Collage, a Collaborative Learning Design Editor Based on Patterns

This paper introduces Collage, a high-level IMS-LD compliant authoring tool that is specialized for CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning). Nowadays CSCL is a key trend in elearning since it highlights the importance of social interactions as an essential element of learning. CSCL is an interdisciplinary domain, which demands participatory design techniques that allow teachers to get directly involved in design activities. Developing CSCL designs using LD is a difficult task for teachers since LD is a complex technical specification and modelling collaborative characteristics can be tricky. Collage helps teachers in the process of creating their own potentially effective collaborative Learning Designs by reusing and customizing patterns, according to the requirements of a particular learning situation. These patterns, called Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns (CLFPs), represent best practices that are repetitively used by practitioners when structuring the flow of (collaborative) learning activities. An example of an LD that can be created using Collage is illustrated in the paper. Preliminary evaluation results show that teachers, with experience in CL but without LD knowledge, can successfully design real collaborative learning experiences using Collage.

Computational Representation of Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns Using IMS Learning Design

The identification and integration of reusable and customizable CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) may benefit from the capture of best practices in collaborative learning structuring. The authors have proposed CLFPs (Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns) as a way of collecting these best practices. To facilitate the process of CLFPs by software systems, the paper proposes to specify these patterns using IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD). Thus, teachers without technical knowledge can particularize and integrate CSCL tools. Nevertheless, the support of IMS-LD for describing collaborative learning activities has some deficiencies: the collaborative tools that can be defined in these activities are limited. Thus, this paper proposes and discusses an extension to IMS-LD that enables to specify several characteristics of the use of tools that mediate collaboration. In order to obtain a Unit of Learning based on a CLFP, a three stage process is also proposed. A CLFP-based Unit of Learning example is used to illustrate the process and the need of the proposed extension.

La Crisi i el petit comerç alimentari : els queviures vs. els supermercats

Els queviures són petits comerços d’alimentació on el tractament personal amb els clients es la clau de l’èxit ja que això provoca una conscienciació per part d’aquests i així es mantenen fidels a aquest establiment. En canvi, el supermercats tracten de explotar al màxim la seva reducció dels costos sense tenir tant en compte el tracte amb el client i donant-li més importància al preu de producte. Com podem observar, són dos tipus de comerços molt diferenciats tot i que al cap i a la fi, són competidors directes.La idea d’aquest treball es veure com afecta la crisi actual en aquests petits comerços i comparar-los amb el grans supermercats per arribar a una sèrie de conclusions.Hem escollit aquest tema ja que ens ha semblat interessant tractar de demostrar com el queviures tradicionals segueixen sent un negoci de profit, tot i la forta expansió que han patit les grans superfícies comercials. Un exemple d’aquest fort creixement podrien ser les dades que ens ha facilitat l’Ajuntament de Barcelona on es reflexa que el consum d’aliments es solen donar en primer lloc al supermercat (47,3%), seguit pel mercat municipal (29,3%) i en tercer lloc en la botiga de barri (16,2%).Un dels grans problemes amb que es troben els queviures és el canvi en el ritme de vida de la societat actual, sempre amb presses i estressada, que busca més, la comoditat i l’estalvi, tant de temps com de diners, a l’hora d’anar a comprar. Peraquest motiu, hem volgut investigar sobre quin es el factor que facilita la supervivència dels queviures.Degut a que el tema dels comerços estrangers va ser un tema que va provocar molta controvèrsia a la presentació del nostre treball, hem cregut convenient estudiar-lo una mica més a fons, únicament a Poble Sec. Per fer-ho hem estudiat el punt de vista que tenen els comerços estrangers sobre els comerços nacionals i també la situació actual del nombre de queviures regentats per uns i altres a través de informació extreta de la associació de comerciants de Poble Sec.Per crear el nostre treball hem realitzar diferents enquestes i entrevistes, tant a consumidors com a propietaris, per poder extreure informació amb la qual poder treballar. En total hem realitzar 100 enquestes a clients, una enquesta a cadapropietari i dues entrevistes: una a un propietari estranger i una altra a Pedro de Diego ( fundador de la associació de comerciants del Poble Sec i primer tresorer del barri)Cal destacar que ens hem trobat amb moltes dificultats per trobar o aconseguir dades econòmiques i financeres sobre aquests establiments i per això hem realitzat una aproximació a la proporció de beneficis sobre ingressos per veure quina proporció dels ingressos es poden considerar beneficis.També hem recopilat diverses notícies de diaris que tracten sobre temes relacionats amb la crisi del petit comerç i sobre l’augment en el nombre de nous queviures regentats per gent estrangera, i a partir d’aquestes hem realitzat una breu crítica sobre la situació actual.

Les Trampes de les emocions

• La següent investigació tracta d’estudiar la presa de decisions dels individus sota un previ ancoratge influenciat o no a través d’estímuls emocionals.La nostra intenció es fer un anàlisi a través d’un experiment econòmic per poder mesurar l’impacte o el grau d’afectació dels estímuls i les emocions en les respostes dels individus.El treball consideraria en tots els experiments un grup de control, que no seria sotmès a cap estímul ni emocional ni numèric i al qual se li demanaria resposta, i tres línies d’investigació més que rebrien diferents tipus d’impactes emocionals: eròtics(situació o entorn d’excitació) i terror (situació o entorn de pànic o límit) i les seves corresponents àncores. La tercera via no rebria cap impacte emocional per a poder comparar, estudiar i comprendre millor els resultats.Després veuríem les seves respostes i el grau o nivell d’ancoratge que se’ls hi deriva i el compararem amb els resultats del grup de control per veure si té efecte (i si el té, en quina mesura) aquestes emocions sobre les respostes.L’estudi recau en com els estímuls en forma d’emocions han modificat (o no) l’ancoratge dels voluntaris i poder estudiar quin és l’òptim punt d’ancoratge quan es donen els tipus d’estímuls ja mencionats. També s’analitzen dades com les del sexe, l’ancoratge entre les xifres absolutes, etc...A través de l’experiment, i després de la recopilació de les dades, i l’elaboració de gràfics i taules estadístiques volem trobar una aplicació socioeconòmica, vinculada amb el marketing, que descobrirem a través a de les conclusions, la realitat i lesrespostes a les hipòtesis que hem plantejat. És a dir, aplicacions que estiguin connectades a la idea de com juguen les emocions alhora de prendre decisions en la nostra vida quotidiana.D’aquest estudi, els economistes en podem treure profit per a predir les eleccions dels consumidors en àmbits com el del poder de compra, entre molts altres que intentarem tractar al llarg del nostre experiment.

Prime Property Institutions for a Subprime Era: Exploring Innovative Models of Residential Development and Finance

This paper breaks new ground toward contractual and institutional innovation in models of homeownership, equity building, and mortgage enforcement. Inspired by recent developments in the affordable housing sector and in other types of public financing schemes, this paper suggests extending institutional and financial strategies such as timeand place-based division of property rights, conditional subsidies, and credit mediation to alleviate the systemic risks of mortgage foreclosure. Alongside a for-profit shared equity scheme that would be led by local governments, we also outline a private market shared equity model, one of bootstrapping home buying with purchase options.

Network revenue management with product-specific no-shows

Revenue management practices often include overbooking capacity to account for customerswho make reservations but do not show up. In this paper, we consider the network revenuemanagement problem with no-shows and overbooking, where the show-up probabilities are specificto each product. No-show rates differ significantly by product (for instance, each itinerary andfare combination for an airline) as sale restrictions and the demand characteristics vary byproduct. However, models that consider no-show rates by each individual product are difficultto handle as the state-space in dynamic programming formulations (or the variable space inapproximations) increases significantly. In this paper, we propose a randomized linear program tojointly make the capacity control and overbooking decisions with product-specific no-shows. Weestablish that our formulation gives an upper bound on the optimal expected total profit andour upper bound is tighter than a deterministic linear programming upper bound that appearsin the existing literature. Furthermore, we show that our upper bound is asymptotically tightin a regime where the leg capacities and the expected demand is scaled linearly with the samerate. We also describe how the randomized linear program can be used to obtain a bid price controlpolicy. Computational experiments indicate that our approach is quite fast, able to scale to industrialproblems and can provide significant improvements over standard benchmarks.

Banks and development: Jewish communities in the Italian Renaissance and current economic performance

Are differences in local banking development long-lasting? Do they affect long-term economic performance?I answer these questions by relying on an historical development that occurred in Italian cities during the 15thcentury. A sudden change in the Catholic doctrine had driven the Jews toward money lending. Cities thatwere hosting Jewish communities developed complex banking institutions for two reasons: first, the Jews werethe only people in Italy who were allowed to lend for a profit and, second, the Franciscan reaction to Jewishusury led to the creation of charity lending institutions, the Monti di Pietà, that have survived until today andhave become the basis of the Italian banking system. Using Jewish demography in 1500 as an instrument, Iprovide evidence of (1) an extraordinary persistence in the level of banking development across Italian cities (2)large effects of current local banking development on per-capita income. Additional firm-level analyses suggestthat well-functioning local banks exert large effects on aggregate productivity by reallocating resources towardmore efficient firms. I exploit the expulsion of the Jews from the Spanish territories in Italy in 1541 to arguethat my results are not driven by omitted institutional, cultural and geographical characteristics. In particular,I show that, in Central Italy, the difference in current income between cities that hosted Jewish communitiesand cities that did not exists only in those regions that were not Spanish territories in the 16th century.

Offshoring and directed technical change

To study the short-run and long-run implications on wage inequality, we introducedirected technical change into a Ricardian model of offshoring. A unique final good isproduced by combining a skilled and an unskilled product, each produced from a continuumof intermediates (tasks). Some of these tasks can be transferred from a skill-abundant Westto a skill-scarce East. Profit maximization determines both the extent of offshoring andtechnological progress. Offshoring induces skill-biased technical change because it increasesthe relative price of skill-intensive products and induces technical change favoring unskilledworkers because it expands the market size for technologies complementing unskilled labor.In the empirically more relevant case, starting from low levels, an increase in offshoringopportunities triggers a transition with falling real wages for unskilled workers in the West,skill-biased technical change and rising skill premia worldwide. However, when the extentof offshoring becomes sufficiently large, further increases in offshoring induce technicalchange now biased in favor of unskilled labor because offshoring closes the gap betweenunskilled wages in the West and the East, thus limiting the power of the price effectfueling skill-biased technical change. The unequalizing impact of offshoring is thus greatestat the beginning. Transitional dynamics reveal that offshoring and technical change aresubstitutes in the short run but complements in the long run. Finally, though offshoringimproves the welfare of workers in the East, it may benefit or harm unskilled workers inthe West depending on elasticities and the equilibrium growth rate.

Cost system design and cost management in the Spanish public sector

Cost systems have been shown to have developed considerably in recent years andactivity-based costing (ABC) has been shown to be a contribution to cost management,particularly in service businesses. The public sector is composed to a very great extentof service functions, yet considerably less has been reported of the use of ABC tosupport cost management in this sector.In Spain, cost systems are essential for city councils as they are obliged to calculate thecost of the services subject to taxation (eg. waste collection, etc). City councils musthave a cost system in place to calculate the cost of services, as they are legally requirednot to profit , from these services.This paper examines the development of systems to support cost management in theSpanish Public Sector. Through semi-structured interviews with 28 subjects within oneCity Council it contains a case study of cost management. The paper contains extractsfrom interviews and a number of factors are identified which contribute to thesuccessful development of the cost management system.Following the case study a number of other City Councils were identified where activity-based techniques had either failed or stalled. Based on the factors identified inthe single case study a further enquiry is reported. The paper includes a summary usingstatistical analysis which draws attention to change management, funding and politicalincentives as factors which had an influence on system success or failure.

Prime property institutions for a subprime era: Toward innovative models of homeownership

This Article breaks new ground toward contractual and institutional innovation in models of homeownership, equity building, and mortgage enforcement. Inspired by recent developments in the affordable housing sector and other types of public financing schemes, we suggest extending institutional and financial strategies such as time- and place-based division of property rights, conditional subsidies, and credit mediation to alleviate the systemic risks of mortgage foreclosure. Two new solutions offer a broad theoretical basis for such developments in the economic and legal institution of homeownership: a for-profit shared equity scheme led by local governments alongside a private market shared equity model, one of "bootstrapping home buying with purchase options".

Bundling electronic journals and competition among publishers

Site licensing of e-journals has been revolutionizing the way academicinformation is distributed. However, many librarians are concerned aboutthe possibility that publishers might abuse site licensing by practicingbundling. In this paper, we analyze the private and social incentives forthe publishers to use bundling in the context of STM electronic journalmarket. In the short run in which the number of journals is exogenouslygiven, we find a strong conflict between the two incentives: each publisherfinds bundling optimal and bundling increases the industry profit butreduces social welfare. However, in the long run we find that publishersmight have higher incentives to introduce new journals under bundlingthan without bundling and, in this case, bundling can reduce the industryprofit while increasing social welfare. Finally, we examine publishers incentive to provide links to the websites of the rival publishers underbundling and show that even asymmetric publishers have incentive tointerconnect.

The organization of research corporations and researcher ability

This paper analyzes the formation of Research Corporations as an alternative governance structure for performing R&D compared to pursuing in-house R&D projects. Research Corporations are privatefor-profit research centers that bring together several firms with similar research goals. In a Research Corporation formal authority over the choice of projects is jointly exercised by the top management of the member firms. A private for-profit organization cannot commit not to interfere with the project choice of the researchers. However, increasing the number of member firms of the Research Corporation reduces the incentive of member firms to meddle with the research projects of researchers because exercising formal authority over the choice of research projects is a public good. The Research Corporation thus offers researchers greater autonomy than a single firm pursuing an identical research program in its in-house R&D department. This attracts higher ability researchers to the Research Corporation compared to the internal R&D department. The paper uses the theoretical model to analyze the organization of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). The facts of this case confirm the existence of a tension between control over the choice of research projects and the ability of researchers that the organization is able to attract or hold onto.

Economic rationality and ethical behavior

This paper argues that economic rationality and ethical behavior cannotbe reduced one to the other, casting doubts on the validity of formulaslike 'profit is ethical' or 'ethics pays'. In order to express ethicaldilemmas as opposing economic interest with ethical concerns, we proposea model of rational behavior that combines these two irreducible dimensions in an open but not arbitrary manner. Behaviors that are neither ethicalnor profitable are considered irrational (non-arbitrariness). However,behaviors that are profitable but unethical, and behaviors that are ethicalbut not profitable, are all treated as rational (openness). Combiningethical concerns with economic interest, ethical business is in turn anoptimal form of rationality between venality and sacrifice.Because every one prefers to communicate that he acts ethically, ethicalbusiness remains ambiguous until some economic interest is actuallysacrificed. We argue however that ethical business has an interest indemonstrating its consistency between communication and behavior by atransparent attitude. On the other hand, venal behaviors must remainconfidential to hide the corresponding lack of consistency. Thisdiscursive approach based on transparency and confidentiality helpsto further distinguish between ethical and unethical business behaviors.

Interconnection among academic journal platforms: Multilateral versus bilateral interconnection

Electronic academic journal websites provide new services of text and/or datamining and linking, indispensable for e¢ cient allocation of attention among abun-dant sources of scienti?c information. Fully realizing the bene?t of these servicesrequires interconnection among websites. Motivated by CrossRef, a multilateralcitation linking backbone, this paper performs a comparison between multilateralinterconnection through an open platform and bilateral interconnection, and ?ndsthat publishers are fully interconnected in the former regime while they can be par-tially interconnected in the latter regime for exclusion or di¤erentiation motives.Surprisingly, if partial interconnection arises for di¤erentiation motive, exclusion ofsmall publisher(s) occurs more often under multilateral interconnection. We also?nd that in the case of multilateral interconnection, a for-pro?t platform inducesless exclusion than an open platform. Various other extensions are analyzed.

What form of relative performance evaluation?

We study relative performance evaluation in executive compensation whenexecutives have private information about their ability. We assume that thejoint distribution of an individual firm s profit and market movements dependson the ability of the executive that runs the firm. In the equilibrium of theexecutive labor market, compensation schemes exploit this fact to sortexecutives of di ?erent abilities. This implies that executive compensation isincreasing in own performance, but may also be increasing in industryperformance-a sharp departure from standard relative performance evaluation.This result provides an explanation for the scarcity of relative performanceconsiderations in executive compensation documented by the empirical literature.