Consumers' behavior and the Bertrand paradox: an ACE approach

We analyze the classical Bertrand model when consumers exhibit some strategic behavior in deciding from which seller they will buy. We use two related but different tools. Both consider a probabilistic learning (or evolutionary) mechanism, and in the two of them consumers' behavior in uences the competition between the sellers. The results obtained show that, in general, developing some sort of loyalty is a good strategy for the buyers as it works in their best interest. First, we consider a learning procedure described by a deterministic dynamic system and, using strong simplifying assumptions, we can produce a description of the process behavior. Second, we use nite automata to represent the strategies played by the agents and an adaptive process based on genetic algorithms to simulate the stochastic process of learning. By doing so we can relax some of the strong assumptions used in the rst approach and still obtain the same basic results. It is suggested that the limitations of the rst approach (analytical) provide a good motivation for the second approach (Agent-Based). Indeed, although both approaches address the same problem, the use of Agent-Based computational techniques allows us to relax hypothesis and overcome the limitations of the analytical approach.

Basket manager: administració web i comerç electrònic en entorns de programari lliure

Joc en línia senzill de gestió esportiva basat en bàsquet.

Help Desk Manager : aplicació Android per a la gestió d’incidències

HDM, Help Desk Manager és una aplicació android que permet crear i gestionar les incidències que es presenten en una empresa.

La gestión de la reputación on-line por parte de las compañías hoteleras : El papel del community manager

Mi trabajo de disertación se desarrolla en el contexto del Grado de Comunicación de la UOC y la finalidad es establecer un marco teórico actualizado sobre el concepto de reputación on-line aplicable al sector hotelero. En este sentido entiendo necesario partir del análisis de tres hoteles de Palma de Mallorca para obtener un diagnóstico de reputación y poderafirmar que existe una relación entre su reputación on-line y la obtención de mayores ingresos. Por este motivo, llevaré a cabo un estudio de caso comparativo con la herramienta de monitorización SocialVane del Hotel Gran Meliá Victoria con sus competidores más directos.

Basketball match manager

Aplicació per a mòbils Android que permet la gestió d'entitats relacionades amb una competició de bàsquet i l'scouting d'un partit en curs mitjançant el recull de dades estadístiques en un dispositiu mòbil.

Accounting manager : Servei web gestor de comptabilitat

Aquest projecte consisteix en un petit servei web de comptabilitat desenvolupat amb Vaadin framework, MySQL i Java. Dita aplicació permet crear factures i altres documents i portar-ne unes estadístiques de les figures relacionades amb aquesta comptabilitat. El fet d'utilitzar Vaadin permet desenvolupar aquest servei web mitjançant Java. Aquesta entrega es composa d'una presentació, la memòria i el producte (servei web+BD+instruccions).

It's what you say not what you pay

We study manager-employee interactions in experiments set in a corporate environment where payoffs depend on employees coordinating at high effort levels; the underlying game being played repeatedly by employees is a weak-link game. In the absence of managerial intervention subjects invariably slip into coordination failure. To overcome a history of coordination failure, managers have two instruments at their disposal, increasing employees' financial incentives to coordinate and communication with employees. We find that communication is a more effective tool than incentive changes for leading organizations out of performance traps. Examining the content of managers' communication, the most effective messages specifically request a high effort, point out the mutual benefits of high effort, and imply that employees are being paid well.

Personal relations and their effect on behavior in an organizational setting: an experimental study

We study how personal relations affect performance in organizations. In the experimental game we use a manager has to assign different degrees of decision power to two employees. These two employees then have to make distributive decisions which affect themselves and the manager. Our focus is on the effects on managers' assignment of decision power and on employees' distributive decisions of one of the employees and the manager knowing each other personally. Our evidence shows that managers tend to favor employees that they personally know and that these employees tend, more than other employees, to favor the manager in their distributive decisions. However, this behavior does not affect the performance of the employees that do not know the manager. All these effects are independent of whether the employees that know the manager are more or less productive than those who do not know the manager. The results shed light on discrimination and nepotism and its consequences for the performance of family firms and other organizations.

Codes of best practice in competitive markets for managers

We study firms' corporate governance in environments where possibly heterogeneous shareholders compete for possibly heterogeneous managers. A firm, formed by a shareholder and a manager, can sign either an incentive contract or a contract including a Code of Best Practice. A Code allows for a better manager's control but makes manager's decisions hard to react when market conditions change. It tends to be adopted in markets with low volatility and in low-competitive environments. The firms with the best projects tend to adopt the Code when managers are not too heterogeneous while the best managers tend to be hired through incentive contracts when the projects are similar. Although the matching between shareholders and managers is often positively assortative, the shareholders with the best projects might be willing to renounce to hire the best managers, signing contracts including Codes with lower-ability managers.

Ràdio participativa amb difusió per Internet

Aquesta memòria reuneix una explicació del treball que s'ha dut a terme per a desenvolupar el projecte final de carrera. Aquest tracta d'implementar una ràdio musical que s'emet per Internet però amb la característica d'ésser una ràdio que decideixi la programació musical en funció de la seva audiència. Per a realitzar això es distingiran dos tipus d'usuaris: els oients i els gestors de la ràdio musical. El gestors de la ràdio tindran la responsabilitat d'alimentar de música la ràdio, etiquetar i classificar aquesta música perquè la ràdio estableixi criteris de similitud entre cançons. Els oients seran responsables d'opinar sobre les cançons que emet la ràdio, si els agrada o desagrada, per guiar la ràdio cap al gust musical del propi oient. La complexitat està en què no es tracta d'una ràdio musical amb un sol oient sinó que hi ha diferents oients i s'haurà de saber gestionar correctament els gustos dispersos dels oients. En el present document recullim tots els treballs realitzats, l'anàlisis formal del problema, l'explicació de la solució proposada i com hem realitzat aquesta solució.

Gestor intel·ligent d'assignació de recursos

Aquest projecte és una eina per a la gestió avançada del Comitè Tècnic d’Àrbitres de Futbol Sala de Catalunya. Creant una base de dades forta i robusta com la que ens proporciona la tecnologia ORACLE, i agafant APEX com a gestor de continguts de la base de dades, hem creat una aplicació per realitzar l'assignació d'arbitratges i altres recursos d'una manera intel·ligent i equitativa.

Patrimoni Digital de Catalunya, a year and a half experience

E-repositories are part of the e-science, and they are based on the e-infrastructure. The Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) together with the Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC) started in 1999 a cooperative repository, named TDR, to file, in digital format, the full-text of the read thesis at the universities of our country in order to spread them worldwide in open access, while at the same time, preserving the intellectual copyright of the authors. Since then, four additional cooperative repositories have been created: RECERCAT for research papers; RACO for scientific, cultural and erudite Catalan magazines; MDC for Catalan digital collections of pictures, maps, posters and old magazines; and PADICAT for archiving Catalan digital web content; The main objective of the latter is to archive Catalan web sites. That is, PADICAT collects, processes and provides permanent access to the entire cultural, scientific and general output of Catalonia in digital format. The repository manager is the Biblioteca de Catalunya, as the institution responsible for compiling, processing and distributing the bibliographic heritage of Catalonia, while CESCA is the technology partner. On September 11th, 2006 the repository went into operation for the general public, with some thirty websites archived. After one year and a half, it has 2.720 captures of more than 1.000 websites. This includes 34 million files (HTML, images...) and two terabytes of data. The objective of this paper is to present PADICAT and our experience developing and managing it.We describe the repository briefly, we explain the technology used to implement it and we comment our experiences during its first year and a half.

GEPM: gestió d'equipaments públics municipals

Aquest projecte presenta una solució integral e integrada per a la gestió d’equipaments públics municipals. És integral ja que contempla tots els aspectes de la gestió, mitjançant diferents canals en funció del perfil d’usuari que l’utilitza ; és integrada ja que proporciona una solució integrada amb l’ERP corporatiu existent actualment a l’Ajuntament per al qual s’ha desenvolupat. El projecte presenta els següents canals de gestió: Aplicació Windows desenvolupada en .NET, Extranet de gestió amb gestió de continguts, Aplicació web per dispositius mòbils i Web informativa de recollida selectiva i neteja viària. El projecte també disposa de connexió al gestor documental Documentum de EMC2.

Multi-level SLA-driven resource management on Cloud Providers

Nowadays, service providers in the Cloud offer complex services ready to be used as it was a commodity like water or electricity to their customers with any other extra effort for them. However, providing these services implies a high management effort which requires a lot of human interaction. Furthermore, an efficient resource management mechanism considering only provider's resources is, though necessary, not enough, because the provider's profit is limited by the amount of resources it owns. Dynamically outsourcing resources to other providers in response to demand variation avoids this problem and makes the provider to get more profit. A key technology for achieving these goals is virtualization which facilitates provider's management and provides on-demand virtual environments, which are isolated and consolidated in order to achieve a better utilization of the provider's resources. Nevertheless, dealing with some virtualization capabilities implies an effort for the user in order to take benefit from them. In order to avoid this problem, we are contributing the research community with a virtualized environment manager which aims to provide virtual machines that fulfils with the user requirements. Another challenge is sharing resources among different federated Cloud providers while exploiting the features of virtualization in a new approach for facilitating providers' management. This project aims for reducing provider's costs and at the same time fulfilling the quality of service agreed with the customers while maximizing the provider's revenue. It considers resource management at several layers, namely locally to each node in the provider, among different nodes in the provider, and among different federated providers. This latter layer supports the novel capabilities of outsourcing when the local resources are not enough to fulfil the users demand, and offering resources to other providers when the local resources are underused.

Cronyism in Business, Public Sector and Politics

This paper contrasts the incentives for cronyism in business, the public sector and politics within an agency problem model with moral hazard. The analysis is focused on the institutional differences between private, public and political organizations. In business, when facing a residual claimant contract, a chief manager ends up with a relatively moderate …rst-best level of cronyism within a …firm. The institutional framework of the public sector does not allow explicit contracting, which leads to a more severe cronyism problem within public organizations. Finally, it is shown that the nature of political appointments (such that the subordinate's reappointment is conditioned on the chief's re-election) together with implicit contracting makes political cronyism the most extreme case. JEL classifi…cation: D72, D73, D86. Keywords: Cronyism; Meritocracy; Manager; Bureaucrat; Politician.