How do teams complete a task involving critical knowledge that is both complex and external to the team itself? This is a task characterized by a particularly difficult tradeoff between external search for important knowledge on one hand and internal coordination on the other. I explore the...

Includes bibliographical references (p. 35-37).

Local search algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems are in general of pseudopolynomial running time and polynomial-time algorithms are often not known for finding locally optimal solutions for NP-hard optimization problems. We introduce the concept of epsilon-local optimality and...

Supported by the organizations who participate in the Program in Systems Thinking. Supported by the New Management Style at the Sloan School of Management, MIT.

Motivated by electronic commerce, this paper is a mechanism design study for sellers of multiple identical items. In the market environment we consider, participants are risk neutral and time-sensitive, with the same discount factor; potential buyers have unit demand and arrive sequentially...