The concept of individual semantic maps in clinical psychology: a feasibility study on a new paradigm

In this paper we propose a new technology able to map the underlying connection scheme among several psychological variables in a single individual. Nine patients with chronic heart failure underwent at regular intervals, two electronic questionnaires to evaluate depression (STAI—short form) and anxiety (STAY-6). Individual semantic maps were developed by Auto Contractive Map, a new data mining tool based on an artificial neural networks acting on the small data set formed by questionnaires items applied serially along time. The clinical psychologist involved in the clinical evaluation of the cases was asked to score the consistency between the information emerging from the graph depicting the structure of the main relationships among items and the clinical picture resulting from the psychological colloquium. All cases reported overall judgments of a good consistency suggesting that the mathematical architecture of the system is able to capture in the dynamics of items value variations through time the underlying construct of the patient psychological status. This technology is promising in remote monitoring of patients’ psychological condition in different settings with the possibility to implement personalized psychological interventions.     

CEO performance evaluation systems: empirical findings from the Italian health service

This paper examines the way that the performance of chief executive officers of Italian healthcare organizations is evaluated. The aim is to analyse the extent of the use of New Public Management techniques in the highly regionalized and political Italian healthcare sector. A positive association was found between formal CEO performance evaluation systems and the quality of regional governance. There was no significant relationship between formal CEO performance evaluation and the duration of CEO tenure.     

(Non‐)Participation in deliberation at work: a case study of online participative decision‐making

Social media are implemented by organisations to enhance productivity and knowledge sharing among employees, but they can also support group deliberation and employee voice. This paper presents a case study of an online deliberation initiative involving the discussion of a contentious internal policy within an organisation of around 550 knowledge workers. The deliberation process lasted 5 weeks and actively involved 167 employees. Different sources of information (user interaction logs, activity patterns, questionnaire responses) were analysed to investigate the impact of participation, or non‐participation, on the level of satisfaction with the deliberation, and on the understanding of the issue discussed. The findings suggest that (1) interest is a driver for participation, but it does not explain active participation, (2) participation, either active or passive, positively influences the understanding of the issue and (3) satisfaction with the outcome is not related to participation, but it may support participation in future initiatives.     

Nature of innovation and technology management in system companies

Competition in the industries that develop complex products (such as aircraft engines and radar) depends on the integration of organizational systems as well as the pace of technological change.
Companies in these industries can be regarded as 'system companies'. A framework and taxonomy are developed to indicate the characteristics and types of companies and to understand how organizational learning and integration take place. This makes it easier for companies to anticipate strategic change and some implications of this kind are described.     

Playing the wrong game: An experimental analysis of relational complexity and strategic misrepresentation

It has been suggested that players often produce simplified and/or misspecified mental models of strategic decisions [Kreps, D., 1990. Game Theory and Economic Modeling. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford]. We submit that the relational structure of players' preferences in a game is a source of cognitive complexity, and may be an important driver of such simplifications. We provide a classification of order structures in two-person games based on the properties of monotonicity and projectivity, and present experiments in which subjects construct representations of games of different relational complexity and subsequently play the games according to these representations. Experimental results suggest that relational complexity matters. More complex games are harder to represent, and this difficulty seems correlated with short term memory capacity. In addition, most erroneous representations are simpler than the correct ones. Finally, subjects who misrepresent the games behave consistently with such representations, suggesting that in many strategic settings individuals may act optimally on the ground of simplified and mistaken premises.     

Gamson's Law versus non-cooperative bargaining theory

We compare Gamson's Law, a popular empirical model of legislative bargaining, with two non-cooperative bargaining models in three players divide the dollar games in which no player has enough votes to form a winning coalition on their own. Both of the game theoretic models better organize the comparative static data resulting from changes in nominal bargaining power than does Gamson's Law. We also identify deviations from the point predictions of the non-cooperative bargaining models. Namely, proposer power is not nearly as strong as predicted under the Baron–Ferejohn model, and a significant number of bargaining rounds tend to take more than two steps under demand bargaining and more than one stage under Baron–Ferejohn, counter to the models' predictions. Regressions using the experimental data provide results similar to the field data, but fail to do so once one accounts for predictions regarding coalition composition under Gamson's Law.     

International asset prices and portfolio choices under Bayesian learning

We calculate equilibrium asset prices and portfolio choices from a two-country OLG international asset pricing model under the assumption that investors are on a Bayesian learning path. Investors from both countries receive identical information flows, but domestic investors start off with less precise priors concerning foreign fundamentals. Learning is shown to produce first-order effects on the properties of asset prices, in the form of increased equity returns, volatility clustering, and time-varying correlations across national stock markets. Moreover, on a learning path, estimation risk generates portfolio biases similar to those observed empirically, i.e. a strong preference towards domestic securities and excessive turnover in foreign securities. These findings are robust to changes in prior beliefs, the calibration of initial information asymmetries, and the parameterization of the model. We use real GDP data for the US and Europe to calibrate the model and show that in the event of a financial liberalization during the 1970s, high excess returns, time-varying volatility, substantial home bias, and excess turnover should have been observed.     

The Cross–section of Risk Premia in the Italian Stock Market

Our analysis compares multi–factor models with Italian stock market data for the period 1990–2000. The first, the simple CAPM, is the relevant benchmark because of its simplicity. The second, the extended Fama–French model (including the momentum portfolio), is the best candidate for substituting the one–factor model. The third is a multi–factor model including sectors; and the fourth is a multi–factor model including the change in short–term interest rates as an extra factor. The results of our research are mildly positive. The Fama–French multi–factor model behaves rather well in time series tests. However, in the cross–section, the average premia are not significantly different from zero, supporting the idea that they are not able to explain the cross–section of returns in the Italian market. Moreover, there is weak evidence that the factor portfolios have predictive power for macroeconomic variables characterizing the state of the economy. What may explain the results? There are two main components: first is the presumably large size of shocks to returns in the Italian case, which makes it difficult to explore the relation among expected returns; second is the presence of extra factors which are not accounted for in our analysis. (J.E.L.: G11, G12).     

Fair trades by trade fairs: Information providing institutions under monopolistic competition

It is a standard result of search theory that the optimal reservation supply price, e.g. wage, is negatively correlated to search costs. This paper applies the inverse relationship, between demand prices and limit prices, to the analysis of an hitherto unexplored topic: trade fairs. Trade fairs bloomed during the Middle Ages and early trade-based capitalism and survived for centuries. In last decades, their growth became sustained: they attract every year hundreds of thousands of exhibitors and tens of millions of visitors.The driving forces behind the trade fair activity are increasing return to scale of search for information, under conditions of imperfect competition, particularly large group monopolistic competition. Under these circumstances, trade fairs offer their participants a collective substitute for information activities that would be beyond individual possibilities. This mechanism is of paramount importance for small firms. Where there are many small suppliers and buyers, and product differentiation, trade fairs give agents the opportunity of low-cost, high-density information exchanges, under spacetime constraints. This leads to lower search costs and lower limit prices, then fairer trades. But this mechanism also implies natural monopoly or oligopoly: the larger the trade fair, i.e. the larger the number of suppliers and visitors who participate, the less the average cost of the service. More generally, natural monopolies arising from decreasing-to-scale search costs ask for a new view of government's role either in the organization or in the regulation of information exchanges. Policy implications for small business development are stressed, including tariff regulation, public investment, and involvement of small business associations in the design and organization of trade fairs.     

Funding Gaps? Access To Bank Loans By High-Tech Start-Ups

This paper aims to shed new light on start-up financing of new technology-based firms (NTBFs) and the existence of credit constraints that may negatively affect their activity. For this purpose, we analyze the different sources of start-up financing used by NTBFs and investigate several characteristics that may influence the extent of recourse to bank loans. In the empirical section, we consider a sample composed of 386 Italian NTBFs that operate both in manufacturing and services. We estimate double-censored tobit and bivariate tobit models so as to highlight the determinants of (i) the financial leverage, measured by the ratio of bank debt to total capital, and (ii) the amounts of personal capital and bank loans of firms at start-up, respectively. Our findings support the view that the credit market is imperfect and there exists a financing hierarchy. In fact, only a minority of firms resorts to outside financing, and especially to bank debt. In addition, the level of financial leverage is not random; it increases with an increase of the predicted amount of firms’ total initial capital, while it decreases with variables such as the number of owners and the work experience of founders that are indicative of greater personal wealth available to finance firms’ start-up. Lastly, the size of the bank loans obtained by firms generally is small and it is quite insensitive to demand-side factors that instead determine the amount of personal and total capital, with the notable exception of scale economies in the industry of the start-up. In other words, in accordance with the argument that credit to NTBFs is rationed, the loan supply curve is highly inelastic, even though not perfectly so.