Benito Arruñada - Böcker

The 12th Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics carried on the tradition, started in 1978, of bringing together scientists working in all regimes of nuclear dynamics. This broad range of related topics allows the researcher attending the Workshop to be exposed to work that normally would be considered outside his/her field, but could po­ tentially add a new dimension to the understanding of his/her work. At Snowbird, we brought together experimentalists working with heavy ion beams from 10 MeV/nucleon up to 200 GeV /nucleon and theoretical physicists working in diverse areas ranging from antisymmetrized fermionic dynamics to perturbative quantum chromo dynamics. Fu­ ture work at RHIC was discussed also, with presentations from several of the experimen­ tal groups. In addition, several talks addressed issues of cross-disciplinary relevance, from the study of water-drop-collisions, to the multi-fragmentation of buckyballs. Clearly the field of nuclear dynamics has a bright future. The understanding of the nuclear equation of state in all of its manifestations is being expanded on all fronts both theoretically and experimentally. Future Workshops on Nuclear Dynamics will certainly have much progress to report. Gary D. Westfall Wolfgang Bauer Michigan State Universzty v PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS The following table contains a list of the dates and locations of the previous Winter Workshops on Nuclear Dynamics as well as the members of the organizing committees. The chairpersons of the conferences are underlined.

This study focuses on market mechanisms which protect quality in the provision of services by audit firms. By providing a better understanding of these market mechanisms, it helps in defining the content of rules and the function of regulatory bodies in facilitating and strengthening the protective operation of the market. An analysis at a more general level is provided in the three chapters making up Part 1. In the four chapters of Part 2, on the other hand, this analysis is applied to a particular problem to determine how non-audit services often provided by auditors to their audit clients should be regulated. Finally, Chapter 8 contains a summary of the analysis and conclusions of the work. The conclusion with regard to non-audit services is that their provision generates beneficial effects in terms of costs, technical competence, professional judgment and competition and, moreover, need not prejudice auditor independence or the quality of these services. This assessment leads, in the normative sphere, to recommending a legislative policy aimed at facilitating the development and use of safeguards provided by the free action of market forces.Regulation should thus aim to enable the parties - audit firms, self-regulatory bodies and audit clients - to discover, through competitive market interaction, both the most efficient mix of services and the corresponding quality safeguards, adjusting for the costs and benefits of each possibility. Particular emphasis is placed on the role played by fee income diversification and the enhancement through disclosure rules of market incentives to diversify.

The Economics of Audit Quality focuses on market mechanisms which protect quality in the provision of services by audit firms. By providing a better understanding of these market mechanisms, it helps in defining the content of rules and the function of regulatory bodies in facilitating and strengthening the protective operation of the market. An analysis at a more general level is provided in the three chapters making up Part 1. In the four chapters of Part 2, on the other hand, this analysis is applied to a particular problem to determine how non-audit services often provided by auditors to their audit clients should be regulated. Finally, Chapter 8 contains a summary of the analysis and conclusions of the work. The conclusion with regard to non-audit services is that their provision generates beneficial effects in terms of costs, technical competence, professional judgment and competition and, moreover, need not prejudice auditor independence or the quality of these services. This assessment leads, in the normative sphere, to recommending a legislative policy aimed at facilitating the development and use of safeguards provided by the free action of market forces.Regulation should thus aim to enable the parties - audit firms, self-regulatory bodies and audit clients - to discover, through competitive market interaction, both the most efficient mix of services and the corresponding quality safeguards, adjusting for the costs and benefits of each possibility. Particular emphasis is placed on the role played by fee income diversification and the enhancement through disclosure rules of market incentives to diversify.

The study of nuclear dynamics is now in one of its most interesting phases. The theory is in the process of establishing an increasingly reliable transport description of heavy ion reactions from the initial violent phase dominated by first collisions to the more thermalized later stages of the reaction. This is true for the low-to-medium energy reactions, where the dynamics is formulated in terms of nucleonic, or in general hadronic, degrees of freedom. And it is also becoming a reality in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion reactions, where partonic elementary degrees of freedom have to be used. Experiments are now able to 'utilize the existing accelerators and multiparticle detec­ tion systems to conduct unprecedented studies of heavy-ion collisions on an event-by-event basis. In addition, the field anticipates the completion of the construction of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the proposed upgrade of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, promising qualitatively new data for the near future. All of these efforts are basically directed to the exploration of the change the nuclear medium provides for the properties and interactions of individual nucleons and, ultimately, the exploration of the nuclear matter phase diagram. The investigation of this phase dia­ gram, including all of the interesting phase transitions predicted from theoretical grounds, is the focus of most of the theoretical and experimental investigations of nuclear dynamics conducted today.