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This paper sets out to present the concept of the value of information, review the descriptive, rational, social and behavioral approaches for assessing the value of information, and explain why user‐centered rather than information‐centered evaluations are the most relevant.

The paper starts by highlighting the main facets and market characteristics which influence the value of information. Next, four approaches to assessing the value of information are explained, including a discussion of advantages and limitations of each approach. The approaches reviewed include descriptive, rational, social and behavioral research. Finally, an information value assessment recommendation is given and a theoretical framework is offered.

The descriptive approach is useful in raising new angles for theory development. The rational approach assumes that the value is inherent in information and offers models that describe how information should be valued. The social perspective suggests that markets are enhanced by social activity. The behavioral aspect teaches that value perception changes by person and circumstance and is a key influence on information markets.

This paper offers a concentrated multi‐dimensional theoretical basis on a topic of central importance to anyone interested in Internet research, information consumption and production. Theory offered here constitutes a basis for a large number of potential empirical research endeavors.

Because of the Internet, the most important assets any company today can possess are not bricks and mortar, but nimbleness and flexibility. Therefore, under the new model, companies need to deemphasize, rather than build upon, fixed assets; use as little working capital as possible; and strike the right balance between “owned” employees and a virtual workforce. They should no longer seek to protect intellectual property; they should merchandise it. They will need to develop new kinds of relationships with customers, such as cooperative partnerships that add value to both sides. And they will need to farm out pieces of their supply chains and make those that remain far more substantial, so that suppliers, too, are partners.

This chapter analyzes markets with an “infinite variety” of goods, such as large parts of the service economy and creative industries such as the book, film, and music market. I argue that the infinite variety of supply that characterizes such markets does not lead to discoordination, because of the emergence of cognitive institutions in the form of market categories, reference points such as exemplary goods, and instruments of interpretation which facilitate the (quality) coordination process. These cognitive institutions function as an extended mind of market participants and enable what is termed interpretative rationality, as distinct from calculative rationality. This interpretative rationality consists of the ability to recognize relevant differences and similarities between goods. These cognitive institutions, like the price system, are an emergent order which can be analyzed through the lens of Austrian economics. This chapter further demonstrates the potential convergence between particular strands of economic sociology and Austrian economics.

This work discusses the use of exponentially and reciprocally decaying infinite elements and assesses their respective value for magnetostatic and eddy current problems. In particular, the need for different decaying parameters for different materials is shown to be detrimental to their application in many practical situations. A simple method, whereby a 2‐D solution is used to find the approximate boundary conditions for a closely truncated 3‐D mesh is presented and shown to give good results without the complications of infinite elements. This method is applied to a large eddy current problem.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the common claim of “infinite variety” being demanded in the marketplace by measuring not just how much variety theoretically could be produced, but how much is actually demanded by the customer. To this effect, the authors propose and validate market‐based variety measures with empirical data and in a second step, extend their analysis by applying these measures and empirically testing the impact of variety mitigation strategies, such as postponement and options bundling.

The authors analyse production and sales data of 226,106 passenger cars, comprising of three models of one vehicle manufacturer sold across four global market regions. The theoretical variety is compared with actual variety for each model‐market combination, and these data are linked to actual production and sales records.

The authors propose and validate product variety measures based on actual customer orders, and empirically demonstrate how these measures can be used to assess the impact of late configuration and option bundling strategies, and find that these are generally valid, but that their applicability is contingent upon the respective variety distribution profile.

Analyses are developed within the context of a single firm and industry, although an attempt was made to counter this weakness by considering models from the volume, niche and premium market segments.

The paper highlights how actual variety differs from theoretical variety in practice, which in turn co‐determines the effectiveness of mitigation strategies applied by firms.

The paper's main contribution is to propose and empirically test a set of novel measures of product variety: the average repetition ratio and a specification Pareto curve, both of which complement and enhance one's understanding of product variety and its impact on manufacturing and distribution systems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the conflicting varieties between cognitive linguistics and animal motivation on one hand and between emotions and motivations on another, and to show how the construction of an artificial personality led to understanding the differences from a cybernetic perspective, and to reconcile and benefit from them.

The design of the artificial personality is built on a core of dual regulator structure as a model of motivation and cognition. The regulating core does not address areas of linguistics and emotions, thus the need to interface with functions from well-researched disciplines in these areas as peripheries to the core. Different disciplines were viewed from a cybernetic perspective, where the variety of categories primarily used in these disciplines was compared numerically and the problem was defined as a search for methods to reducing the varieties between disciplines.

The interfaces between the core of artificial personality and the peripheries are seen as either regulators, which reduce variety, or generators of variety.

The approach to reconcile cross-disciplinary differences based on comparing the numerical variety of categories is understood to be original. The reduction of comparison to numerical counts removes hard-to-reconcile qualitative differences and retains the simplicity of quantitative differences. Qualitative cross-disciplinary differences benefit the specialists and protect them from competition with each other. By reconciling cross-disciplinary differences the artificial personality develops across disciplines and achieves multi-disciplinary transparency. The specialists may not welcome the competition but science, technology and society in general will benefit from reduced duplication, improved information flow and integration. This work is a small step in understanding and learning to reconcile differences between disciplines.

The operational analysis of catering operations is constrained by the lack of an internationally accepted taxonomy and the seemingly infinite variety of operations. The development of catering operations is described and a flow chart of ten distinct stages that constitute any such operation is proposed. These stages provide the basis for a possible taxonomy. It is suggested that currently there are ten generic catering systems that can be clearly identified, each of which has a unique combination of some or all of the ten stages. Such analysis is the highest level of a hierarchy of possible analyses, i.e. Level 1. The second level of analysis considers the range of subsystems in use to achieve the function of each stage. The range of alternative technologies varies from two to five in each stage. The theoretical number of combinations of subsystems is in the thousands, but many are mutually incompatible with each other. There are therefore approximately 100 types of operation in the industry when considered at Level 2. Finally, there is a third level of analysis that considers the specific application of the basic technology applied to any given operation. It is at this level that there is the almost apparent infinite variety of operations that appears to typify the industry. These three levels and the ten stages are then combined into an analytical model which is called the Catering/System Pentahedron. The pentahedron enables the classification of any given catering operation and establishes a means of evaluating innovation and proposals for performance improvement within operations.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the presuppositions implied in a recent debate about the possibility of economic planning using computing models and to provide additional arguments relevant to the economic calculation debate.

Recalling the fundaments of the classical debate on economic calculation (L. von Mises in 1990, O. Lange in 1936, 1937) and using Cantor's theorem from the set theory the arguments proposed by Robert R. Murphy are reformulated and refined, sustaining the thesis that, in an economic system based on collective forms of property, the central planner must necessarily resort to an infinite uncountable list of prices.

The paper provides additional arguments supporting the thesis that computation in a planned economy implies computation with infinite uncountable domains. In addition, this paper rejects the objections raised by some earlier researchers in 2007 in response to Murphy's theses.

The possibility of computation and calculation in an economic system is of great practical importance. Institutional settlements and policies are not indifferent to the economic calculation problem. Different institutional settings can hinder the very possibility of economic calculation and rational allocation of resources. From this perspective, the conclusions of economic calculation debate are crucial. The economist's and philosopher's criteria used to define institutions and policies must take into account this important question of the possibility of computation and calculation in an economic system.

The paper is of value in providing additional argumentation concerning the economic calculation debate.

NO apology is needed, we opine, to even the most died‐in‐the‐wool aeronautical enthusiast of our readers for reproducing here the paper read in January before the NORTH‐EAST COAST INSTITUTION OF ENGINEERS AND SHIPBUILDERS of Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne by MR LUBBOCK, although it by no means primarily relates to power‐plant for aircraft. Even SIR FRANK WHITTLE, on a recent occasion, tool: time off from his many aviation engagements to board a gas‐turbine‐powered naval gunboat and grace with his presence a short demonstration cruise it made in the Thames before tying up alongside the Nelson Pier at the South Bank Exhibition; where it lies, as we write, beside a similarly engined naval picket‐boat and the first jet‐propelled flying‐boat, the Saunders‐Roe SR/A1.

Fat‐tailed distributions have been found in many financial and economic variables ranging from forecasting returns on financial assets to modeling recovery distributions in bankruptcies. They have also been found in numerous insurance applications such as catastrophic insurance claims and in value‐at‐risk measures employed by risk managers. Financial applications include: