This paper summarizes key attributes and the uniqueness of smart business networks [1], to propose thereafter an operational implementation architecture. It involves, amongst others, the embedding of business logic specific to a network of business partners, inside the communications control...

In a viral marketing campaign an organization develops a marketing message, and stimulates customers to forward this message to their contacts. Despite its increasing popularity, there are no models yet that help marketers to predict how many customers a viral marketing campaign will reach, and...

Recent literature on sustainable logistics networks points to two important questions: (i) How to spot the preferred solution(s) balancing environmental and business concerns? (ii) How to improve the understanding of the trade-offs between these two dimensions? We posit that a complete...

Information systems have revolutionized the provisioning of decision-relevant information, and decision support tools have improved human decisions in many domains. Autonomous decision- making, on the other hand, remains hampered by systems’ inability to faithfully capture human preferences....

Sustainable energy systems of the future will need more than efficient, clean, low-cost, renewable energy sources; they will also need efficient price signals that motivate sustainable energy consumption as well as a better real-time alignment of energy demand and supply.

The ISO 9000 experiences of the same sample of organisations over a five year time period is examined in this paper. The responses to a questionnaire sent out at the end of 1999 to companies which had a reasonably long term experience with the ISO 9000 series quality system are analysed. These...

In this paper we present the results of an international survey among 313 CFOs on capital structure choice. We document several interesting insights on how theoretical concepts are being applied by professionals in the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, and France and we directly compare our...

An autonomous trading agent is a complex piece of software that must operate in a competitive economic environment and support a research agenda. We describe the structure of decision processes in the MinneTAC trading agent, focusing on the use of evaluators – configurable, composable modules...

The primary objective of closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) is to reap the maximum economic benefit from end-of-use products. Nevertheless, literature within this stream of research advocates that closing the loop helps to mitigate the undesirable footprint of supply chains. In this paper we...

A number of experimental studies have investigated whether cooperative behavior may emerge in multi-agent Q-learning. In some studies cooperative behavior did emerge, in others it did not. This report provides a theoretical analysis of this issue. The analysis focuses on multi-agent Q-learning...