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Due to the wicked nature of software development, it is imperative to take into consideration bounded rationality and opportunism of the agents involved in, when managing software development projects. These two concepts, which are at the foundations of transaction cost economics, have not yet been studied in relation to software engineering. In this paper, we develop transaction cost economics approach to software engineering, specifically as it relates to governance.This approach enables us better understand the strengths and weaknesses of top-down and bottom-up processes, and outlines a method to be used in choosing amongst alternative governance structures given relevant project characteristics.

This article leverages the findings of the transaction cost economics field, and proposes a simple theory and associated vocabulary to serve as a foundation for a unified theory of software engineering. It characterizes software engineering as a set of transactions organized under three governance structures. The theory explains the strengths and weaknesses of these governance structures in relation to asset specificity. It takes into account the recursive nature of the notions in software engineering, and applies uniformly to various contexts at different levels of granularity. The theory not only provides an explanatory framework for some of the propositions given in the software engineering literature, but also reveals the boundaries of their applicability.

This study looks into the factual link between nitrogen fertilizer use and the land annual mean temperature anomalies arising from climate change, incorporating the effect of income and agriculture share to understand better their impact on emissions from agricultural activities along climate indicators. The study unearths causalities associated with this link by employing the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) with back-dated actual panel data specifically constructed for this study by combining four datasets from 2002 to 2010. In the long-run, the causality is significant and unidirectional, indicating that income, agriculture share, and land temperature anomalies cause agricultural emissions, and that disequilibrium from such emissions is not eliminated within a year. In the short-run, the effective use of nitrogen fertilizers and other associated agricultural practices can be achieved as countries approach per capita income of 7000 USD. Changes in the structure of economies have an expected effect on agricultural emissions. Temperature anomalies increase agricultural emissions from nitrogen fertilizers, possibly due to the fact that the potential negative impacts of these anomalies are mitigated by farmers through changes in crop production inputs. Therefore, as part of adoption strategies, to avoid the excessive and inefficient use of nitrogen fertilizers by farmers, economic incentives should be aligned with the national and global incentives of sustainability.