If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to show that knowledge sharing is primarily based on a trading process -the business transaction process. Motivators as well as morale hazards for knowledge sharing based on existence needs, biosocial needs and cognitive needs are described.Design/methodology/approach -An industry survey followed by interviews discovers arguments supporting the business transaction theory. Results of the interviews are clustered and categorized according to Alderfer's pyramid. Morale hazards hampering knowledge sharing are derived thereof.Findings -The comprehensive online survey, combined with personal interviews, supports the business transaction theory. According to this theory, knowledge sharing is based on a trading process. During this process, which can be regarded as information exchange process, people evaluate information on individual basis in an asymmetric way. Modern portfolio theory can help to understand the motivation behind this process. Motivators as well as morale hazards for knowledge sharing were detected.Research limitations/implications -The business transaction theory is valid independent from cultures. However, the findings about morale hazards are cultural dependent. These findings represent hopes and fears of the Central European society. It would be interesting to perform the study in other regions and to compare the results.Practical implications -The results are valuable for companies which plan to improve their rewarding and incentive systems.Originality/value -Until recently researchers regarded trust, attitude and group support as the main drivers of successful knowledge-sharing cultures. This paper shows that the underlying mechanism for knowledge sharing is rather based on a trading process.

This paper describes the results of a$ve-year research program on production systems carried out in Vienna by a large engineering group at the Alcatel-Elin research laboratory. In the course of our investigations, a real-time expert system shell, PAMELA, was developed. We describe features of PAMELA and discuss ways in which the matching algorithm can be speeded up. It was found that the single processor version is one of the most efficient forward chainers available worldwide. Since single processor enhancements have been widely explored, we concentrated our efforts on multiple processor architectures to provide further per$ormance gain. EfJicient exploitation of parallelism in production systems requires suitable algorithms for load-balancing, without simultaneously increasing organisational or communication overheads. With this in mind, we developed a transputer-based architecture which serves as a testbedfor our new parallel matching algorithm. The execution speeds of various expert systems based on PAMELA are presented.

We are interested in the question of how to motivate people to share valuable information so that group performance can be leveraged. In particular, we investigate the impact of power and jealousy on cooperation. It is an unresolved issue how these two social phenomena influence cooperation. We study the impact of power and jealousy to cooperation models by using dynamic artificial agents and agent populations following combined characteristics. We simulate dynamic multi player goods games and we use the Business Transaction Theory as a basic layer for information valuation. Payoff matrices as they are used in evolutionary game theory are also applied. Our motivation to use artificial agents is manifold. First, we are able to simulate small to huge populations in short time, second we are flexible in changing agent characteristics, and third it is hard to find people who admit being jealous in real life. The technical framework is based on the eclipse development environment. The artificial agents are programmed in Java. Our interdisciplinary approach is new since emotions, in context with collaboration, have never been investigated by artificial agents and game theoretical means. Our findings show that incentives might have a big influence on jealousy and even on egoists.

Although knowledge management techniques have been discussed and developed substantially during the last several years, only moderate success has been reported in terms of measurable business results. We show how human information exchange can be mapped to the investment processes of the modern portfolio theory. We argue that the presented theory is the major reason for the rather limited success of the computer-based techniques used for codifying knowledge. The theory should be taken into account during the implementation of knowledge management programs.

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