Overcoming the “European Paradox”: The role of Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) in translating R&D investments into economic and employment growth

The emergence of the so-called “European Paradox” shows that R&D investment is not maximally effective and that increasing the scale of public R&D expenditures is not sufficient to generate employment and sustained economic growth. Increasing Governmental R&D Investment is far from being a “panacea” for stagnant growth. It is worth noting that Government R&D Investment does not have a statistically significant impact on employment, indicating the need to assess the trade-offs of policies that could lead to significant increases in government expenditure. Surprisingly, Governmental R&D Employment does not contribute to “mass-market” employment, despite its quite important role in reducing Youth-Unemployment. Despite the negative side-effects of Governmental R&D Employment on both GVA and GDP, University R&D Employment appears to have a quite important role in reducing Unemployment, especially Youth-Unemployment, while it also does not have a downside in terms of economic growth. Technological Capacity enhancement is the most effective instrument for reducing Unemployment and is a policy without any downside regarding sustainable economical development. In terms of wider policy implications, the results reinforce the idea that European Commission Research and Innovation policies must be restructured, shifting from a transnational framework to a more localised, measurable and operational approach.

Paradox of choice: The influence of assortment size on customer satisfaction

Recently researchers showed that more choice is not always better. Choosing from large assortments can be overwhelming, raising expectations and decreasing overall level of consumer satisfaction. Author contributes to existing overchoice studies by using real assortment of online stores to find influence of assortment size on customer satisfaction. 90 students participated in the main experiment, where they chose a smartphone case for their friend. Results of the study show that large assortment size leads to higher expectations, higher choice difficulty and higher level of satisfaction. This research does not show overchoice presence and author suggests future studies could focus more on assortment variety and more personal characteristics of consumers, like preference uncertainty.

Ressocialização no meio prisional

This paper examine the purpose of rehabilitation while main purpose of imprisonment application, and the divergence between its central role assumed in legislation and what is being practiced in the institutional dimension. This study aims to determine the expected outcome of this dialectical opposition, in pursuit of preventive purposes that guide the criminal reactions of Portuguese criminal - legal system. To this end, the sentence of imprisonment shall be framed in the main politico- criminal traits of our country, analyzing the standards and principles that underlie and underpin our legal – criminal system. The guiding principles of the prison sentence and the respective legislation will be presented, such as the prison system and treatment provided to achieve the above desideratum. Finally material factors and legislative contradictions that oppose the rehabilitation in prisons will be presented. The dissertation does not intend to expose the solution to this paradox insurmountable, but rather present the main factors that hinder the achievement of the objectives intended to be achieved with the prison sentence.

Essays on bounded rationality: Individual decision and strategic interaction

Economics is a social science which, therefore, focuses on people and on the decisions they make, be it in an individual context, or in group situations. It studies human choices, in face of needs to be fulfilled, and a limited amount of resources to fulfill them. For a long time, there was a convergence between the normative and positive views of human behavior, in that the ideal and predicted decisions of agents in economic models were entangled in one single concept. That is, it was assumed that the best that could be done in each situation was exactly the choice that would prevail. Or, at least, that the facts that economics needed to explain could be understood in the light of models in which individual agents act as if they are able to make ideal decisions. However, in the last decades, the complexity of the environment in which economic decisions are made and the limits on the ability of agents to deal with it have been recognized, and incorporated into models of decision making in what came to be known as the bounded rationality paradigm. This was triggered by the incapacity of the unboundedly rationality paradigm to explain observed phenomena and behavior. This thesis contributes to the literature in three different ways. Chapter 1 is a survey on bounded rationality, which gathers and organizes the contributions to the field since Simon (1955) first recognized the necessity to account for the limits on human rationality. The focus of the survey is on theoretical work rather than the experimental literature which presents evidence of actual behavior that differs from what classic rationality predicts. The general framework is as follows. Given a set of exogenous variables, the economic agent needs to choose an element from the choice set that is avail- able to him, in order to optimize the expected value of an objective function (assuming his preferences are representable by such a function). If this problem is too complex for the agent to deal with, one or more of its elements is simplified. Each bounded rationality theory is categorized according to the most relevant element it simplifes. Chapter 2 proposes a novel theory of bounded rationality. Much in the same fashion as Conlisk (1980) and Gabaix (2014), we assume that thinking is costly in the sense that agents have to pay a cost for performing mental operations. In our model, if they choose not to think, such cost is avoided, but they are left with a single alternative, labeled the default choice. We exemplify the idea with a very simple model of consumer choice and identify the concept of isofin curves, i.e., sets of default choices which generate the same utility net of thinking cost. Then, we apply the idea to a linear symmetric Cournot duopoly, in which the default choice can be interpreted as the most natural quantity to be produced in the market. We find that, as the thinking cost increases, the number of firms thinking in equilibrium decreases. More interestingly, for intermediate levels of thinking cost, an equilibrium in which one of the firms chooses the default quantity and the other best responds to it exists, generating asymmetric choices in a symmetric model. Our model is able to explain well-known regularities identified in the Cournot experimental literature, such as the adoption of different strategies by players (Huck et al. , 1999), the inter temporal rigidity of choices (Bosch-Dom enech & Vriend, 2003) and the dispersion of quantities in the context of di cult decision making (Bosch-Dom enech & Vriend, 2003). Chapter 3 applies a model of bounded rationality in a game-theoretic set- ting to the well-known turnout paradox in large elections, pivotal probabilities vanish very quickly and no one should vote, in sharp contrast with the ob- served high levels of turnout. Inspired by the concept of rhizomatic thinking, introduced by Bravo-Furtado & Côrte-Real (2009a), we assume that each per- son is self-delusional in the sense that, when making a decision, she believes that a fraction of the people who support the same party decides alike, even if no communication is established between them. This kind of belief simplifies the decision of the agent, as it reduces the number of players he believes to be playing against { it is thus a bounded rationality approach. Studying a two-party first-past-the-post election with a continuum of self-delusional agents, we show that the turnout rate is positive in all the possible equilibria, and that it can be as high as 100%. The game displays multiple equilibria, at least one of which entails a victory of the bigger party. The smaller one may also win, provided its relative size is not too small; more self-delusional voters in the minority party decreases this threshold size. Our model is able to explain some empirical facts, such as the possibility that a close election leads to low turnout (Geys, 2006), a lower margin of victory when turnout is higher (Geys, 2006) and high turnout rates favoring the minority (Bernhagen & Marsh, 1997).

The value creation radar applied to the space engineering sector

This case study illustrates the application of the Value Creation Radar (VCR) to SenSyF, an Earth Observation (EO) system which was developed by Deimos Engenharia S.A. (DME), the Portuguese affiliate of Elecnor Deimos. It describes how a team of consultants adopted the VCR in order to find new market applications for SenSyF, selected the one with the highest potential, and defined a path to guarantee a sustainable market launch. This case study highlights the main challenges of bringing a technology-driven company closer to the market in the pursuit of long-term sustainability, while not compromising its technological capabilities