Metabolic impact of shift work

In developing countries, shift work represents a considerable contingent workforce. Recently, studies have shown that overweight and obesity are more prevalent in shift workers than day workers. In addition, shift work has been associated with a higher propensity for the development of many metabolic disorders, such as insulin resistance, diabetes, dislipidemias and metabolic syndrome. Recent data have pointed that decrease of the sleep time, desynchronization of circadian rhythm and alteration of environmental aspects are the main factors related to such problems. Shortened or disturbed sleep is among the most common health-related effects of shift work. The plausible physiological and biological mechanisms are related to the activation of the autonomic nervous system, inflammation, changes in lipid and glucose metabolism, and related changes in the risk for atherosclerosis, metabolic syndrome, and type II diabetes. The present review will discuss the impact of shift work on obesity and metabolic disorders and how disruption of sleep and circadian misalignment may contribute to these metabolic dysfunctions.     

The Board Value Protection Function in Young,Mature and Family Firms

Next to value creation, the value protection function of the Board of Directors is a widely accepted fact. Nevertheless, the current literature struggles to show a positive impact of the Board Value Protection (BVP) on firm performance. We use the decision rights model of board functions and argue the difference between board member roles (insider vs independent) and functions, to isolate the BVP from other director functions. By using the German context as a natural setting, we can isolate the BVP and show how it evolves with the firm lifecycle and owner motivations. Based on a sample of 446 initial public offerings (IPOs) from 1995 to 2015, our results show that the importance of BVP in young firms decreases with age, increases in mature firms and that this effect is stronger in family firms.     

Tight Revenue Bounds With Possibilistic Beliefs and Level‐k Rationality

Mechanism design enables a social planner to obtain a desired outcome by leveraging the players' rationality and their beliefs. It is thus a fundamental, but yet unproven, intuition that the higher the level of rationality of the players, the better the set of obtainable outcomes. In this paper, we prove this fundamental intuition for players with possibilistic beliefs, a model long considered in epistemic game theory. Specifically, • We define a sequence of monotonically increasing revenue benchmarks for single‐good auctions, G⁰≤G¹≤G²≤⋯, where each Gⁱ is defined over the players' beliefs and G⁰ is the second‐highest valuation (i.e., the revenue benchmark achieved by the second‐price mechanism). • We (1) construct a single, interim individually rational, auction mechanism that, without any clue about the rationality level of the players, guarantees revenue G^k if all players have rationality levels ≥k+1, and (2) prove that no such mechanism can guarantee revenue even close to G^k when at least two players are at most level‐k rational.     

The Italian Regional Well-Being in a Multi-expert Non-additive Perspective

This paper designs a multidimensional index of well-being for 20 Italian regions, based on a set of 41 indicators organized in an original hierarchical structure, a decision-tree whose four main pillars are Economy, Society, Environment and Health. Our novel approach combines the objective dimension of the evaluation (a comprehensive set of statistical indicators) within a flexible non-additive aggregation model (the Choquet integral) characterized with the preferences of informed Italian stakeholders. Adopting the Choquet integral allows us to overcome the well-known limitations embedded in the linear models, by assigning a weight (capacity) to any coalitions of dimensions, and by allowing a different degree of substitutability within each decision node in the tree. The weights and the parameters for the aggregation are elicited through a computer-based nominal group technique, a method which reduces the occurrences of drastically dissenting valuations and the potential expert-selection bias. Our results show that experts’ perception of synergies and redundancies is quite heterogeneous between levels and nodes in the tree. Moreover, well-being measures are much influenced by the degree of substitutability embedded in the experts’ preferences. Overall, the Italian picture looks more heterogeneous when analysed through the Choquet integral, with respect to a linear model.     

The Heterogeneous Impact of International Migration on Left‐behind Households: Evidence from Bangladesh

This article investigates the heterogeneous effects of international migration on the expenditure of Bangladeshi migrant households. Adopting a counterfactual framework, we estimate the impact of migration on per capita expenditure of left‐behind households according to their position in the counterfactual expenditure distribution and the length of the migration period. The effects on households’ social mobility and on inequality are also assessed. The analysis indicates that migration has a positive impact on per capita expenditure and represents an important vehicle of social mobility, but may also be a source of inequality. We also find that only a tiny share of international migrants originates from households belonging to the lowest expenditure quintile and, since most of the characteristics which seem to influence the migration decision cannot be shaped by policy interventions, our results also suggest that pro‐migration policies might not be effective in lifting those most in need out of poverty.     

Socio-demographic Components of Eudaimonic Well-Being: A Survey in an Italian Province

This work is part of a well-established strand of study about quality of life (QoL) and the different methodologies for its quantitative evaluation. The study focuses on a specific dimension of QoL, that of the eudaimonic well-being (EuWB), with two main objectives. On the one hand, we try to clarify how EuWB can be framed in the systematizations of QoL proposed in the literature. Its relation to the concept of subjective well-being is discussed, and the need to distinguish such approach from the so-called hedonic dimension of QoL is highlighted. On the other hand, the paper aims to investigate the link between the perception of EuWB and individual socio-demographic characteristics through a quantitative analysis based on the results of a survey. The survey carried out in Central Italy in 2010, involved a sample of 1,134 individuals, which are classified according to their perception of EuWB. An analysis of the socio-demographic characteristics within the EuWB groups is then performed in order to investigate the association between these variables and the perception of EuWB. Results are discussed with respect to the evidences from similar surveys found in the literature. The analysis confirms the influence of some variables on the perception of EuWB, yet it underlines the difficulty in comparing different studies on QoL without clarifying to which of the different declensions of this concept the survey methodology refers to.     

Domain Effects and Financial Risk Attitudes

We investigated whether financial risk preferences are dependent on the financial domain (i.e., the context) in which the risky choice options are presented. Previous studies have demonstrated that risk attitudes change when gambles are framed as gains, losses, or as insurance. Our study explores this directly by offering choices between identical gambles, framed in terms of seven financial domains. Three factors were extracted, explaining 68.6% of the variance: Factor 1 (Positive)—opportunity to win, pension provision, and job salary change; Factor 2 (Positive‐Complex)—investments and mortgage buying; Factor 3 (Negative)—possibility of loss and insurance. Inspection of the solution revealed context effects on risk perceptions across the seven scenarios. We also found that the commonly accepted assumption that women are more risk averse cannot be confirmed with the context structure suggested in this research; however, it is acknowledged that in the students’ population the variance across genders might be considerably less. These results suggest that our financial risk attitude measures may be tapping into a stable aspect of “context dependence” of relevance to real‐world decision making.     

Knightian Analysis of the Vickrey Mechanism

We analyze the Vickrey mechanism for auctions of multiple identical goods when the players have both Knightian uncertainty over their own valuations and incomplete preferences. In this model, the Vickrey mechanism is no longer dominant‐strategy, and we prove that all dominant‐strategy mechanisms are inadequate. However, we also prove that, in undominated strategies, the social welfare produced by the Vickrey mechanism in the worst case is not only very good, but also essentially optimal.     

On General Continuous Triangular and Two-sided Power Distributions

In this article, we directly introduce the continuous version of the general discrete triangular distributions (Kokonendji and Zocchi, 2010 Kokonendji, C.C., Zocchi, S.S. (2010). Extensions of discrete triangular distribution and boundary bias in kernel estimation for discrete functions. Statist. Probab. Lett. 80:1655–1662.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). It is bounded and, in general, unimodal with pike. It contains thus a very useful class of two-sided power distributions (van Dorp and Kotz, 2002a Van Dorp, J.R., Kotz, S. (2002a). A novel extension of the triangular distribution and its parameter estimation. Statistician 51:1–17. [Google Scholar],b Van Dorp, J.R., Kotz, S. (2002b). The standard two-sided power distribution and its properties; with applications in financial engineering. Amer. Statistician 56:90–99.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2003 Van Dorp, J.R., Kotz, S. (2003). Generalization of two-sided power distributions and their convolution. Commun. Statist. Theor. Meth. 32:1703–1723.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Moments, particular cases, limit distributions, and relations between parameters are straightforwardly derived.