Technology Management

Crosscurrents between globalization and localization have created two world industry segments, an open highly competitive global industry, and a closed highly localized industry. Searching for competitive advantage in this new market environment, global manufacturers are becoming more like local service providers by executing a dual strategy: a global cost leadership strategy and a local product differentiation strategy. To achieve global cost leadership, manufacturers cooperate with their competitors to reach economies of scale and reduce costs. To achieve local product differentiation, manufacturers compete with their global partners by cooperating with local service providers to differentiate their offerings. This trend is analyzed to suggest two interdependent mechanisms for building successful bundling strategies. The competitiveness of a bundle that brings together global products and local services depends upon the degree of bundle localization. Sustainable bundling strategies should be treated as bundles of international business relationships.

New York City police statistics show that virtually every part of the five boroughs enjoys the sharpest drop in violent crime that the city has experienced since the end of the Prohibition in the early 1930's. A number of alternative explanations (such as new police tactics and demographic factors) have been offered for this precipitous decline in crime, but the lack of comprehensive research makes it difficult to evaluate them . The undisputed fact is that the New York City Police Department enjoys a significant cash infusion of City and Federal money and has the highest number of police officers in its history . How efficient and effective is the Police Department in managing its resources and in achieving its mission ? This paper finds that 35 percent of the precincts are prime targets for managerial intervention since they are both inefficient and ineffective . These precincts have the potential to increase arrests by as much as 25 percent which implies substantial gains in effectiveness. Fifty six percent of the precincts are efficient and ineffective . These precincts might not have adequate resource levels to fight crime. If this is the case, additional Federal grands provided through the 1994 omnibus crime law should be directed to these precincts . Finally, 8 percent of the precincts are both efficient and effective . These precincts should be used as raw models and their characteristics should be further studied .

This paper examines the implications of a tariff increase in a spatial model of an open economy with price conjectures between domestic and foreign producers of non-identical goods. Households are mobile and location and rent adjustments are influenced by pricing policies. It is shown that, although the equilibrium configuration of the economy is sensitive to the prevailing combination of conjectural variations, the effects of a tariff increase are qualitatively consistent across alternative, and perhaps asymmetric, price conjectures.

This paper explores the fundamentals of crowdfunding, compares it to traditional means of raising capital for innovative ventures, explains the relationship between crowdfunding and innovation, and summarizes the impact that crowdfunding created on some heavy tech industries in recent years.

Two experiments are presented that serve as a framework for exploring auditory information processing. The framework is referred to as polychotic listening or auditory search, and it requires a listener to scan multiple simultaneous auditory streams for the appearance of a target word (the name of a letter such as A or M). Participants’ ability to scan between two and six simultaneous auditory streams of letter and digit names for the name of a target letter was examined using six loudspeakers. The main independent variable was auditory load, or the number of active audio streams on a given trial. The primary dependent variables were target localization accuracy and reaction time. Results showed that as load increased, performance decreased. The performance decrease was evident in reaction time, accuracy, and sensitivity measures. The second study required par- ticipants to practice the same task for 10 sessions, for a total of 1800 trials. Results indicated that even with extensive practice, performance was still affected by auditory load. The present results are compared with findings in the visual search literature. The implications for the use of multiple auditory displays are discussed. Potential applications include cockpit and automobile warning dis- plays, virtual reality systems, and training systems.

Manager or individual contributor? That is the question faced by many human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) professionals after a few years of having embarked upon their careers in industry, or sometimes at the start of their careers. They are often ill equipped to ...