Revenue Management in Business Services

A significant portion of the services industry is focused on providing services (medical, legal, financial, personal, and travel) to individuals. However, studies have shown that a less visible but rapidly growing segment of the service sector comprises firms that provide business functions to other businesses. The sector covers tasks such as payroll processing, procurement, and information systems management, as well as business consulting, technical support, call center operations, and software development. Firms may choose to purchase, rather than perform, these business functions to reduce costs, to mitigate risk, or simply to focus on their processes that provide marketplace differentiation. Transferring a business function from within a firm to an outside supplier is often called “outsourcing”; when the supplier provides the service from a lower‐cost country, it is called “offshoring.” The risks and benefits of outsourcing to the firm purchasing a business service have been studied in some detail by both academics and consultants. In this paper, we outline revenue management issues faced by business service providers and describe some new opportunities for the use of analytic methods in the service science sector.     

Efficiency Wage,Fixed Employment Costs,and Dual Labour Markets

The standard efficiency wage‐based explanation of labour market dualism hinges on the existence of differences in monitoring across sectors. The paper proposes fixed employment costs as an alternative source of wage differentials for homogeneous workers. It shows that firms with larger fixed costs pay higher wages in order to elicit more effort from their workers, and tend to have higher capital/labour ratio and labour productivity. The model generates both involuntary unemployment and involuntary confinement in the secondary sector: high effort–high wage jobs are preferred to low effort–low wage jobs and either are preferred to unemployment. The proposed framework can also account for the various types of treatment of marginal jobs in primary sector firms envisaged by Doeringer and Piore (Internal Labour Markets and Manpower Analysis, 1971). In particular, an increase in fixed costs beyond a certain level may induce primary sector firms to restructure, segment production, and enter the secondary sector, thus converting their jobs into secondary jobs. From a welfare point of view, we cannot state in general the desirability of subsidizing fixed employment costs; however, we show that an employment subsidy financed by a wage tax is able to increase employment with no loss in terms of production.     

Expectations About Future Economic Prospects and Satisfaction with Democracy: Evidence from European Countries during the COVID-19 Crisis

Social Indicators Research - Recent studies highlight that economic expectations are a crucial determinant of citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). This article relies on a...     

Work and Family over the Life Course: Do Older Workers Differ?

This study explored how older workers (age 55+) differed from middle-aged (ages 35–54) and young workers (<35 years) in their experience of the work–family interface. Data came from a subset of a survey conducted by a multi-national corporation in 79 countries (N = 41,813, n = 2,700). Older workers reported significantly less work-to-family and family-to-work conflict and greater work–family fit, life success, and work success than middle-aged and young workers. They reported significantly greater job flexibility and job satisfaction but were significantly less likely to be aware of and use work–family programs than young workers. Older men reported significantly less awareness and use of work-life programs and less family-to-work conflict than older women. Implications of this research are presented.     

Doing Sociological Films: A Proposal

This essay in an attempt to define, termino‐logically and methodologically, a certain sociological way of producing videos.

The aim is to clarify the possibility of making cinematographic products as sociological practice; trying to transcend the “autodeceit” caused by the cine‐eye. This is a methodological proposal that confronts the risk of misunderstanding reality, through the paradoxical adoption of a method based upon theatre and fiction.     

Exploring Networking of Third Sector Organizations: A Case Study Based on the Quartieri Spagnoli Neighborhood in Naples (Italy)

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In the last decades, European Third Sector Organizations have been increasingly affected by marketization and the...     

Bounded integrated processes and unit root tests

In the framework of integrated processes, the problem of testing the presence of unknown boundaries which constrain the process to move within a closed interval is considered. To analyze this problem, the concept of bounded integrated process is introduced, thus allowing to formally define boundary conditions for I(1) processes. A new class of tests, which are based on the rescaled range of the process, is introduced in order to test the null hypothesis of no boundary conditions. The limit distribution of the test statistics involved can be expressed in terms of the distribution of the range of Brownian functionals, while the power properties are obtained by deriving some asymptotic results for I(1) processes with boundary conditions. Both theoretical and simulation investigations show that range-based tests outperform standard unit root tests significantly when used to detect the presence of boundary conditions. A previous draft of the paper (Cavaliere, 2000) was presented at the 8th World Congress of the Econometric Society, Seattle, 11–16 August 2000. I wish sincerely to thank: Martin Jacobsen for his patience in discussing weak convergence to regulated Brownian motions and his valuable suggestions; the Department of Theoretical Statistics of the University of Copenhagen whose hospitality is gratefully acknowledged; Tommaso Proietti for important suggestions; Silvano Bordignon and partecipants at the CIdE seminar, University of Padua, June 2000; two anonymous referees. Partial financial support from 60% M.U.R.S.T. research grants is acknowledged.     

The role of dispersal and local environment in urban land snail assemblages: an example of three cities in Central Italy

Ecologists increasingly appreciate the central role that urban biodiversity plays in ecosystems, however much urban biodiversity is neglected, especially some very diverse groups of invertebrates. For the first time in southern Europe, land snail communities are analysed in four urban habitats along a geographical gradient of three cities, using quantitative methods and assessing the relative roles of local environmental conditions (“distance from sea”, “distance from city centre”, “vegetation cover”) and spatial effects by principal coordinate analysis of neighbour matrices, redundancy analysis and variation partitioning. A total of 53 species was recorded, a richness similar to that of natural areas. At habitat level, species richness did not show a clear increasing trend from more to less urbanized habitats, but rather a homogeneous pattern. At city level, study areas hosted rather heterogeneous species assemblages and biotic homogenization did not seem to have any impact; indeed, only three species could be considered alien. Variation partitioning showed that land snail communities were mostly structured by environmental factors, even when spatial structures independent of measured environmental variables were included: “vegetation cover” and “distance from city centre” were the environmental variables that explained most of the variation in species composition. The lack of strong spatial structure also unexpectedly suggested that transport by humans aids dispersal of organisms with low mobility, which are usually limited by spatial constraints in natural environments. These results provide ecological and conservation implications for other invertebrate groups, suggesting to set priorities in management strategies that include habitat conservation at local scale.