Techno-economic case study on dedicated RAN for an intelligent transportation system: impact of the legislation-driven costs

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) aim at improving daily travel experience. There are many promising communication technologies that could provide some ITS services. So far they have been predominantly evaluated from the technical point of view. This paper contributes a techno-economic evaluation of a case study on dedicated Radio Access Network (RAN) for public ITS. We analyze, calculate and compare Capital (CapEx) and Operational Expenditures (OpEx) for four different ITS-enabling wireless technologies: Ultra High Frequency standard, Wi-Fi 802.11n, Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) 802.11p and LTE. This paper expands our results from Grigoryev et al. (2015). Here, we discuss in more details RAN planning and generalize legislation-driven cost influence on CapEx for DSRC and LTE deployments.     

Institutions of Higher Education: Cornerstones in Building Ethical Organizations

Ethical organizations have a competitiveadvantage in the marketplace. The merepresence of a statement of ethics isinadequate. Deeds and actions are alsonecessary. A critical component in building anethical culture in organizations is therecruitment and retention of ethical employees. The best and most readily available sources ofsuch personnel are higher educationinstitutions that have strong ethical culturesand skilled graduates. This paper addresses indicators of highereducation institutions having strong ethicalcultures. The paper discusses the concepts ofpraxis and contrast experience and their role in education. The importance of andopportunities for service learning areconsidered to be a central theme in developingethical graduates. We conclude thatinstitutions of higher education that live theethics and values contained in their missionstatements produce graduates who are highlyvalued and sought by ethical organizations.     

CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF COOPERATIVE MERGERS AND THEIR RESULTS

This study characterizes the mergers and acquisitions undertaken in the Spanish agrifood sector during the period 1995–2005. First, it aims to establish the pre‐merger financial characteristics of the merging cooperatives in comparison with other firms in the agrifood sector. For this, the financial situation is analyzed in the different types of merger carried out (merger by formation or merger by acquisition), and the different roles played by the cooperatives (acquiring, acquired or involved in a merger in which a new cooperative is formed). The second and final objective is to determine whether these mergers have managed to improve the economic‐financial situation of the companies involved, either by increasing income and size or by reducing relative costs. For this purpose, several non parametric tests and a probit model were used. The results show that on average following a merger there were no statistically significant improvements in the economic‐financial indicators studied.     

“Welcome to Tijuana”: Popular Music on the US–Mexico Border

Popular music has not yet been widely considered by popular geopolitics practitioners. This paper develops such a perspective, using the US–Mexico border as a case study. In the area, the classic corrido and the more recent narcocorridos are flourishing. Their lyrics, exalting the deeds of border trespassers, usually represent the border as a superimposed boundary. Around the border, other more hybrid kinds of music stand for a very mixed borderland. The border is also portrayed in Anglo songs, referring to the ‘South of the border’ experience. In these, depiction leaves room for a different perception, since the border is represented as an open frontier, easy to cross, to find an abundance of girls and alcohol on the other side. Popular music can also offer a metaphorical representation of the US–Mexico border, transforming it from a local space to the symbol of all global power asymmetries, as in Manu Chao’s songs.     

Estimates and Determinants of Armington Elasticities for the U.S. Food Industry

This paper provides estimates of elasticities of substitution between domestic and imported goods for 40 4-digit S.I.C. food manufacturing industries and explains the inter-industry differences among these coefficients in terms of industry sectoral characteristics. The results show that there is a wide range of variation among such elasticities and that the intensity of each industrys percentage of output sold to final consumers, foreign direct investment, expenditures on advertising and the existence of import quotas affect the degree of substitutability between domestic and foreign goods in the face of a relative price change.     

The dimensional stability of the standards used in the disconfirmation paradigm

Disconfirmation judgments are defined as the difference between a consumer's consumption experiences and the comparison standards brought to mind at the time of judgment. Although disconfirmations are one of the most strongly related antecedents of customer satisfaction (CS), little is known about the dimensional stability of the standards used in the disconfirmation paradigm. The most commonly used standards in the measurement of disconfirmations, and the focal constructs in this research, are goals, expectations, and norms. Using three datasets in retail service settings, the authors investigated whether these standards are changed in the process of measuring disconfirmation judgments. The results of the structural equation models indicate that while consumers can generate comparison standards that are distinct, consumers appear to assimilate disconfirmation judgments into a single construct. One implication for retailers is that when using direct measures of disconfirmations in surveys, there appears to be little difference in the ability of these standards to predict customer satisfaction.     

Platform strategies: how the position in the network drives success

Scholars have focused on platform strategies for a long time, moving from a product perspective to an industry-wide one. In particular, the decision to open the platform to external complementors has been studied through the perspective of platform leadership. The digital age is now moving from a closed approach versus an open approach. Is being a platform leader still imperative or is participating in a network of existing platforms still a suitable strategy as well? What kind of collaborations within an ecosystem leads to better performances? Leveraging social network analysis is performed within the network formed by mobile apps in the Health and Fitness category; this research shows how the decision of being (or not) a platform provider has an impact on the performances, but the position within the network mediates this impact. Based on the results obtained, research and managerial implications can be established.     

Liquidity biases in asset pricing tests

Microstructure noise in security prices biases the results of empirical asset pricing specifications, particularly when security-level explanatory variables are cross-sectionally correlated with the amount of noise. We focus on tests of whether measures of illiquidity, which are likely to be correlated with the noise, are priced in the cross-section of stock returns, and show a significant upward bias in estimated return premiums for an array of illiquidity measures in Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) monthly return data. The upward bias is larger when illiquid securities are included in the sample, but persists even for NYSE/Amex stocks after decimalization. We introduce a methodological correction to eliminate the biases that simply involves weighted least squares (WLS) rather than ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation, and find evidence of smaller, but still significant, return premiums for illiquidity after implementing the correction.     

Trade Reform and Poverty: The Case of Mexico

We use a two‐step computationally simple procedure to analyse the effects of Mexico's's potential unilateral tariff liberalisation on real incomes. First, we use the CGE model provided by the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) as the new price generator. Second, we apply the price changes to Mexican household data in order to assess the effects of the policy simulation on poverty and income distribution. Although Mexico widely liberalised most of its imports by the mid 90s, one salient feature is its membership in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and United States. By choosing GTAP as the price generator, we are able to model the differential tariff structure. Even starting with a low level of tariff protection, simulation results show that the impact of tariff reform on welfare will be positive in general for all expenditure deciles. We find that, when we assume non‐homothetic individual preferences, trade liberalisation benefits people in the poorer deciles more than those in the richer ones.