Mitigating climate change is one of the most profound challenges facing humankind. In industrialized countries, the residential housing sector produces roughly one-fourth of the greenhouse gas emissions. One solution to reduce these emissions is the availability of building codes that require high levels of energy efficiency. Given the current scientific knowledge, more research is needed to gain a proper systemic understanding of the underlying socio-economic and technical system. Such an understanding is crucial for developing high energy-efficiency standards because this system develops...

The storage yard is the operational and geographical centre of most seaport container terminals. Therefore, it is of particular importance for the whole terminal system and plays a major role for trade and transport flows. One of the latest trends in container-storage operations is the automated Rail-Mounted-Gantry-Crane system, which offers dense stacking, and offers low labour costs. This book investigates whether the operational performance of container terminals is influenced by the design of these storage systems and to what extent the performance is affected by the terminal's framework...

The concept of internal control has developed along with audit practice. As demands have been made for greater accountability in corporate governance, the significance of internal control systems in companies has increased. Traditionally internal control has had a fairly direct relationship to financial reporting quality but wider approaches to internal control have expanded those boundaries much further. Stakeholders are increasingly concerned with the effectiveness of internal controls, and disclosure requirements are making firms to go public with regard to their internal control systems....

Monetary incentives, as a driving force for human behavior, are the main theme of this book. The primary goals underlying the application of monetary incentive systems in companies are motivating employees to strive for superior productivity in line with the interests of employers, and hiring adequately skilled employees. The first goal refers to incentive effects, the latter to sorting effects. This book introduces important theories and concepts concerning behavior under influence of monetary incentives; it reviews existing economic frameworks and identifies specific contingency variables....

The primary contribution of this book is to integrate the important disciplines which simultaneously impact the investment appraisal process. The book presents a study that develops a new approach to investment appraisal which uses a multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) model to integrate the selected disciplines which include capital markets, corporate governance and capital budgeting. The research covers two case studies, one in the e-commerce sector and another in the airline industry in which the above disciplines are integrated. Readers from the areas of corporate governance,...

The current book on Nework Governance contributes to the literature by offering new perspectives on network goals and performance, inter-organizational learning and trust in alliances, corporate governance issues in cooperatives, governance of cross-border retail networks, contract design and governance innovations in cooperatives and fanchising.

Stochastic knowledge is generated from past request information by a new forecasting approach and is used in the pro-active approach to guide vehicles to request-likely areas before real requests arrive there.

This book presents an in-depth perspective of knowledge as a fundamental process of any organization rather than just another resource to be managed. The author presents a process-oriented theory of creating and applying knowledge directed towards both researchers and practitioners. In this book the author develops normative knowledge management guidelines which draw from a unique view on knowledge, discussed in the field of philosophy since Plato but neglected by most knowledge management authors - by applying a philosophically grounded 'social epistemology' to organizations. The guidelines...

This book presents the comparative evaluation of international and industrial factors affecting the financial condition of enterprises. The aim of the empirical study is to determine such factors - national or industrial ones - that have a greater impact on the corporate performance in the selected European Union countries.