Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language.

Consumer Expertise or Credit Risk? An empirical analysis of mortgage pricing

Loan mortgage interest rates are usually the result of a bank-customer negotiation process. Credit risk, consumer cross-buying potential, bundling, financial market competition and other features affecting the bargaining power of the parties could affect price. We argue that, since mortgage loan is a complex product, consumer expertise could be a relevant factor for mortgage pricing. Using data on mortgage loan prices for a sample of 1055 households for the year 2005 (Bank of Spain Survey of Household Finances, EFF-2005), and including credit risk, costs, potential capacity of the consumer to generate future business and bank competition variables, the regression results indicate that consumer expertise-related metrics are highly significant as predictors of mortgage loan prices. Other factors such as credit risk and consumer cross-buying potential do not have such a significant impact on mortgage prices. Our empirical results are affected by the credit conditions prior to the financial crisis and could shed some light on this issue.

The long road of climate negotiations: From Kyoto to Paris stopping over in Doha

4 p.

A dynamic CGE modelling approach for analyzing trade-offs in climate change policy options: the case of Green Climate Fund

38 p.

La frontera, borders an transborders. Reflections of the borderlands in Chicana Literature (early 20th-21st c.)

421 p.