A general framework for collecting and analysing the tracking data of cruise passengers at the destination

Cruise passengers’ behaviour at the destination is a rather poorly investigated phenomenon. The single exit/entry point and the relatively brief visiting time, which characterize cruise passengers’ experience at their destinations, make the use of GPS technology particularly suitable for the analysis of such a relevant phenomenon. The aim of this research is to propose a general framework for collecting and analysing GPS tracking data relating to cruise passengers’ behaviour at their destination. The main prerequisites and research stages for the implementation of surveys on cruise passengers will be described and a set of tools and measures for the analysis of GPS tracking data will be proposed, together with their potential applications. As examples of case studies, two surveys performed in the ports of Palermo and Dubrovnik will be described and the main results of the collated information will be presented. Improving our understanding of the behaviour of cruise passengers at their destination is particularly relevant for the management of tourism destinations, given the challenges that this growing phenomenon is posing for many port destinations in the Mediterranean.     

Combinatorial auctions with decreasing marginal utilities

In most of microeconomic theory, consumers are assumed to exhibit decreasing marginal utilities. This paper considers combinatorial auctions among such submodular buyers. The valuations of such buyers are placed within a hierarchy of valuations that exhibit no complementarities, a hierarchy that includes also OR and XOR combinations of singleton valuations, and valuations satisfying the gross substitutes property. Those last valuations are shown to form a zero-measure subset of the submodular valuations that have positive measure. While we show that the allocation problem among submodular valuations is NP-hard, we present an efficient greedy 2-approximation algorithm for this case and generalize it to the case of limited complementarities. No such approximation algorithm exists in a setting allowing for arbitrary complementarities. Some results about strategic aspects of combinatorial auctions among players with decreasing marginal utilities are also presented.     

The throne vs. the kingdom: Founder control and value creation in startups

Research summary: Does the degree to which founders keep control of their startups affect company value? I argue that founders face a “control dilemma” in which a startup's resource dependence drives a wedge between the startup's value and the founder's ability to retain control of decision making. I develop hypotheses about this tradeoff and test the hypotheses on a unique dataset of 6,130 American startups. I find that startups in which the founder is still in control of the board of directors and/or the CEO position are significantly less valuable than those in which the founder has given up control. On average, each additional level of founder control (i.e., controlling the board and/or the CEO position) reduces the pre‐money valuation of the startup by 17.1–22.0 percent . Managerial summary: A founder's vision and capabilities are key ingredients in the early success of a startup. During those early days, it is natural for the founder to have a powerful, central role. However, as the startup grows, founders who keep too much control of the startup and its most important decisions can harm the value of the startup. Both qualitative case studies and quantitative analyses of more than 6,000 private companies highlight that startups in which the founder has maintained control (by retaining a majority of the board of directors and/or by remaining as CEO ) have significantly lower valuations than those where the founder has relinquished control. This is especially true when the startup is three years old or more . Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

哈佛商学院创业就趁现在

很多主管都表示,他们想要离开现在的企业战场,出去开家小公司独立创业,却因各种看似合理的“完美理由”,认为时机未到而放弃初哀：我必须建立更多更好的口碑,我必须了解财务系统的实际操作,我必须在孩子还小的时候维持家庭稳定……     

The communication requirements of efficient allocations and supporting prices

We show that any communication finding a value-maximizing allocation in a private-information economy must also discover supporting prices (in general personalized and nonlinear). In particular, to allocate L indivisible items between two agents, a price must be revealed for each of the 2^L-1 bundles. We prove that all monotonic prices for an agent must be used, hence exponential communication in L is needed. Furthermore, exponential communication is needed just to ensure a higher share of surplus than that realized by auctioning all items as a bundle, or even a higher expected surplus (for some probability distribution over valuations). When the utilities are submodular, efficiency still requires exponential communication (and fully polynomial approximation is impossible). When the items are identical, arbitrarily good approximation is obtained with exponentially less communication than exact efficiency.     

Supra-national regulation for supra-national telecommunications carriers?

The article reviews the extraordinary number of international ventures by major telecommunications organizations and explores problems for traditional national regulation that these global networks create. A theoretical model is defined that illustrates the adjustment process of different national policies to each other. The choice of various supra-national regulatory arrangements is shown to be affecting substantive policy. The article then discusses options for coordination and concludes that the concrete problems created by supra-national carriers do not justify the hidden cost of elaborate mechanisms of supra-national policy. Since such coordination has traditionally been used to prop up monopoly arrangements, a better approach for the foreseeable future is to encourage more national policy experimentation and focus less on international policy coordination.     

Algorithmic Mechanism Design

We consider algorithmic problems in a distributed setting where the participants cannot be assumed to follow the algorithm but rather their own self-interest. As such participants, termed agents, are capable of manipulating the algorithm, the algorithm designer should ensure in advance that the agents' interests are best served by behaving correctly. Following notions from the field of mechanism design, we suggest a framework for studying such algorithms. Our main technical contribution concerns the study of a representative task scheduling problem for which the standard mechanism design tools do not suffice. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C60, C72, D61, D70, D80.