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It is well known that a player in a non-cooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting his possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that is contingent on the game’s outcome. We explore what happens when external parties – who we call “game miners” – discover this fact and seek to profit from it by entering an outcome-contingent contract with the players. We analyze various structured bargaining games among such miner(s) and players that determine such an outcome-contingent contract before the start of the original game. These bargaining games include playing the players against one another as in the original game, as well as allowing the players to pay the miner(s) for exclusivity and first-mover advantage. We establish restrictions on the strategic settings in which a game miner can profit and bounds on the game miner’s profit. We also find that game miners can lead to both efficient and inefficient equilibria.

As a result of the recent changes in world politics, especially in Eastern Europe (and between the United States and the Soviet Union), there has been a re‐evaluation of the United States military forces. There is a movement to develop a variety of ways to trim the numbers of those in the active duty military. At the same time, there is a recognised need to offer assistance to those departing the military and to enable them to make a smooth transition into the civilian world of work. Although the research reported here was conducted over two years ago and focused on those retiring from the military, the issues raised may be more relevant today.

The globalization of knowledge has driven an increased emphasis on cross-border, high-technology acquisitions where a target firm in a technology industry is acquired by a firm in another nation. However, learning depends on similarity of knowledge, and we find that needed similarity can be provided by either technology or culture. As a result, firms can learn from acquiring targets at increasing cultural distance or at increasing technological distance, but not both. We find an interaction where acquisitions made at longer cultural distances and less technological distance, and acquisitions at shorter cultural distances and greater technological distance improve financial performance. This means technological distance and cultural distance are substitutes or represent a trade-off where improved acquisition performance depends on having commonality (low distance) for one of the variables.

The Building Bridges service was implemented as the result of an assessment of the psychological and mental health needs of black and minority ethnic children and families in Liverpool. This article describes the development of the service, and draws links between the existing literature, government legislation and implications for CAMHS.

The European Union‐supported Child and Adolescent Mental Health in an Enlarged Europe (CAMHEE) project aimed to provide an overview of the challenges, current practice and guidelines for developing effective mental health promotion and mental illness prevention policy and practice across Europe. As part of this work, an analysis was undertaken of the situation in England, making use of a bespoke data collection instrument and protocol.Our analysis suggests that there has been significant effort and investment in research, needs assessment, policy, human resource and service developments in CAMHS over the last 20 years, leading to a more detailed understanding and availability of services. Much of the emphasis has been on assessment and management of difficulties, however in recent years attention has begun to focus on mental health promotion. National standards and programmes such as Every Child Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2004) have acted as catalysts for a number of national initiatives.

Nearly every monograph and textbook that discusses the work of G. H. Mead considers the “game” as one of the important concepts with which he worked. Wittgenstein in his work too used the concept of game to illustrate his claim that the meaning of a word is its place in a language-game which is a “form of life.”

Via philosophy of science, the paper seeks to identify the role of trial and error in business and other managed activities, including economic development.

Drawing first on Karl Popper's view of trial and error as essential to the evolution of all life, including all human activity, the paper asks what we mean by science, and how distinctive is the scientific mode of enquiry. It goes on to look at, in particular, the treatment of trial and error, and of evolution, in two best‐selling management books of the last 25 years, and at the relevance of this treatment to some recent discussions of economic development.

Popper's distinction between science and various types of non‐science is not as clear‐cut as is sometimes portrayed. Moreover, there are significant variants to Popper's view of scientific method. But accepting Popper's view of the centrality of trial and error for problem solving the paper finds significant echoes in some management thinking. Related questions occur, also, in some recent discussions of economic development.

The paper argues that trial and error is a well‐established approach in business and other managed activities, and that there is potential to learn from many examples of success and disappointment.

The paper questions whether some views of science, and of the demarcation between science and non‐science, are as clear‐cut as is sometimes assumed. It argues against claimed novelty in some recent discussion of evolutionary process in business and elsewhere.