Physical exercise,nutrition and hormones: three pillars to fight sarcopenia

Background: Sarcopenia is a pathophysiological condition diffused in elderly people; it represents a social issue due to the longer life expectancy and the growing aging population. It affects negatively quality of life and it represents a risk factor for other pathologies, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. No silver bullet exists to hinder sarcopenia, but it may be counteracted by physical exercise, nutrition, and a proper endocrine milieu. Indeed, we aim to analyze the scientific literature to give to clinician effective advices to counteract sarcopenia.

Main text: Physical exercise, proper nutrition, optimized hormonal homeostasis represent the three pillars to fight sarcopenia. Physical exercise represents the most effective remedy to face sarcopenia, in particular if it is combined with a proper diet and with an adequate endocrine milieu. Consistency in training, adequate daily protein intake and eugonadism seems to be the keys to fight sarcopenia. The combination of these three pillars might act synergistically.

Conclusions: Optimization of these factors may increase their efficiency; however, scientific data may be sometimes confusing so far. Therefore, we aim to give practical advices to clinician to identify and to highlight the most important aspects in each of these three factors that should be addressed.     

SPECULATIVE PROFITS,INNOVATION, AND GROWTH

When technological change affects the prices of tradeable assets, innovators can obtain speculative profits by exploiting their inside information as to the occurrence of innovations. We propose a tractable model of endogenous growth that formalizes this argument, originally due to Hirshleifer (1971). We then use the model to assess two claims advanced by Hirshleifer, namely, that speculative profits can generate excessive investment in R&D when they add to monopoly rents guaranteed by patent protection, or else even in a perfectly competitive economy. The analysis confirms the first claim, but casts doubts on the second one. (JEL O30, O40)     

Performance management change in archaeological sites: The case of Herculaneum Conservation Project

This study focuses on the issues relating to the implementation of management accounting systems in complex settings such as archeological sites. The aim is to understand the conditions under which the implementation of performance management systems (PMS) may enable cultural organizations to fulfil their multiple objectives and the factors which play a crucial role in such dynamics. Focusing on the Herculaneum Conservation Project (HCP) the study explains how PMS came to be implemented having been made acceptable to all parties involved. The Middle Range Theory as developed by Broadbent and Laughlin (Accounting control and controlling accounting: interdisciplinary and critical perspectives, Bingley, Emerald, 2013) was utilized to explore how the PMS change took place in the HCP, and focus on the factors influencing this process. The findings reveal that the change in the PMS benefited from the involvement of a multidisciplinary Specialist Work Group. This involvement reduced the natural tendency to resist the forces of change and increased the commitment of the various groups of stakeholders to the new culture. The findings reveal how PMS were developed in the context of a multifaceted approach to change, allowing us to draw both theoretical and practical lessons that may be brought to bear in other complex contexts.     

Community-Based Determinants of Community Engagement: A Meta-Analysis Research

In literature, several variables, both individual and collective level, have been utilized to explain community engagement: the active, voluntary involvement of individuals and groups in changing problematic conditions in communities. The purpose of this study is to identify the main community-based variables and, via meta-analysis research, calculate the effects of these variables on community engagement. These variables include sense of community, community identity, social well-being, place identity, trust in the community, trust in institutions, and community cohesion. The overall and partial effect sizes and heterogeneity between studies were calculated. Some study characteristics (i.e. type of sample, size of sample, percentage of women in the sample, and mean age) were used as moderators for subsample analysis and meta-regressions. The first six major variables (sense of community, community identity, social well-being, place identity, trust in the community, and trust in institutions) show a positive but moderate relationship with community engagement. As for the moderating variables were not found substantial variations. The data are very heterogeneous and highlight the complex and multivariate nature of community engagement. Theoretical and methodological implications were discussed.     

Agency costs of free cash flow,internal capital markets and unrelated diversification

This paper investigates whether free cash flow arguments or the internal capital market perspective better explains diversification decisions. Based on a unique panel of hand-collected data from listed and unlisted Italian firms for the 1980–2010 time period, the results of this study generally reveal the predominant role of the internal capital market arguments. The benefits of unrelated diversification, which include the avoidance of costly external financing, outweigh its costs, which involve opportunistic problems. Although the literature suggests two distinct forces concurrently affect diversification decisions, in the Italian context, financial benefits appear to be the prevailing motivation for unrelated diversification decisions. Furthermore, the internal capital market argument has a strong effect on decisions to engage in unrelated diversification, particularly with respect to firms that are sensitive to financial constraints.     

Anti-austerity between militant materialism and real democracy: exploring pragmatic prefigurativism

ABSTRACT

The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the ‘age of austerity’ that came after those crises, was underpinned by a set of ideas and practices that we refer to here as ‘pragmatic prefigurativism’. Whilst the anti-austerity movements typically rejected formal ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism, nevertheless pragmatic prefigurativism can be understood as a ‘left convergence’ of sorts. The paper explores the features of this pragmatic prefigurativism, comparing the anti-austerity movements in the UK and Spain. In particular, we note the role of unresponsive institutions of democracy in prompting the move towards pragmatic prefigurativism, the adoption of techniques of direct democracy and direct action as the means through which to express a voice and to refuse austerity, and the pragmatic nature of the subsequent (re)turn to political institutions when this became a possibility.     

On the performance of mildly greedy players in cut games

We continue the study of the performance of mildly greedy players in cut games initiated by Christodoulou et al. (Theoret Comput Sci 438:13–27, 2012), where a mildly greedy player is a selfish agent who is willing to deviate from a certain strategy profile only if her payoff improves by a factor of more than \(1+\epsilon \), for some given \(\epsilon \ge 0\). Hence, in presence of mildly greedy players, the classical concepts of pure Nash equilibria and best-responses generalize to those of \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximate pure Nash equilibria and \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximate best-responses, respectively. We first show that the \(\epsilon \)-approximate price of anarchy, that is the price of anarchy of \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximate pure Nash equilibria, is at least \(\frac{1}{2+\epsilon }\) and that this bound is tight for any \(\epsilon \ge 0\). Then, we evaluate the approximation ratio of the solutions achieved after a \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximate one-round walk starting from any initial strategy profile, where a \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximate one-round walk is a sequence of \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximate best-responses, one for each player. We improve the currently known lower bound on this ratio from \(\min \left\{ \frac{1}{4+2\epsilon },\frac{\epsilon }{4+2\epsilon }\right\} \) up to \(\min \left\{ \frac{1}{2+\epsilon },\frac{2\epsilon }{(1+\epsilon )(2+\epsilon )}\right\} \) and show that this is again tight for any \(\epsilon \ge 0\). An interesting and quite surprising consequence of our results is that the worst-case performance guarantee of the very simple solutions generated after a \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximate one-round walk is the same as that of \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximate pure Nash equilibria when \(\epsilon \ge 1\) and of that of subgame perfect equilibria (i.e., Nash equilibria for greedy players with farsighted, rather than myopic, rationality) when \(\epsilon =1\).     

Correction to: Do women directors contribute to R&D? The role of critical mass and expert power

Journal of Management and Governance - An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.