussions examine antitrust enforcement, which is an increasingly important constraint on strategy, as well as strategies for pricing, bidding, signaling, and bargaining. This book is a fascinating examination of modern business strategy and its application in many different settings. Students of business and economics--as well as executives and managers--will recognize Competitive Solutions as an indispensable resource as well as a definitive vision of the strategic firm: one in which each element of company strategy reinforces the other elements.

m-Business technology enables you to achieve extraordinary organizational agility Ñ and deliver unprecedented value to customers wherever they are. In Business Agility, Internet Week columnist Nicholas D. Evans draws upon real case studies to illuminate today's best m-Business strategies and tactics, and offers a complete step-by-step blueprint for execution: planning, process models, architecture, implementation, and much more.

Our societies are growing more unequal, more hierarchical, meaner and less human every year. Voters appalled by the direction of current politics respond to leaders that articulate a cohesive and genuine progressivism. This book provides the framework for politicians and activists to deliver that vision, organised around the themes of cooperative solutions to social problem-solving and a social contract centred on rights and the equal dignity of all people. Drawing on contemporary Australian examples, 'Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder' shows how the partisan divide recurs in policy debates from civil rights, to inequality, to economic growth, to the environment and foreign policy. It argues that we should recommit to fighting for our democracy in order to manage these social differences and channel them into opportunities for social progress. As a former Australian diplomat with ten years' experience writing political analysis for government, Anthony Skews is well placed to provide a comprehensive introduction to left-wing thought for the contemporary 'post-fact', politically polarised era. Above all, this book argues for an alternative future.

Innovation is essential for businesses to survive in the long run, but there are no one-size-fits-all strategies for innovating successfully. A firm's specific business environment will determine what works and what does not work. Based on a global survey of innovative firms and on 50 in-depth case studies, Innovation Reinvented identifies six patterns or 'games' of innovation, each commanding best-of-class strategies and best practices. Examining recognized innovative companies - from Apple and Intel in the technology area to Proctor & Gamble and Clorox in mature markets - this book dispels the notion of innovation as a 'one-size fits all' or necessarily radical process. As Roger Miller and Marcel Côté demonstrate, the vast majority of innovations result from improvements in product features or business processes. Innovation Reinvented provides a unique framework for entrepreneurs and senior executives to identify the game(s) in which a business is involved, and which approaches are best-suited to win by competing on innovation.

Transport policy has dramatically changed over the last ten years with major regulatory reforms and privatisation of transport enterprises. Part 1 presents an authoritative statement of the theoretical arguments for and against regulatory reform, the changing political scene in North America and the different mechanisms that can be used to return state-owned monopolies to the private sector. Part 2 presents the empirical evidence on ten years of airline deregulation in the United States and this review is matched by an assessment of the different situation in Europe where national governments are under pressure to follow the same path.

This collection highlights the most important ideas and concepts from Michael E. Porter, recognized worldwide as the leading thinker on strategy. Porter heads The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness based at Harvard Business School and is the foremost authority on competitive strategy for business, as well as on the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions. Business readers will recognize Porter’s seminal book, On Competition, as a classic in the field. This set, curated by Harvard Business Review, includes the full digital edition of the updated and expanded edition of On Competition—a must-have for anyone interested in or studying the topic of strategy and for those developing strategy for their own organizations. The collection also includes the digital edition of the popular Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy, which offers a concise, accessible summary of Porter’s revolutionary thinking and was written with Porter’s full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review. Finally, the set features the newer foundational article “Creating Shared Value,” which was published in Harvard Business Review in 2011 to great fanfare and global accolades. This must-have collection is for anyone serious about business, strategy, and competitiveness.

Shortlisted for the 2012 Prix Vogel in Economic Law. Public procurement and competition law are both important fields of EU law and policy, intimately intertwined in the creation of the internal market. Hitherto their close connection has been noted, but not closely examined. This new work is the most comprehensive attempt to date to explain the many ways in which these fields, often considered independent of one another, interact and overlap in the creation of the internal market. In this process of convergence between competition and public procurement law , the need for this joint study is clearly apparent. As such the book asks whether competition law principles inform or condition public procurement rules, and whether they are adequate to ensure that competition is not distorted in markets where public procurement is particularly significant. The book moves away from the classical focus of public procurement on the activities of private actors, developing instead an analytical framework for the appraisal of the market behaviour of the public buyer from a competition perspective. The analysis is both legal and economic. Proceeding through a careful assessment of the general rules of competition and public procurement, the book constantly tests the efficacy of the rules in competition and public procurement against a standard of the proper functioning of undistorted competition in the market for public procurement.

This Research Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the role of project management in sustainable development. Examining how to successfully integrate sustainability into the processes and practices involved, it highlights the significant development in sustainable project management whilst exploring potential future directions for the field.

Complex Automated Negotiations have been widely studied and are becoming an important, emerging area in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. In general, automated negotiations can be complex, since there are a lot of factors that characterize such negotiations. These factors include the number of issues, dependency between issues, representation of utility, negotiation protocol, negotiation form (bilateral or multi-party), time constraints, etc. Software agents can support automation or simulation of such complex negotiations on the behalf of their owners, and can provide them with adequate bargaining strategies. In many multi-issue bargaining settings, negotiation becomes more than a zero-sum game, so bargaining agents have an incentive to cooperate in order to achieve efficient win-win agreements. Also, in a complex negotiation, there could be multiple issues that are interdependent. Thus, agent's utility will become more complex than simple utility functions. Further, negotiation forms and protocols could be different between bilateral situations and multi-party situations. To realize such a complex automated negotiation, we have to incorporate advanced Artificial Intelligence technologies includes search, CSP, graphical utility models, Bays nets, auctions, utility graphs, predicting and learning methods. Applications could include e-commerce tools, decision-making support tools, negotiation support tools, collaboration tools, etc. In this book, we solicit papers on all aspects of such complex automated negotiations in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. In addition, this book includes papers on the ANAC 2010 (Automated Negotiating Agents Competition), in which automated agents who have different negotiation strategies and implemented by different developers are automatically negotiate in the several negotiation domains. ANAC is one of real testbeds in which strategies for automated negotiating agents are evaluated in a tournament style.