This book analyzes the effects of power generated by renewable energy sources, renewable energy production technologies, energy efficiency, and market regulation of carbon emissions. It elaborates on how these parameters have direct and indirect effects on carbon emission reduction, such as the results of an environmental tax that could directly reduce carbon emissions by decreasing fossil fuel consumption or by stimulating energy savings through technological innovation, as well as how renewable energy sources can affect both economic growth and the environment. In addition to a detailed analysis of the interrelationships between renewable energy consumption, production technology, and market regulation, The Development of Renewable Energy Sources and its Significance for the Environment proposes a model for measuring the effectiveness and results of the interaction between these links. Furthermore, a structure for a marketplace of renewable energy sources is put forward, as well as an outline of the requirements that must be met in order for this market to function. Suitable policy recommendations to enhance the market for renewable energies are also provided.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2014, held in Cardiff, UK, in September 2014. The 8 revised full papers and 7 paper-in-progress presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. The presentation sessions that have been set up are: Cloud Adoption, Work in Progress on Market Dynamics, Cost Optimization, Work in Progress on Pricing, Contracts and Service Selection and Economic Aspects of Quality of Service.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2013, held in Zaragoza, Spain, in September 2013.The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: business models, energy consumption, resource allocation, work in progress on resource allocation, work in progress on pricing, quality of service, work in progress on utility and ROI modeling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2012, held in Berlin, Germany, in November 2012. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 work in progress papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 36 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: market mechanisms, pricing and negotiation; resource allocation, scheduling and admission control; work in progress on tools and techniques for cost-efficient service selection; market modeling; trust; cloud computing in education; and work in progress on cloud adoption and business models.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2011, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in December 2011. The 9 revised full papers presented together with 5 work in progress papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on market mechanisms and negotiation; cost models, charging, and trading platforms; resource allocation, scheduling, and admission control; and two work in progress sections: risk assessment and economics of cloud services; and cost-aware adoption of cloud services.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2021, in September 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually hosted by the Libera Universita Maria SS. Assunta (LUMSA), Rome, Italy. The 7 full papers and 2 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. In addition, this book includes 8 work-in-progress papers and 2 extended abstracts. Chapters "AI Technologies and Motives for AI Adoption by Countries and Firms: A Systematic Literature Review"; "Knowledge Management Framework for Cloud Federation"; "Architecture for Orchestrating Containers in Cloud" and "Towards Software Compliance Specification and Enforcement using TOSCA" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2020, held in Izola, Slovenia, in September 2020. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually by the University of Ljubljana. The 11 full papers and 9 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The papers are structured in selected topics, namely: Smartness in Distributed Systems; Decentralizing Clouds to Deliver Intelligence at the Edge; Digital Infrastructures for Pandemic Response and Countermeasures; Dependability and Sustainability; Economic Computing and Storage; Poster Session.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2018, held in Pisa, Italy, in September 2018. The 21 full papers and 9 short papers presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions.This GECON 2018 proceedings was structured in three special sessions on selected topics, namely: IT service ecosystems enabled through emerging digital technologies; machine learning, cognitive systems and data science for system management; and blockchain technologies and economics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2017, held in Biarritz, France, in September 2017.The 10 full papers and 10 short papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. This volume of the GECON 2017 proceedings has been structured in sections following the sessions that comprised the conference program: Pricing in Cloud and Quality of Service, Work in Progress on Service Management, Work in Progress on Business models and Community Cooperation, Work in Progress on Energy Efficiency and Resource Management, Resource Management, Edge Computing, Cloud Federation; and Work in Progress on Service Selection and Coordination.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2016, held in Athens. Greece, in September 2016. The 11 revised full papers and 11 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. This volume has been structured following the seven sessions that comprised the conference program (three of which are work-in-progress sessions): Session 1: Business Models Session 2: Work in Progress on Quality of Services and Service Level Agreements Session 3: Work in Progress on Cloud Economics Session 4: Energy Consumption Session 5: Resource Allocation Session 6: Work in Progress on Resource Allocation Session 7: Cloud Applications

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2015, held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in September 2015. The 11 revised full papers and 10 paper-in-progress presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The presentation sessions that have been set up are: resource allocation, service selection in clouds, energy conservation and smart grids, applications: tools and protocols, community networks and legal and socio-economic aspects.

Collective intelligence has become an attractive subject of interest for both academia and industry. More and more conferences and workshops discuss the impact of the users' motivation to participate in the value creation process, the enabling role of leading-edge information and communication technologies and the need for better algorithms to deal with the growing amount of shared data. There are many interesting and challenging topics that need to be researched and discussed with respect to knowledge creation, creativity and innovation processes carried forward in the emerging communities of practice.

COLLIN is on the path to become the flagship conference in the areas of collective intelligence and ICT-enabled social networking. We were delighted to again receive contributions from different parts of the world including Australia, Europe, Asia, and the United States. Encouraged by the positive response, we plan COLLIN 2012 to be held next year end of August at FernUniverstitat in Hagen.

In order to guarantee the quality of the event, each paper went through a doubleblind review process. The reviews concentrated on originality, quality and relevance of the paper topic to the symposium. In addition, we invited a few renowned experts in the field to contribute to the success of the symposium with outstanding papers reporting on their most recent research. Our special thanks go to the authors for submitting their papers, to the international program committee members, and to numerous reviewers who did an excellent job in guaranteeing that the papers in this volume are of very high quality."

In 57 realen Fallstudien werden die vielfachen Facetten der internationalen Unternehmenstatigkeit vorgestellt. Die didaktisch geschickt aufbereiteten Fallstudien decken die zentralen Bereiche des Internationalen Managements ab. Zu jeder Fallstudie gehoren neben der Problembeschreibung konkrete Fragen mit Losungshinweisen. In der 4. Auflage wurden zahlreiche Fallstudien durch neue und aktuelle Case Studies ersetzt; die verbleibenden wurden vollstandig uberarbeitet. Um die zunehmenden englischsprachigen Vorlesungen im Fach Internationales Management zu unterstutzen, sind in der 4. Auflage etwa die Halfte der Fallstudien in englischer Sprache.