Cooperation have in previous research been seen as a negative impact on competition and  vice versa. This thesis is building on a concept called coopetition in which cooperation and  competition is studied simultaneously. Coopetition have been studied in terms of the level of  cooperation and competition. However, we found a possible link between coopetition and  complexity in previous literature. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore whether  complexity can develop an understanding for what organizations within a company group  cooperate and compete about as well what they want to cooperate and compete about.     The four main cornerstones in the theoretical frame of reference is cooperation, competition,  coopetition and complexity. We begin by defining these concepts, describing previous  research and discuss various factors of the concepts. Finally, we further develop the possible  link between coopetition and complexity.    For reaching our purpose we study a company group in the travel industry. We are  conducting unstructured interviews with people at leading positions in the company group.  Our analysis is done by thematic network analysis in six steps.    The empirical data is coded, basic themes are found and a condensed version of the  interviews is presented together with a short presentation about the company group.     In the analysis we present two global themes, cooperation and competition. These are both  derived from the basic themes and organizing themes. The factors of complexity are the  organizing themes.    Our conclusion is that complexity can categorize wanted and actual cooperation in the  company group in the sense that complexity has to be lowered for cooperation to exist.  Regarding competition, we did not draw any conclusion to our purpose due to lack of data.  However, we find that competition is mainly seen as negative in the coopetitive situation  studied.     The implications of this thesis is that complexity can further refine the concept of coopetition  but the causality have to be further tested. In a managerial perspective, leaders should focus  on decreasing the factors of complexity if cooperation is wanted. We also suggest that it is  important to understand if people in organizations are positive towards cooperation and  negative to competition or the other way around.

NP-Hardness is a well-known theory to identify the hardness of computational problems. It is believed that NP-Hard problems are unlikely to admit polynomial-time algorithms. However since many NP-Hard problems are of practical significance, different approaches are proposed to solve them: Approximation algorithms, randomized algorithms and heuristic algorithms. None of the approaches meet the practical needs. Recently parameterized computation and complexity has attracted a lot of attention and been a fruitful branch of the study of efficient algorithms. By taking advantage of the moderate value of parameters in many practical instances, we can design efficient algorithms for the NP-Hard problems in practice. In this dissertation, we discuss a new approach to design efficient parameterized algorithms, kernelization. The motivation is that instances of small size are easier to solve. Roughly speaking, kernelization is a preprocess on the input instances and is able to significantly reduce their sizes. We present a 2k kernel for the cluster editing problem, which improves the previous best kernel of size 4k; We also present a linear kernel of size 7k 2d for the d-cluster editing problem, which is the first linear kernel for the problem. The kernelization algorithm is simple and easy to implement. We propose a quadratic kernel for the pseudo-achromatic number problem. This implies that the problem is tractable in term of parameterized complexity. We also study the general problem, the vertex grouping problem and prove it is intractable in term of parameterized complexity. In practice, many problems seek a set of good solutions instead of a good solution. Motivated by this, we present the framework to study enumerability in term of parameterized complexity. We study three popular techniques for the design of parameterized algorithms, and show that combining with effective enumeration techniques, they could be transferred to design efficient enumeration algorithms.

In this thesis, we propose a cell scheduling mechanism to overcome some drawback of Carry-Over Round Robin (CORR) algorithm. Compare with CORR, the modified scheme reduces complexity of implementation and allocates bandwidth more fairly. In general, it simplifies CORR algorithm, which applies some design to maintain the maximum frame size. We prove that the maximum frame size is not necessary for deriving end-to-end delay. We also show that it results in fair distribution of bandwidth. As long as the schedulers and traffic shapers work independently, significant underutilization is expected. In order to solve this problem, we borrow the concept of CORR which divides each allocation cycle into two subcycles¡Xa major cycle and a minor cycle. By designing some information feedback to shapers, schedulers can transmit more cells in minor cycles. Hence we can improve bandwidth utilization successfully.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-56).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 2001. / "August 2001." Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-87). Also available in print.

Not available / text

Not available / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

This paper is based on the proposition that the choice of different product tactics is influenced by the nature of the firm’s external environment. It illustrates the type of product activities suggested for a complex and turbulent environment, when viewing the environment through a chaos and complexity theory lens. A qualitative, case method, using depth interviews,investigated the product activities in two companies to identify the product activities adopted in a more successful, versus a less successful, firm in a complex/turbulent environment. The results showed that the more successful company uses some destabilizing product activities but also partially uses stabilizing product activities. These findings are of benefit to marketers as they emphasize a new way to consider future product activities in their firms. Since businesses and markets are complex adaptive systems, using complexity theory to understand how to cope in complex, turbulent environments is necessary, but has not been widely researched, with even less emphasis on individual components of the marketing mix.