Managerial flexibility, or real options, embedded in IT investments allows resolving uncertainty not only by passively waiting for new information to arrive during deferral but also by proactively deploying mitigations. Classic real options models fail to account for the value of proactive...

Problems in Finance, particularly those involving risk assessmentand management, have been slow to yield toexpert systems technology for two reasons. First, expertreasoning in such problems is often based on acirc; first principlesquot;instead of acirc; situation-actionquot; rules that...

Modeling expert knowledge using quot;situation-actionquot; rules is not always feasible in knowledgeintensive domains involving volatile knowledge (e.g., trading). The explosive searchspace involved in such domains and its dynamic nature make it extremely difficult to setupa rule base and keep...

In design, inferring structure from function is a combinatorial generate-and-test problem.Existing methods use prestored domain-specific partial configurations to constrainthe generator. We have found that for certain types of economic and physicalsystems consisting of two-terminal components...

This paper investigates the relationship between market conditions and the value and use of sourcing flexibility for service processes. We develop and analyze a series of models, and we derive expressions for the optimal switching decision, the value of the option to outsource, the value of the...

This paper examines multiple contract design choices in the context of transaction and relational attributes and consequent ex-ante and ex-post transaction costs. It focuses on two understudied themes in the IT outsourcing literature. First, while the literature is predominantly concerned with...