Customer satisfaction and service domains: a further development of PROSERV

Quality & Quantity - This paper aims to represent that levels of customer satisfaction of tourist accommodation are an important prerequisite when the goal is building a loyal relationship with...     

The gift of being chosen

We report evidence from an experiment where an employer selects one of two workers to perform a task for a fixed compensation. Workers differ in their ability. The employer’s payoff depends on the worker’s ability and on a non-contractible effort that the worker exerts once employed. We find that selected workers exert an effort higher than the minimum enforceable one. When the employers can send a free-text form message to the selected worker, workers with low ability exert significantly higher effort than the workers with high ability. The difference in effort overcompensates the difference in ability.     

Innovation,trade and multi‐product firms

This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between innovation and exports by developing a model that emphasizes the role of product innovation in explaining heterogeneity in export behaviour both across and within firms. The dynamic model assumes that firms invest to maintain and increase the portfolio of products they sell: innovation is a stochastic process whereby the probability to capture new business opportunities is a function of the number of goods already sold. Crucially, the model assumes two independent mechanisms to drive the extensive and the intensive margins of a firm's export. The resulting lack of (built‐in) correlation between the two margins is well reflected in the data and represents the main contribution of our theoretical framework. The model is consistent with several other empirical regularities that characterize multi‐product firms, such as the heavy tail in the distribution of the number of products exported by each firm, the strict hierarchy in the sales of products across markets, the substantial degree of product churning and the highly skewed distributions of export sales.     

Do Not Trash the Incentive! Monetary Incentives and Waste Sorting

In this paper, we examine whether combining non‐monetary and monetary incentives increases municipal solid waste sorting. We empirically investigate this issue, exploiting the exogenous variation in waste management policies experienced during the years 1999–2008 by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy). Using a panel regression analysis, we estimate that pay‐as‐you‐throw (PAYT) incentive schemes increase the sorted‐to‐total waste ratio by 17 percent, and that their effect reinforces that of a door‐to‐door (DtD) collection system, which is equal to 15.7 percent. Moreover, the panel structure of our dataset allows us to find learning and spatial effects associated with both PAYT and DtD.