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Microfinance: What Do We Know? Where Do We Go? examines micro lending, which has become a global phenomenon where small unsecured loans are made to the poorest people usually in groups so that the borrowers can invest the money in some business or related entrepreneurial venture and improve their social and economic conditions.

Agglomeration, Industrial Districts and Industry Clusters: Trends of the 21th Century Literature reviews the early work of 21st century scholarship on agglomerations, industrial districts and industry clusters and explores the context to the prominent themes that emerged between 2000 and 2015.

Explores the factors that have caused the recent explosion in hedge fund activism; examines the impact of this activism, including whether it is shortening investment horizons and discouraging investment in research and development; and surveys and evaluates possible legal interventions with an emphasis on the least restrictive alternative.

Entrepreneurship and Institutions: A Bidirectional Relationship argues that the view that institutions determine the extent to which entrepreneurial activity is productive is only part of the story. Rather, causality is bidirectional, in that entrepreneurship is also, for better or for worse, one of the main drivers of institutional change.

The aim of the smart electric energy grid is to improve efficiency, flexibility, and stability of the electric energy generation and distribution system, with the ultimate goal being the added value of energy-related services. This book gives some structure to the complex ecosystem and surveys key research problems that have shaped the area.

Provides a survey on mmWave vehicular networks including channel propagation measurement, PHY design, and MAC design. The reader is given a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the technical aspects the technology used in the automotive environment.

Describes a set of technologies that assist users in specifying database queries for different application domains. The goal of such systems is to bridge the gap between current query interfaces provided by database management systems and the needs of different usage scenarios that are not well served by existing query languages.

Addresses the organisational design of entrepreneurial ventures. While many definitions of organisational design exist, the authors consider it as consisting of two main dimensions - the organisational structure of the firm and the human resource management practices.

Computational visual perception seeks to reproduce human vision through the combination of visual sensors, artificial intelligence, and computing. This monograph focuses on the inference component of the problem and in particular discusses in a systematic manner the most commonly used optimization principles in the context of graphical models.

Surveys a family of algorithmic techniques for the design of scalable algorithms. These techniques include local network exploration, advanced sampling, sparsification, and geometric partitioning. They also include spectral graph-theoretical methods, such as are used for computing electrical flows and sampling from Gaussian Markov random fields.

Focuses on specific aspects of the decision support systems (DSS) history by means of an empirical assessment of the DSS literature over three consecutive time periods: 1969-1990, 1991- 2005, and 2006-2012.

Software-based Fault Isolation (SFI) is a software-instrumentation technique at the machine- code level for establishing logical protection domains within a process. This monograph discusses the SFI policy, its main implementation and optimization techniques, as well as an SFI formalization on an idealized assembly language.

After a long decline in American manufacturing in the 2000s, the US governemnt responded with a poicy of ""advanced manufacturing"". This book traces how the foundational concepts of this poicy were developed and how an innovation system response was considered and developed to strengthen the US production system.

This monograph provides a comprehensive review of kernel mean embeddings of distributions and, in the course of doing so, discusses some challenging issues that could potentially lead to new research directions. The targeted audience includes graduate students and researchers in machine learning and statistics who are interested in the theory and applications of kernel mean embeddings.

This monograph provides the reader with an in-depth survey of the research conducted to date in computational visual attention models and provides the basis for further research in this exciting area.

Leveraged Buyouts: Motives and Sources of Value analyzes the motives for taking public firms private and provides a structured and critical review of the empirical research in this area.

Households as a Site of Entrepreneurial Activity explores the interactions between business activities and entrepreneurial households, demonstrating that new venture creation and growth often hinges on the household-business nexus, and that business decisions are influenced both by family circumstances and prevailing economic conditions.

Examines supply chain management from a strategic point of view. The book provides a holistic exploration of existing supply chain strategies with most of its emphasis on product-driven strategies, and Fisher's framework in particular.

Although several experimental studies have been conducted in recent years that compare the performance of several big graph systems, Big Graph Analytics Platforms is the first text to provide a comprehensive survey that clearly summarizes the key features and techniques developed in existing systems.

Offers a step-by-step approach to conducting ethnography in business and consumer settings with some examples. This monograph also provides a framework and some general principles.

Looks at why historical deterministic practices and standards, mostly developed in the 1950s, should be reviewed in order to take full advantage of new emerging technologies and facilitate transition to a smart grid paradigm.

Reviews the literature on this topic and presents a framework that synthesizes the factors associated with successful transformational performance improvement. Coverage includes determining and communicating a system-level goal; developing and using system-level measures of performance; and understanding and managing interdependencies.

Focuses on the foundations laid by the early research on agglomerations, industrial districts, and industry clusters that was published in the 20th century. Chapters review the literature on agglomerations, industrial districts and industry clusters beginning with an introductory overview of Marshall's (1920) and other significant works.

Presents a set of goals to help the reader understand the role of experimental economics in marketing. These include distinguishing experimental economics from other fields in the broadest possible terms; providing the basic methodological tenets of experimental economics; and delineating classes of experiments within experimental economics.

The two primary goals of the text are to learn several canonical problems in communication complexity that are useful for proving lower bounds for algorithms (Disjointness, Index, Gap-Hamming, and so on); and to learn how to reduce lower bounds for fundamental algorithmic problems to communication complexity lower bounds.

Focuses on systems with linear dynamics, giving rise to convex control problems. This book provides a comprehensive survey of a family of first order methods known as decomposition schemes or operator splitting methods and shows the behaviour of such algorithms as solvers of control related convex problems from tens to a few hundreds of variables.

Presents a comprehensive review of the foundations, the trends, and the future challenges of IS success measurement in order to improve research and practice in terms of the measurement and evaluation of information systems. This book explores the foundations and trends in the definition and measurement of information systems success.

Presents a detailed review and analysis of some of the leading computational methods and implementations developed for executing community detection on modern day multicore and manycore architectures.

Attempts to promote a broad debate about the notion of causality and the role of causal inference in the social sciences. This volume allows researchers and students in accounting, and the social sciences, to acquire a deeper understanding of the notion of causality and the nature, limits, and scope of empirical research in the social sciences.

Lays out a discussion framework for understanding the role of human-computer interaction in public policymaking. The book takes an international view, discussing potential areas for research and application and their potential for impact. The aim is to provide a solid foundation for discussion, cooperation and collaborative interaction.