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The principal question addressed is the extent to which American organizations source legal services they require in a manner consistent with transaction cost economics and agency theory. Transaction cost economics (TCE) is an interdisciplinary undertaking which joins economics with aspects of organizational theory and contract law. TCE views frequency, uncertainty and asset specificity (the extent to which assets have little utility or value except in the context of a particular transaction or relationship) as key variables in determining how a transaction will be str...

While "e-learning" has proliferated in our society, the problem exists that many corporations are delving into e-learning without fully understanding end users’ self-reported computer competence or attitudes toward e-learning or computers in general, which could ultimately impact the success of e-learning at an organization. Studies have been done to examine these phenomena, but the vast majority center around the academic environment, and many are deemed archaic due to advances in technology. To examine this problem, this research study’s goal was to develop a valid and reliable instrument th...

Funding private projects in emerging markets - in a safely manner - requires a thorough evaluation and analysis of several aspects that are constituent to the project itself, to the specific country where it is located, and to the project owners. The author has studied the functioning of Financial Markets in developing countries for several years, compared them to International Financial Markets, and has come to the conclusion that the contributions made in the past do not cover all the information required in order to judge and secure the viability of projects in these countries. T By devel...

This study had two primary purposes. First, this study assessed the psychometric properties of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) questionnaires used to record juvenile firesetting events (Fineman, 1997a, 1997b,1997c). Second, this study initiated preliminary analyses that (1) contributed to the identification of a typology of firesetters, (2) account for variance in the severity of fires set by juveniles, and (3) predicted the likelihood of recidivistic behaviors in juvenile firesetters. Predictors were restricted to a limited set of exploratory variables; including age, sex, deli...

Projects are important to industry, but project performance continually disappoints stakeholder expectations. Organizations react to this performance problem in many ways, and purchase consultancy, training, methods and tools as possible solutions. There is no published evidence that any of these solutions are consistently successful in improving project performance. This thesis answers the question, "What can be done to improve project management practices, and thus project performance?" by demonstrating that a novel form of continuous action research can contribute such evidence. Firstl...

"Liberal order and software-agents" - long-established ideas and modern technology are bridged. The impulse for undertaking this effort comes from the observation that it becomes difficult for computer science alone to create order for and within machines. The growing complexity of computer systems, open networks like the Internet, and the increasingly social role of software entities push the traditional quest for total global control out of reach. Economic theory of social order offers extensive experience with such conditions, so that it can complement and guide research in computer science...

On July 1st 1993, the EU implemented the Common Organization for the Market of Bananas (COMB) to replace the different national banana policies that previously existed in its member countries. As it turned out, the adopted regime became one of the most bitterly internally disputed outcomes of the completion of the EU single common market, and is an on-going source of dispute at the WTO level between the EU on the one side, and the US and Latin American countries on the other side. The most controversial aspects of the COMB relate to the management of banana trade with non-EU countries, and in ...

Ever since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, genetic evolutionary theory has increasingly served as the foundation for fields that deal with organisms that arose by natural selection. This thesis argues that economic theory should integrate with Darwinian theory through the creation of a "genetic evolutionary economics". The promise of genetic evolutionary economics is a better understanding of human nature and, consequently, a more accurate and comprehensive economic science. Economic theory rests on a set of assumptions about human nature. These economic...

The goal of the work reported in this dissertation is to develop methods for the acquisition and reproduction of high quality digital color images. To reach this goal it is necessary to understand and control the way in which the different devices involved in the entire color imaging chain treat colors. Therefore we addressed the problem of colorimetric characterization of scanners and printers, providing efficient and colorimetrically accurate means of conversion between a device-independent color space such as the CIELAB space, and the device-dependent color spaces of a scanner and a printer...

This study analyses the legal condition of women in Catalonia, Spain, in the early modern ages, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by way of the study of primary legal sources. The legal discourse was conceived as being different for men and women: women were treated as a specific social category, were judicially discriminated against and were given inferior legal personality. Following the moral discourse of the time, jurists classified women as honest and dishonest, and tried to establish a physical and legal barrier to divide the good from the bad. As a result, wo...