Emotional support from a digital assistant in technology-mediated services: Effects on customer satisfaction and behavioral persistence

In their traditional role, digital assistants in technology-mediated services provide customers with information, guidance, and suggestions. However, as the opportunities offered by technology and artificial intelligence increase, digital assistants can also provide emotional support, which refers to empathetic, reassuring expressions for customers who have failed or succeeded in fulfilling a task. We show across four experiments that emotional support offered by a digital assistant increases customer satisfaction (Study 1 and 2) and persistence (Study 3 and 4) in using technology-mediated services. The increase in satisfaction occurs via the perceived warmth of the digital assistant, and the increase in persistence via the serial mediation of perceived warmth and satisfaction. Further, the results of a moderated serial mediation show that the effect on persistence only occurs when a digital (but not when a human) assistant provides emotional support in technology-mediated services. Finally, the effect of emotional support on persistence occurs independently of the digital assistant's embodiment. Practitioners learn how to imbue technology-mediated services with a human touch, inducing favorable customer outcomes.     

Facing the pain of others: perspectives on international volunteer tourism between agency and spectatorship

This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing academic debate on volunteer tourism by reviewing the volunteer tourists' experience in light of their encounter with poverty and sufferance. Through the analysis of data collected from semi-structured in-depth interviews with a group of 29 young Italian adults, the author examines the different ways in which volunteer tourists construct and negotiate their role as agents of change during their vacations abroad. Results show that the expectations of providing effective help to the local communities is often challenged by the limitations and constraints of the volunteer tourism experience and, as a consequence, volunteer tourists need to find new ways of making sense of their experiences abroad. Looking at the work of French sociologist [Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering. Morality, media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] on the ways in which spectators respond to the distant suffering of others, this paper argues that, in order to avoid an oversimplification and a trivialisation of the volunteer tourism experience, the volunteers' participation needs to be addressed primarily as a matter of spectatorship, rather than as a question of agency.     

Impacts of urban sprawl and commuting: a modelling study for Italy

This paper aims to analyse empirically the intricate relationship between urban sprawl and commuting, a process that started a few decades ago in Italy. Using a mobility impact index based on commuting data for 1981 and 1991, we quantify the impact of commuting for seven major Italian urban areas, comprising in total 739 municipalities (communes). Our modelling experiment highlights the effect of sprawl at the commune level, while taking into account the variability of communes across geographical location and level of polycentrism. Causal relationships between spatial developments and explanatory factors related to changes in urban density are analysed using multivariate cross-section regression analysis and Causal Path Analysis (CPA). Our empirical results confirm the expectation that sprawl is accompanied by intensive travel movements and associated environmental effects.     

The Gender Impact of Social Protection Policies: A Critical Review of the Evidence

Abstract

Over the course of the neoliberal era, social protection policies have been transformed dramatically; these changes have had profound gender implications. Since the early 1980s, welfare state regimes around the world have shifted away from ‘universalism' towards ‘targeting'. More recently, there has been a further shift—especially in industrialized countries—away from the male-breadwinner to the adult worker model. Despite the progressivity implied by this latter shift, important issues of gender inequality remain unresolved (even in Nordic countries where levels of gender equity are higher than elsewhere). This paper presents a critical review of social protection policies, examined from a gender perspective. The analysis presents a conceptual framework on gender and the welfare state, and examines the experience of major industrialized and developing countries in engendering social policy. In particular, this paper provides a careful examination of care-related programs, since this domain is particularly important to understanding the gendered effects of social protection policies. Finally, the gendered implications of the global crisis and subsequent policy measures are examined.     

IMP studies: A bridge between tradition and innovation

“Combining the Social and Technological Aspects of Innovation: Relationships and Networks” was the title of the 28th IMP Conference held in Rome, at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in 2012.     

The expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates and monetary policy: some evidence from Asian countries

This article outlines a panel data approach to modelling the term structure of interest rates in the short and in the long run. We find robust evidence supporting the expectations hypothesis of the term structure (EHTS) for a small sample of Asian emerging markets. Furthermore, we detect some relevant differences in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, and the existence of a McCallum (2005) rule (no exogeneity of monetary policy to the yield curve) in some countries. Finally, we document the influence of an international global factor (i.e. a time-varying global risk premium) on the yield curve, while local country-specific factors are not statistically significant.     

Valuing environmental and health risk in agriculture: A choice experiment approach to pesticides in Italy

The widespread use of pesticides in agriculture shows a complex ramification of multiple negative externalities, ranging from food safety-related effects to the deterioration of farmland ecosystems. Recent research has demonstrated that the assessment of the economic implications of such negative processes is fraught with many uncertainties. This paper presents the results of an empirical study recently conducted in Northern Italy aimed at estimating the economic value of reducing the wide-ranging impacts of pesticide use, by deploying a Choice Experiment approach. The experimental design provides a meaningful tool to assign monetary values to the negative environmental effects associated with agrochemicals use. In this connection, the paper addresses in particular the reduction of farmland biodiversity, groundwater contamination and harm to human health. The resulting estimates confirm that, on average, respondents demonstrate a substantial willingness-to-pay a premium for agricultural goods (in particular, foodstuffs) produced in environmentally-benign ways.     

Measuring and Understanding Productivity in UK Market Services

Many productivity studies, if they cover the service sector,commonly enter a caveat that the data are uncertain or justlook at manufacturing. This paper attempts to clarify what UKmarket-service-sector data are available, whether they shouldbe treated as inaccurate, and what conceptual problems mightmake measuring service-sector output so hard. Our overall conclusionis that most problems surround financial intermediation andbusiness services. In financial intermediation, national accountsconventions and adjustments make the output data very hard tointerpret. In business services many of the output measuresare employment based. Elsewhere, for example, retail and wholesaletrade, transport, and hotels and restaurants, the main problemis, in practice, lack of collected deflators. Footnotes ¹ E-mail addresses: g.a.crespi{at}sussex.ac.uk; chiara.criscuolo{at}ons.gsi.gov.uk;j.e.haskel{at}qmul.ac.uk; d.hawkes{at}ioe.ac.uk