Are they telling the truth? Revealing hidden traits of satisfaction with a public bike-sharing service

Public bike-sharing systems (BSSs) are an emerging mode of transportation introduced by municipalities to solve congestion problems in metropolitan areas, especially when integrated with other types of transportation. In the last years, the number of public bike-sharing services has been constantly on the rise all over the world, and generally the overall satisfaction with them is high. However, satisfaction with public services is driven by mechanisms that can differ from those in the private sector. It is important to establish to what extent a high satisfaction is genuine or simply ephemeral. Even “old” public services (like public transportation) become “gold” when accompanied by the introduction of new technologies. In this paper we analyze this phenomenon using data from a satisfaction web-survey conducted among customers of the public BSS “BikeMi” in Milan, Italy, in a period when mobile technologies have been introduced to speed up the service. On analyzing the responses to satisfaction questions using simple summary statistics, the level of satisfaction resulted very high. However, our aim was to look for potential “darker” sides of the service by detecting possible hidden satisfaction components. For this purpose, we used the Nonlinear Principal Components Analysis, which is particularly powerful in this context. A simple textual analysis was also performed as a validating test. Results from our analysis indicated that satisfaction is flawed by a set of factors like the mechanics of the bikes, the picking and dropping system, and the apps used to organize the service. Less concern was detected for more general aspects of the service.     

Who benefits from privileged peers? Evidence from siblings in schools

By comparing siblings attending the same school at different points in time, we investigate whether the effect of peer quality on long-term labor market outcomes varies with parental background. We find that exposure to better peers—who have higher mean parental education—increases lifetime earnings of disadvantaged students, coming from families with low parental education, but penalizes privileged students from better educated families. These results suggest that desegregation policies that allocate disadvantaged students to schools with better peers produce long-term benefits. We discuss mechanisms and show that human capital accumulation, ordinal rank and network effects contribute to explain our findings.     

Small Firm Investment and Financing Decisions: An Option Value Approach

This paper reviews and discusses recent developments undergone by investment theory, and tries to address both financial and real decisions within an uncertain environment, here, the Italian economy. According to the recent "option value" approach to investment, if differing degrees of reversibility characterize the accumulation process by groups of firms (small and larger firms), we should expect their investment decisions to differ under uncertainty. On the other hand, asset reversibility has an influence on firm financing policy, given the observed relationship between asset and liability composition. Assuming a different degree of investment reversibility for small and larger firms, we explore how they react to interest rate uncertainty using the Italian experience during the 1980s as a benchmark. The main result of this paper is that interest rate uncertainty exerts a negative influence on firms' investment demand. The relationship is stronger for large firms than for small firms. Another result is that firm leverage also shows a negative relationship with interest rate uncertainty.     

Parallel trade,product quality,and welfare

We study the welfare effects of parallel trade (PT) considering investment in quality. We thus revisit the case for PT in research-intensive industries. We find that PT may raise quality, depending on how preferences for quality differ across countries. Conditional on quality, consumer surplus may rise (fall) in the PT-source (PT-recipient) country. While PT reduces ex post welfare, improving quality is a necessary condition for PT to increase welfare ex ante.     

Assessment of meaningful change in routine outcome measurement (ROM) with a combination of a longitudinal and a ‘classify and count’ approach

To assess significant changes of health status in people receiving health care, distribution-based and anchor-based methods have been proposed. However, there is no real consensus on what method is the best for evaluating clinically meaningful change. To maximize the internal and external validity of outcome assessment, we propose combining two approaches as recommended by recent practical guidelines on this field. Specifically, we suggest applying longitudinal hierarchical linear models on subgroups of patients showing reliable change and reliable and clinically significant change. This combined approach improved the model’s ability (1) to quantify the magnitude of changes to be reliable and clinically meaningful and (2) to select significant predictors of changes. An empirical application on a prevalence sample of Italian outpatients attending four community mental health services was done. A cross-sectional model and three longitudinal models were applied on the entire study sample and reliable and clinically meaningful change subsamples to investigate the magnitude of change and the predictive effect on outcomes of clinical, socio-demographic and process variables on different patients’ subgroups. Differences were found suggesting that both the statistical method and the sample used to calculate individual changes affect the estimates. The main conclusion is that ignoring the longitudinal data structure or including patients with unreliable change at the follow-up might result in misleading inferences that can alter the real magnitude of changes and the contributions of predictors. The approach proposed provides robust feedback to clinicians on clinically significant change and can be recommended in outcome studies and research.     

Covered interest arbitrage profits: The role of liquidity and credit risk

We study the profitability of Covered Interest Parity (CIP) arbitrage violations and their relationship with market liquidity and credit risk using a novel and unique dataset of tick-by-tick firm quotes for all financial instruments involved in the arbitrage strategy. The empirical analysis shows that positive CIP arbitrage deviations include a compensation for liquidity and credit risk. Once these risk premia are taken into account, small arbitrage profits only accrue to traders who are able to negotiate low trading costs. The results are robust to stale pricing and the nonsynchronous trading occurring in the markets involved in the arbitrage strategy.     

Monopoly with local knowledge of demand function

In this note, we propose a model where a quantity setting monopolist has incomplete knowledge of the demand function. In each period, the firm sets the quantity produced observing only the selling price and the slope of the demand curve at that quantity. Given this information and through a learning process the firm estimates a linear subjective demand curve. We show that the steady states of the dynamic equation are critical points of the objective profit function. Moreover, results depend on convexity/concavity of the demand. When the demand function is convex and the objective profit function has a unique critical point: the steady state is a globally stable maximum; conversely when then steady state is not unique, local maximums are locally stable, while local minimums are locally unstable. On the other hand when the demand function is concave, the unique critical point is a maximum: there can be stability or instability of the critical point and period two cycles around it via a flip bifurcation. Moreover, through simulations we can observe that, with a mixed inverse demand function, there are different dynamic behaviors, from stability to chaos and that we have transition to complex dynamics via a sequence of period-doubling bifurcations. Finally, we show that the same results can be obtained if the monopolist is a price setter.