Collective intelligence

Estudio e implantación de algoritmos de recomendación, búsqueda, ranking y aprendizaje.

Business Models in OER, a Contingency Approach

We will present an analysis of data from a literature review and semi-structured interviews with experts on OER, to identify different aspects of OER business models and to establish how the success of the OER initiatives is measured. The results collected thus far show that two different business models for OER initiatives exist, but no data on their success or failure is published. We propose a framework for measuring success of OER initiatives.

Collective Intelligence for OER Sustainability

To thrive, the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement, or a given initiative, must make sense of a complex, changing environment. Since "sustainability" is a desirable systemic capacity that our community should display, we consider a number of principles that sharpen the concept: resilience, sensemaking and complexity. We outline how these motivate the concept of collective intelligence (CI), we give examples of what OER-CI might look like, and we describe the emerging Cohere CI platform we are developing in response to these requirements.

Consumption heterogenity over the business cycle

We study consumption heterogeneity over the business cycle. Using household panel data from 1984 to 2010 in the US we find that the welfare cost of the business cycle is non-negligible, once agents heterogeneity is taken into account, and sums to about 1% of yearly consumption. This is due to the structure of comovements between the different parts of the consumption distribution, in particular the tails are highly volatile and negatively related to each other. We also find that business cycle fluctuations originating from exogenous financial shocks only hit the top end of the consumption distribution and therefore reduce consumption inequality.

Desenvolupament d'un agent intel·ligent dins el marc de la competició TAC SCM

Aquest projecte està emmarcat dins el grup eXiT d’Intel•lig`encia Artificial del Departament d’Electrònica i Automàtica (EIA) de la Universitat de Girona. Pertany a l’àmbit de la Intel•ligència Artificial i, concretament, en l’apartat d’agents intel•ligents. En el nostre cas, tractarem el desenvolupament d’un agent intel•ligent en un entorn determinat, el de la gestió d’una cadena de producció. Amb l’objectiu de proporcionar un marc experimental on provar diferents tecnologies de suport a la gestió de la cadena de producció, la comunitat d’investigadors va proposar una competició internacional: la Trading Agent Competiton (TAC). En aquesta competició existeixen diferents modalitats. En particular, la Swedish Institution of Computer Science (SICS), juntament amb la Carnegie Mellon University de Pittsburg, Minnesotta, van proposar al 2003 un escenari de muntatge de PC’s basat en el proveïment de recursos, l’embalatge de PC’s i les ventes a clients. Aquesta modalitat és coneguda com aTAC-SCM (Supply Chain Management)

A Negotiation Style Recommender Based on Computational Ecology in Open Negotiation Environments

The system described herein represents the first example of a recommender system in digital ecosystems where agents negotiate services on behalf of small companies. The small companies compete not only with price or quality, but with a wider service-by-service composition by subcontracting with other companies. The final result of these offerings depends on negotiations at the scale of millions of small companies. This scale requires new platforms for supporting digital business ecosystems, as well as related services like open-id, trust management, monitors and recommenders. This is done in the Open Negotiation Environment (ONE), which is an open-source platform that allows agents, on behalf of small companies, to negotiate and use the ecosystem services, and enables the development of new agent technologies. The methods and tools of cyber engineering are necessary to build up Open Negotiation Environments that are stable, a basic condition for predictable business and reliable business environments. Aiming to build stable digital business ecosystems by means of improved collective intelligence, we introduce a model of negotiation style dynamics from the point of view of computational ecology. This model inspires an ecosystem monitor as well as a novel negotiation style recommender. The ecosystem monitor provides hints to the negotiation style recommender to achieve greater stability of an open negotiation environment in a digital business ecosystem. The greater stability provides the small companies with higher predictability, and therefore better business results. The negotiation style recommender is implemented with a simulated annealing algorithm at a constant temperature, and its impact is shown by applying it to a real case of an open negotiation environment populated by Italian companies

Place marketing performance: benchmarking european cities as business destinations

The aim of this study is to develop a model measuring the performance of cities' marketing efforts. The model and the benchmarking methodology presented can be used by local authorities to position their marketing efforts and achievements against other (competing) cities and to identify best practices that can assist place marketers in learning how to be more efficient obtaining desired place marketing results, e.g., improved city brand image, with the available resources/budgets. The major implication for practitioners is that place marketing should be managed as a process, taking into account both the resource flows and the outputs, as well as the efficiency of this process.

Herramienta de gestión integral de e-Business

El objetivo del proyecto es llevar a cabo el desarrollo de una herramienta que permita a las pequeñas y medianas empresas informatizar su gestión para acercarlas al e-business.

Implantació de SAP Business One a l'empresa Quines Tapes S.L.

Anàlisi i disseny de la implantació de SAP Business One en un restaurant o cadena de restaurants.

Business Exits entail greater future levels of entrepreneurship? An empirical analysis at country level

Using Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data for 41 countries this study investigates the impact of business exit on entrepreneurial activity at the country level. The paper distinguishes between two types of entrepreneurial activity according with the motive to start a new business: entrepreneurs driven by opportunity and necessity motives. The findings indicate that exits have a positive impact on future levels of entrepreneurial activity in a country. For each exit in a given year, a larger proportion of entrepreneurial activity the following year. Moreover, this e ffect turns out to be higher for opportunity entrepreneurs. The findings indicate that both types of entrepreneurial activity rates are influenced by the same factors and in the same direction. However, for some factors we find a di fferential impact on the entrepreneurship. The results show some important implications given that business exit may be overcome when there is a necessity motivation. This has important implications for both researchers and policy makers. JEL codes: L26. Keywords: Entrepreneurship, business exit, social values

Measurement with Some Theory: a New Approach to Evaluate Business Cycle Models

We propose a method to evaluate cyclical models which does not require knowledge of the DGP and the exact empirical specification of the aggregate decision rules. We derive robust restrictions in a class of models; use some to identify structural shocks and others to evaluate the model or contrast sub-models. The approach has good size and excellent power properties, even in small samples. We show how to examine the validity of a class of models, sort out the relevance of certain frictions, evaluate the importance of an added feature, and indirectly estimate structural parameters.

Are There Classical Business Cycles?

The aim of this paper is to test formally the classical business cycle hypothesis, using data from industrialized countries for the time period since 1960. The hypothesis is characterized by the view that the cyclical structure in GDP is concentrated in the investment series: fixed investment has typically a long cycle, while the cycle in inventory investment is shorter. To check the robustness of our results, we subject the data for 15 OECD countries to a variety of detrending techniques. While the hypothesis is not confirmed uniformly for all countries, there is a considerably high number for which the data display the predicted pattern. None of the countries shows a pattern which can be interpreted as a clear rejection of the classical hypothesis.

Business Cycles, Unemployment Insurance, and the Calibration of Matching Models

This paper points out an empirical puzzle that arises when an RBC economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment. The standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment, or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to labor market policies, but it cannot do both. Variable search and separation, finite UI benefit duration, efficiency wages, and capital all fail to resolve this puzzle. However, both sticky wages and match-specific productivity shocks help the model reproduce the stylized facts: both make the firm's flow of surplus more procyclical, thus making hiring more procyclical too.

Credit Constraints, Firms' Precautionary Investment, and the Business Cycle

This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of firms' precautionary investment behavior in response to the anticipation of future financing constraints. Firms increase their demand for liquid and safe investments in order to alleviate future borrowing constraints and decrease the probability of having to forego future profitable investment opportunities. This results in an increase in the share of short-term projects that produces a temporary increase in output, at the expense of lower long-run investment and future output. I show in a calibrated model that this behavior is at the source of a novel and powerful channel of shock transmission of productivity shocks that produces short-run dampening and long-run propagation. Furthermore, it can account for the observed business cycle patterns of the aggregate and firm-level composition of investment.

Pitfalls to Avoid when Measuring Institutions: Is 'Doing Business' Damaging Business?

Over recent years, both governments and international aid organizations have been devoting large amounts of resources to "simplifying" the procedures for setting up and formalizing firms. Many of these actions have focused on reducing the initial costs of setting up the firm, disregarding the more important role of business registers as a source of reliable information for judges, government departments and, above all, other firms. This reliable information is essential for reducing transaction costs in future dealings with all sorts of economic agents, both public and private. The priorities of reform policies should therefore be thoroughly reviewed, stressing the value of the legal institutions rather than trivializing them as is often the case.