Why plan? How and what do we plan? Who plans for whom? These three questions are then applied across three major topics in planning: States, Markets, and the Provision of Social Goods; The Methods and Substance of Planning; and Agency, Implementation, and Decision Making.

This paper shows that there is an opportunity to use an institutional economics approach to the analysis of the challenges around megaproject construction contract development. It shows, firstly, that this approach is useful to analyze the reasonability of using particular contractual functions and clauses to deal with megaproject complexity. Specifically, although it is here recognized that complexity justifies the use of coordination and adaptation clauses, it is also alleged that safeguarding clauses may or may not be useful as complexity rises because this depends on the relationship between maladaptation costs and transaction costs, both related to the institutional environment. Secondly, this paper also alleges that new institutional economics is a helpful framework to analyze the prioritization of the underlying factors that determine the criteria used to assess and select contracting methods.This document illustrates that the decision of the procuring method needs to be fundamentally addressed by analyzing the sponsors’ characteristics and objectives. This is aligned with the fact that the decision regarding which contracting method to apply should consider the potential minimization of transaction costs, by adjusting governance to the nature of the transaction.

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis placed on local and regional integration in major planning projects and infrastructure development including roads, rail and waterways. This emphasis is not only on integrating various projects, but also integrating them with related issues such as housing, industry, environment and water. In other words, land-use planning and infrastructure management have become more spatially-oriented. This book brings together experts in the fields of spatial planning, land-use and infrastructure management to explore the emerging agenda of spatially-oriented integrated evaluation. It weaves together the latest theories, case studies, methods, policy and practice to examine and assess the values, impacts, benefits and the overall success in integrated land-use management. In doing so, the book clarifies the nature and roles of evaluation and puts forward guidance for future policy and practice.

Winner, 2022 Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award, American Marketing Association How do leaders, managers, and proprietors go about the essential task of setting prices? What biases enter into this process, and why? How can a business debias its price setting to become more productive, strategic, and profitable? Combining perceptive insights from behavioral economics with leading-edge ideas on price management, this book offers a new approach to pricing. Gerald Smith demonstrates why understanding, reframing, and refining everyday pricing processes—a firm’s or manager’s pricing orientation—results in a better long-term pricing strategy. He explores how pricing actually happens in practice and shows how to identify and remove the psychological blinders that cause suboptimal decisions and policies. Smith details how to improve pricing orientation by combining the soft behavioral skills that intuitively shape and refine pricing practice with the hard analytic skills that guide and structure pricing strategy. The result is more rational and more profitable pricing—with respect to not only revenue and profitability but also employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Offering an accessible and actionable model, Getting Price Right is the first book to apply behavioral economics to managerial price setting. It is a must-read for corporate business leaders, thought leaders, and professionals interested in advances in pricing and for managers, entrepreneurs, proprietors, and small and midsize business owners whose everyday work involves pricing.