The rhythm of effective entrepreneurs’ decision-making process. The pathways of alertness scanning and search and cognitive style. A mediation model

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - How can entrepreneurs be effective when making decisions? To enrich current research on entrepreneurship and cognition, the present study...     

THE POSTAL SERVICE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION PUBLIC MONOPOLY OR COMPETITIVE MARKET?: A transaction cost approach

The paper discusses the relevant institutional and economic aspects of the postal service, and analyses both the arguments for abolishing the statutory monopoly and those for retaining it. The main thesis of the paper is that public and private postal services differ from each other in many aspects: transaction costs, the willingness of the customer to pay, market structure, and possibilities of substituting the service with other communication instruments. Therefore, a simple privatisation will not solve per se the efficiency problems of the service. furthermore, the European Commission, which published in 1992 a green paper on postal services, is considering the possibility of harmonising the quality of the service within the EU and gradually reducing the gap in national postal prices. This seems to be an effective device to force firms towards the greater efficiency required in a Continental market. In future, the competition will take place not so much between private firms (more interested in running the high-value segments), as between national public carriers, as shown by the phenomenon of remail.     

Fast and accurate calculation of American option prices

We propose a very efficient numerical method to solve a nonlinear partial differential problem that is encountered in the pricing of American options. In particular, by using the front-fixing approach originally developed in Wu and Kwok (J Financ Eng 6:83–97, 1997) and Nielsen et al. (J Comput Finance 5:69–97, 2002) in conjunction with a suitable change of the time variable, a (nonlinear) partial differential problem is obtained which can be solved very efficiently by means of a finite difference scheme enhanced by repeated Richardson extrapolation. Numerical results are presented showing that the novel algorithm yields excellent results, and performs significantly better than a finite different method with Bermudan approximation.     

Engel’s curve and product differentiation: A dynamic analysis of the effects of quality on consumer’s choice

The application of Engel’s Curve in a single-product perspective may dramatically change the role of quality in affecting the dynamics of economic performance. This paper introduces a specification of preferences that regards quality as luxury, and quantity as necessary. The analysis is carried out by using a framework similar to Grossman’s and Helpman ’s (1991), while quality is defined as in Stokey (1988). The resulting consumer’s demand crucially depends on quality. Quality is potentially able to prevent the process, implied by neoclassical models, that leads the value of consumption goods to decline over time. By doing so, quality also affects the consumption bundle shares and the variety-specific consumption growth rates, thus influencing all dynamic quantitative variables of the economy. I thank Professor Beniamino Moro for his guidance and encouragement. I thank Stephen Wright for his comments and suggestions. I have benefited from the support of Alessio Moro, Dario Unali, Debora Fletcher, Emilio Merella, Esteban Jaimovich, Francesca Lamanna, Matteo Bellinzas, Mauro Merella and all my friends. I am also indebted to Professor Cuong Le Van and Professor Stephen Parente for their advice. I thank two anonymous Referees for their useful remarks.     

Asymptotical behavior of finite and possible discontinuous economies

We consider a finite economy in which the data are depending on an exogenous parameter and the utilities satisfy a condition, previously introduced by the authors and called sequential pseudocontinuity, weaker than sequential lower semicontinuity and than sequential upper semicontinuity. We show that the economy has a nice asymptotical behavior, that is: for any sequence (x _n ) _n of exogenous parameters converging to x _o , any convergent subsequence of a sequence of approximate competitive equilibria of converges to an exact equilibrium of .