The Determinants of Retail Productivity: A Critical Review of the Evidence

This paper discusses the literature on the established determinants of productivity in the retail sector. It also draws attention to some neglected strands of research which provide useful insights into strategies that could allow productivity enhancements in this area of the economy. To date, very few attempts have been made to integrate different specialisms in order to explain what drives productivity in retail. Here this paper rectifies this omission by putting together studies from economics, geography, knowledge management and employment studies. It is the authors’ view that quantitative studies of retail productivity should focus on total factor productivity in retailing as the result of competition/composition effects, planning regulations, information and communications technology, the multinational operation element and workforce skills. Further, the fact that retail firms possess advantages that are transferable between locations suggests that investment in strategies enhancing the transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge between and within businesses are crucial to achieve productivity gains.     

Hard evidence and ambiguity aversion

This article shows that if an allocation rule can be implemented with unlimited information certification, then it can also be implemented with limited information certification if the designer can use ambiguous communication mechanisms, and if agents are averse to ambiguity in the sense of maxmin expected utility. The reverse implication is true if there is a single agent and a worst outcome.     

Strategic planning and research and development—Can we integrate them?

The main problem affecting the R & D function has always been caused by its lack of integration with the enterprise. Such a problem makes it difficult to pass from invention to innovation—that is, to turn the invention into processes and products to be exchanged on the market. The author points out the main social and organizational problems which prevent R & D from entering the ‘circulatory system’ of the enterprise. The identification of such problems is important in order to set up and to implement innovative strategies. This is the first of two articles by Professor Petroni on this subject. The second article will appear in April 1983.     

The game Grundy number of graphs

Given a graph G=(V,E), two players, Alice and Bob, alternate their turns in choosing uncoloured vertices to be coloured. Whenever an uncoloured vertex is chosen, it is coloured by the least positive integer not used by any of its coloured neighbours. Alice’s goal is to minimise the total number of colours used in the game, and Bob’s goal is to maximise it. The game Grundy number of G is the number of colours used in the game when both players use optimal strategies. It is proved in this paper that the maximum game Grundy number of forests is 3, and the game Grundy number of any partial 2-tree is at most 7.     

Strategy-proofness on Euclidean spaces

 In this paper we characterize strategy-proof voting schemes on Euclidean spaces. A voting scheme is strategy-proof whenever it is optimal for every agent to report his best alternative. Here the individual preferences underlying these best choices are separable and quadratic. It turns out that a voting scheme is strategy-proof if and only if (α) its range is a closed Cartesian subset of Euclidean space, (β) the outcomes are at a minimal distance to the outcome under a specific coordinatewise veto voting scheme, and (γ) it satisfies some monotonicity properties. Neither continuity nor decomposability is implied by strategy-proofness, but these are satisfied if we additionally impose Pareto-optimality or unanimity. Received: 18 October 1993/Accepted: 2 February 1996     

Passage a l'age adulte et mobilite spatiale

Starting with longitudinal data on two cohorts of women living in the Alpes-Maritimes in 1982 (a sample of 1,500 women in total) we try to establish the role of the spatial distribution of opportunities at a number of key stages in the life cycle: marriage, birth of first child, making professional use of qualifications, confrontation of a situation of professional risk and professional mobility during the years immediately following the completion of studies. The underlying hypothesis is that control of social location often depends on the control of spatial location.     

Europe and the Euro: Do not Indulge in Misinterpreting Strength as Weakness

The change was not only promised during Obama’s electoral campaign but urgently invoked by all the major international actors in view of the financial and economic crises: the world foreign policy has suddenly entered a new age not being yet prepared to govern globalization and its wide interdependence conditionality. Even Russia has changed tune now and President Medvedev announced vigorously a new strategy, a new policy, and a new drive for Russia. Until a few years ago, the theories of International Relations were simply an American intellectual and governance exit of the growing role of the US in the world, a kind of field of competence for the greatest power in the global economic, political, strategic and innovative sectors. The British School was an island of the core American thinking and the rest of the world mostly absent. FSU has not expressed a relevant contribution to the various schools of thinking related to the IR theories and even the Marxist political scientists did not dedicate specifically to this main research area because convinced that first it was not a real “science” but a derivative outcome from Philosophy or Political Science; secondly, for the reason of the monopoly of the power in the hands of an autocratic regime where these issues were not left to the researchers and experts but only to the institutional and military leadership. Today Russia—after having caressed and found opportunistically convenient to resume the realism doctrines of the past US almost decennial Presidency, with modest attempts to assume the great changes in international affairs intervened— has the chance to take the last train for a competitive power role, “de facto” under the unavoidable strict rules of engagement of the global governance. In the 2020–2030 the world would be completely reshape by the present metamorphosis.     

The Influence of Organizational Culture in Women Participation and Inclusion in Voluntary Organizations in Italy

The aim of this study is to analyze the rules whereby women are selected for leadership and management roles and to describe the cultural values that can foster their inclusion and participation in Italian Voluntary Organizations. Two hypotheses: the organizational culture that governs these organizations is necessarily oriented toward acceptance, involvement and participation, and the rules and setting must be flexible and inclusive of all members in order to enable each organization to survive. Methodology was based on 91 semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate that Italian Voluntary Organizations must necessarily embrace an organizational culture whose rules and norms are oriented toward attracting men and women to join and encouraging them to participate. Implications for for-profit organizations are also discussed.