Business modelling is a vast arena of research and practice, which is gaining increasing important in the rapid development of e-commerce, globalization, and in particular, the movement toward global e-business. The ability to utilize advanced computing technology to model, analyse and simulate various aspects of ever-changing businesses has made a significant impact on the way businesses are designed and run these days. With the current global e-business and e-commerce initiatives, it has become important that all businesses carefully validate their business objectives, requirements, and strategies through a careful process of formal business modelling. It is important for effective enterprise decision making to have clear, concise business models that allow the extraction of critical value from business processes and specify the rules to be globally enforced. Particularly in e-business specifications, the need to be unambiguous, accurate, and complete becomes even greater, because there may be no human mediator or agent to rely on in complex or unforeseen situations.
Business Modelling: Multidisciplinary Approaches - Economics, Operational, and Information Systems Perspectives, arranged in three parts, brings scholarly perspectives from various disciplines to bear on some of the critical aspects of business modeling. The first part (chapters 1-8) focuses on business modelling fundamentals and starts with a series of economics and operations research perspectives. The second part (chapters 9-19) concentrates on modelling in electronic businesses and focuses on Management Information Systems and Decision Support Systems. The third part (chapters 20-22) centers on multidisciplinary business modelling progress, in particular on the seminal work of Professor Andrew B. Whinston.

Inhalt
I:Business Modelling Fundamentals.- Introduction: Business Modelling: Multidisciplinary Approaches.- 1. Gleanings into the Second Best Debate.- 2. Transfer Pricing: From Price Guidelines To Strategic Interaction.- 3. Trading Mechanism Design for Swap Markets.- 4. Production Capacity for Durable Goods.- 5. Cost-Sharing for Pollution Abatement.- 6. A Study on Coefficient Reduction of Binary Knapsack Inequalities.- 7. Qualitative Reasoning: Theory and Applications.- 8. An Architecture for Knowledge Management Featuring Metaknow-ledge.- II-Modelling in Electronic Business.- 9. Multi Agent Enterprise Modeling.- 10. Designing IT-Supported Market Mechanisms for Organizational Coordination.- 11. Congestion Based Pricing and Management of Distributed Computational Resources.- 12. Pricing Virtual Private Networks - An Economic, Engineering and Experimental Approach.- 13. Knowledge Representation: A Classification with Applications in Telecommunications and the Web.- 14. Quasi-naturally Occurring Experiments with Electronic Markets and Digital Products.- 15. Finding the Right Products and Devising Marketing Strategies for E-Tailing.- 16. To Surf Or To Ride.- 17. Organizational and Economic Mechanisms for Buyer-Supplier Contracts.- 18. The Intelligent Internal Accounting Control Model under E-Business Environment.- 19. Internet Diffusion in Developing Countries.- III Multidisciplinary Business Modelling Progress.- 20. Advances in Business Problem Solving: Bridging Business and Computing Disciplines.- 21. The Intellectual Contribution of Professor Andrew B. Whinston to the Field of Information Systems in the Past Two Decades.- 22. IT Reference Disciplines - Andy Whinston, A Case Study.