Research & Publications

If one person’s behavior at work can be predicted, weakly, conditionally, but measurably, can a team’s? A team that includes an AI colleague? A company’s? A multinational’s? Five literatures each hold a piece of the answer and none holds the whole. This paper asks the question once, across all five levels, and finds that prediction does not fail as you climb; it changes its translation rule at every boundary.

The paper contributes original data at the level where the literature is thinnest: 9,772 measurements administering the instruments organisations use on people, a DISC-format inventory, a Big Five questionnaire and a battery of repeated-play games, to AI colleagues configured the way real functions configure them: six corporate roles, working documents included, across four model versions from two providers.

The role an organisation assigns to its advisors, human or artificial, follows its decision latency, not its national culture. Written strength predicts; unwritten strength does not. The function writes the AI colleague’s style; the model carries its behavior.

Characterise the situation before reading anyone’s profile. Design the team’s first round instead of predicting it. Contract the advisor’s role rather than letting the clock assign it. And before an AI colleague joins a team, profile it like a hire: per role, per model version, with the behavioral battery and not just the questionnaire, then re-profile on every update.

European pipeline corridors are conventionally analysed as engineering assets; the paper treats them as mispriced options on four possible molecular futures.

The corridor — permitted, contracted, and physically continuous across borders — is the asset that cannot be rebuilt; the pipe within it can.

Demand risk, not technical feasibility, is the binding constraint on the transition.

The operator’s defining task is therefore instrument-stacking across borders: aligning capacity, contracts, and regulatory instruments so the corridor’s optionality is preserved rather than foreclosed.

European return systems prove a financial mechanism: wherever a binding consequence attaches to non-return, containers come back at 85–99 per cent; wherever none does, goodwill fails.

The missing piece is the settlement layer — the shared register of identity, obligation, and clearing that would let a claim travel across borders, categories, and rival systems.

The regulation now applying will multiply national loops without connecting them.

The paper prices the five instruments in use today, locates the three seams where settlement stops, and closes with four tests for operators, merchants, and investors: run a loop, join the layer, hold the option, or don’t build.