The outputs or products of an economy can be divided into services products and goods products (due to manufacturing, construction, agriculture and mining). To date, the services and goods products have, for the most part, been separately mass produced. However, in contrast to the first and second industrial revolutions which respectively focused on the development and the mass production of goods, the next — or third — industrial revolution is focused on the integration of services and/or goods; it is beginning in this second decade of the 21st Century. The Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) is based on the confluence of three major technological enablers (i.e., big data analytics, adaptive services and digital manufacturing); they underpin the integration or mass customization of services and/or goods. As detailed in an earlier paper, we regard mass customization as the simultaneous and real-time management of supply and demand chains, based on a taxonomy that can be defined in terms of its underpinning component and management foci. The benefits of real-time mass customization cannot be over-stated as goods and services become indistinguishable and are co-produced — as “servgoods” — in real-time, resulting in an overwhelming economic advantage to the industrialized countries where the consuming customers are at the same time the co-producing producers.

With the world talking about climate change, the United States (U.S.), China and India have announced their carbon emission reduction targets. For these three countries to achieve their targets, significant questions arise, such as what will be the annual emission reduction efforts to achieve those targets, how much it would cost and what would be the economic effects. This paper puts the carbon intensity reduction targets of China and India together with the absolute emission reduction target of the U.S. into the same non-linear model to quantitatively study the optimal emission control strategies and associated total cost for achieving those targets by the year 2020, and estimate and compare the minimized total costs of the three countries to reach their targets. Our results show that the total cost for the U.S. to achieve its emission reduction target is greater than those of China and India in terms of absolute amount. However, in terms of proportion of total cost to GDP, China and India’s ratios are significantly greater than that of the U.S., indicating that for the developing countries such as China and India, the achievement of emission reduction targets needs relatively greater effort.

A formal methodology for analyzing the importance of weighing a decision maker℉s attitudes in a conflict is introduced and applied to the problem of negotiating a fair transfer of a brownfield property. A decision maker℉s attitudes are expressed in his consideration of his own preferences, as well as those of his opponents. Dominating attitudes are used to suggest that in a circumstance in which a decision maker takes into account multiple perspectives due to his attitudes, he may favor one perspective more heavily. The analysis of a brownfield acquisition conflict illustrates the types of insights that this methodology reveals.

Our world has been changing at an exponential rate. As a result of this rapid growth, we will be forced to make changes in not only the way we live in the environment but also in the environment itself such as designing the cities of the future to be in greater harmony with the increasing population and growing complexity. The paper contains both reflections on global awareness and comprehensive criteria and their priorities for choosing the most desirable city.

Industrial development can enrich people’s lives, but it also causes environmental pollution, which is an area of significant concern among governments, consumers, and companies. Governments formulate some environmental policies, which motivate industry by providing greater incentives for green product development. Consumers are classified into two groups — ordinary and green market segments — according to their environmental awareness and attitudes. In this regard, companies need to reconsider their primary product design strategies. By investigating the interactions among customers’ preferences, firms’ product strategies, and government subsidy policies, this paper presents a theoretical model for new product design strategies. After detailed theoretical analysis of such strategies, we found that to motivate firms to choose environmentally friendly product design strategies, governments should inaugurate effective subsidy policies. After simultaneously considering environmental issues and firms’ benefits, we designed a subsidy policy. With such a policy, firms can change their primary product design strategies and develop both green and ordinary products, thereby increasing the firms’ profits and improving the total environmental quality.

A valuable number of works has been published about Hurwitz and Schur polynomials in order to known better their properties. For example it is known that the sets of Hurwitz and Schur polynomials are open and no convex sets. Besides, the set of monic Schur polynomials is contractible. Now we study this set using ideas from differential topology, and we prove that the space of Schur complex polynomials with positive leading coefficient, and the space of Hurwitz complex polynomials which leading coefficient having positive real part, have structure of trivial vector bundle, and each space of (Schur complex and real, Hurwitz complex) polynomials has a differential structure diffeomorphic to some known spaces.