Quality evaluation and preferences of healthcare services: the case of telemedicine in Sardinia

Quality & Quantity - This paper explores preferences towards cardiological e-health services, assessed on a representative quota sample of potential users in Sardinia, Italy. By a mixture model...     

Asymmetric information and deal selection: evidence from the Italian venture capital market

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - The aim of this study is to show how information asymmetry affects the venture capital (VC) deal selection process in the Italian capital...     

CSR and service quality in nonprofit organizations: the case of a performing arts association

• The relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and marketing performance has been widely investigated recently, but mostly in relation to for-profit companies. This paper highlights the importance of this topic for nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Focusing on an Italian NPO operating in the performing arts and entertainment industry, two empirical studies (a quantitative survey and a qualitative exploratory enquiry) prove the strategic relevance of CSR in nonprofit contexts. The results demonstrate that CSR can be considered an additional dimension of the customer perception of service quality in NPOs and reveal that customer perception of the social responsibility of the studied NPO is strongly linked to its institutional mission and to the modalities through which it pursues that mission.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A note on contribution games with loss functions

Decisions on joint funding of continuous public goods between two agents often involve heterogeneous targets. We introduce loss functions in a contribution game in order to study the effect of this conflict. Unlike Varian (1994), joint contribution occurs only if the players’ targets are sufficiently close and the sequential game reduces free riding problems, while total contribution is higher in the simultaneous game.     

Can price regulation increase cost-efficiency?

This paper examines the possibility that price regulation increases a monopolist's cost-efficiency. When the firm's choice of cost-reducing effort depends on the output supplied, a binding price-cap, by compelling the monopolist to produce more, results in lower costs. On the basis of a two-period asymmetric information model, the paper demonstrates that price regulation increases efficiency when the elasticity of demand is sufficiently low, even assuming very conservative preferences of the regulator and asymmetric information. Moreover, contrary to previous findings and conventional wisdom, we find that a periodical rate base review may increase productive efficiency through the positive effect on future cost-reducing effort, counterbalancing its well known adverse effect on the current level of effort.     

Home bias in divestment decisions of multinational corporations in the EU

We empirically investigate the claim that multinational corporations (MNCs) suffer from a “home bias” in divestment decisions: MNCs prefer to divest from foreign subsidiaries because the “emotional involvement” and the commitment in divesting from domestic subsidiaries is larger. This issue has not been yet empirically explored in the economic literature, although it is quite recurrent in the political debate on MNCs and FDI. Using detailed company‐level data on the EU corporate groups during the economic crisis (2008–2014), we show that, in spite of prima facie empirical evidence of a home bias, the bias disappears when firm‐, country‐, and sector‐specific factors are accounted for.     

Structural breaks in the lending interest rate pass-through and the euro

This paper investigates whether size and speed of the pass-through of market rates into short term business lending rates have increased in the wake of the introduction of the euro. Allowing for multiple unknown structural breaks we find two in four EMU countries, and in the UK as well, and a single one in five other countries. The pattern of dates fits national banking systems adjusting slowly to the new monetary regime and suggests caution in associating structural changes to the introduction of the euro. The estimated equilibrium pass-through in the last break-free period is on average more incomplete, hinting at a reduced effectiveness of the single monetary policy. These results run against the economic intuition that a reduced volatility in money market rates is bound to mitigate uncertainty and to ease therefore the transfer of policy rate changes to retail rates; the run-up to Basel 2 and a deterioration of competition in loan markets could be the motivations. Caution in extrapolating these findings to recent periods is suggested by the differences between the unharmonized and the new harmonized retail rates.     

Analysing Social Capital and Product Innovativeness in the Relationship Evolution of Born-Global Companies the Mediating Role of Knowledge Acquisition

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Relatively little is known about how born-global companies (BGs) innovate abroad during their lifecycle or about how the international...     

Noncompensatory/nonlinear composite indicators for ranking countries: a defensible setting

Composite indicators (or indexes) are very common in economic and business statistics for benchmarking the mutual and relative progress of countries in a variety of policy domains such as industrial competitiveness, sustainable development, globalization and innovation. The proliferation of the production of composite indicators by all the major international organizations is a clear symptom of their political importance and operational relevance in policy-making. As a consequence, improvements in the way these indicators are constructed and used seem to be a very important research issue from both the theoretical and operational points of view. This article aims at contributing to the improvement of the overall quality of composite indicators (or indexes) by looking at one of their technical weaknesses, that is, the aggregation convention used for their construction. For this aim, we build upon concepts coming from multi-criteria decision analysis, measurement theory and social choice. We start from the analysis of the axiomatic system underlying the mathematical modelling commonly used to construct composite indicators. Then a different methodological framework, based on noncompensatory/nonlinear aggregation rules, is developed. Main features of the proposed approach are: (i) the axiomatic system is made completely explicit and (ii) the sources of technical uncertainty and imprecise assessment are reduced to the minimum possible degree.