Quantitative analysis of image factors in a cultural heritage tourist destination

The tourism consumer’s purchase decision process is, to a great extent, conditioned by the image the tourist has of the different destinations that make up his or her choice set. In a highly competitive international tourist market, those responsible for destinations’ promotion and development policies seek differentiation strategies so that they may position the destinations in the most suitable market segments for their product in order to improve their attractiveness to visitors and increase or consolidate the economic benefits that tourism activity generates in their territory. To this end, the main objective we set ourselves in this paper is the empirical analysis of the factors that determine the image formation of Tarragona city as a cultural heritage destination. Without a doubt, UNESCO’s declaration of Tarragona’s artistic and monumental legacies as World Heritage site in the year 2000 meant important international recognition of the quality of the cultural and patrimonial elements offered by the city to the visitors who choose it as a tourist destination. It also represents a strategic opportunity to boost the city’s promotion of tourism and its consolidation as a unique destination given its cultural and patrimonial characteristics. Our work is based on the use of structured and unstructured techniques to identify the factors that determine Tarragona’s tourist destination image and that have a decisive influence on visitors’ process of choice of destination. In addition to being able to ascertain Tarragona’s global tourist image, we consider that the heterogeneity of its visitors requires a more detailed study that enables us to segment visitor typology. We consider that the information provided by these results may prove of great interest to those responsible for local tourism policy, both when designing products and when promoting the destination.

Stable coalition structures with fixed decision scheme

This paper studies the stability of a finite local public goods economy in horizontal differentiation, where a jurisdiction's choice of the public good is given by an exogenous decision scheme. In this paper, we characterize the class of decision schemes that ensure the existence of an equilibrium with free mobility (that we call Tiebout equilibrium) for monotone distribution of players. This class contains all the decision schemes whose choice lies between the Rawlsian decision scheme and the median voter with mid-distance of the two median voters when there are ties. We show that for non-monotone distribution, there is no decision scheme that can ensure the stability of coalitions. In the last part of the paper, we prove the non-emptiness of the core of this coalition formation game

Human capital in export-based internationalisation. "Managerial determinants and their influence upon the export behaviour of the firm: four case-studies of catalan exporting SMEs"

Export activities are a major source of economic growth and are considered important both at the national level and for individual businesses. Moreover, in the case of SMEs, they gain particular relevance, exporting being the most common foreign market entry mode for these firms. The decision maker’s role in the export activity is crucial, particularly in the case of SMEs. However, the extant literature on internationalization is characterized by a lack of consensus among scholars as to what constitutes the managerial factor in determining exporting. Therefore, this study focuses on the following issue: Which are the decision maker’s characteristics and perceptions that may influence the export behaviour of Catalan SMEs? To address this question a multiple case study method is applied across four Catalan exporting SMEs. The methodology chosen for analysing the empirical data is relying on the proposition testing approach while the investigation is conducted including both within and cross-case analysis. The findings show that high educational level, language skills, high risk tolerance, innovativeness as well as strongly perceived export stimuli as compared to low and easy to overcome export barriers positively influence the export involvement and development of SMEs. The study provides further insights into the research topic by jointly studying managerial characteristics and perceptions. Additionally, the majority of research on exporting topics has been carried out in the USA, so there is a clear need of investigation in the field in other countries, moreover in Spain where the exporting activities have not been as widely studied.

Cooperative vs. non-cooperative mechanisms in the EU decision making process

According to the account of the European Union (EU) decision making proposed in this paper, this is a bargaining process during which actors shift their policy positions with a view to reaching agreements on controversial issues.

Learning from Shocks and the Decision to Open

Two claims pervade the literature on the political economy of market reforms: that economic crises cause reforms; and that crises matter because they bring into question the validity of the economic model held to be responsible for them. Economic crises are said to spur a process of learning that is conducive to the abandonment of failing models and to the adoption of successful models. But although these claims have become the conventional wisdom, they have been hardly tested empirically due to the lack of agreement on what constitutes a crisis and to difficulties in measuring learning from them. I propose a model of rational learning from experience and apply it to the decision to open the economy. Using data from 1964 through 1990, I show that learning from the 1982 debt crisis was relevant to the first wave of adoption of an export promotion strategy, but learning was conditional on the high variability of economic outcomes in countries that opened up to trade. Learning was also symbolic in that the sheer number of other countries that liberalized was a more important driver of others’ decisions to follow suit.

A decision-making Fokker-Planck model in computational neuroscience

Minimal models for the explanation of decision-making in computational neuroscience are based on the analysis of the evolution for the average firing rates of two interacting neuron populations. While these models typically lead to multi-stable scenario for the basic derived dynamical systems, noise is an important feature of the model taking into account finite-size effects and robustness of the decisions. These stochastic dynamical systems can be analyzed by studying carefully their associated Fokker-Planck partial differential equation. In particular, we discuss the existence, positivity and uniqueness for the solution of the stationary equation, as well as for the time evolving problem. Moreover, we prove convergence of the solution to the the stationary state representing the probability distribution of finding the neuron families in each of the decision states characterized by their average firing rates. Finally, we propose a numerical scheme allowing for simulations performed on the Fokker-Planck equation which are in agreement with those obtained recently by a moment method applied to the stochastic differential system. Our approach leads to a more detailed analytical and numerical study of this decision-making model in computational neuroscience.

Bringing actors and violent conflict into forced migration literature. A model of the decision to return

Populations displaced as a result of mass violent conflict have become one of the most pressing humanitarian concerns of the last decades. They have also become one salient political issue as a perceived burden (in economic and security terms) and as an important piece in the shift towards a more interventionist paradigm in the international system, based on both humanitarian and security grounds. The saliency of these aspects has detracted attention from the analysis of the interactions between relocation processes and violent conflict. Violent conflict studies have also largely ignored those interactions as a result of the consideration of these processes as mere reaction movements determined by structural conditions. This article takes the view that individual’s agency is retained during such processes, and that it is consequential, calling for the need to introduce a micro perspective. Based on this, a model for the individual’s decision of return is presented. The model has the potential to account for the dynamics of return at both the individual and the aggregate level. And it further helps to grasp fundamental interconnections with violent conflict. Some relevant conclusions are derived for the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina and about the implications of the politicization of return.

Revisiting the size-R&D productivity relation: introducing the mediating role of decision-making style on the scale and quality of innovative output

We develop a mediation model in which firm size is proposed to affect the scale and quality of innovative output through the adoption of different decision styles during the R&D process. The aim of this study is to understand how the internal changes that firms undergo as they evolve from small to larger organizations affect R&D productivity. In so doing, we illuminate the underlying theoretical mechanism affecting two different dimensions of R&D productivity, namely the scale and quality of innovative output which have not received much attention in previous literature. Using longitudinal data of Spanish manufacturing firms we explore the validity of this mediation model. Our results show that as firms evolve in size, they increasingly emphasize analytical decision making, and consequently, large-sized firms aim for higher-quality innovations while small firms aim for a larger scale of innovative output.

Intra-Party Democracy and middle-level elites in Spain

The gradual implementation of new, more participatory and thus, more democratic mechanisms of intra-party decision-making has been pointed out by several party politics scholars. This phenomenon has been studied as the party elite’s reactions to a widespread trend in Western countries: the party membership decline. Spain is still a deviant case in both the party membership decline trend, and with regards to the introduction of more participatory and democratic decision-making mechanisms. However, the paper point out that support for intra-party democracy is quite widespread within Spanish party middle elites (party delegates). That is why the aim of this paper is to explain which factors are underpinning the supports for intra-party democracy amongst Spanish party delegates. After conducting a multivariate analysis, the results show that ideology, the involvement in intra-party experiences and the degree of pragmatism, amongst others, are factors strongly associated with the support for intraparty democracy in Spanish party middle elites.

The Decision on Turkish EU accession in December 2002: The logic of anarchy, collective action problems and rhetorical action

Studies of the EU accession of the East and Central European Countries have stressed the importance of neo-liberal institutionalism as an explanation for Member State preferences. In this paper it is argued that Member States’ preferences over Turkish EU accession are better explained by power politics and neo-realism. It seems therefore that Turkey’s way to the EU follows another path than the East and Central Countries. Turkish accession raises the question of the EU’s role in a uni-polar world order – whether the EU should develop into an independent actor on the world stage or not. However, when it comes to the interaction among the Member States in order to decide on when to open accession negotiations with Turkey the constitutive values of the EU seriously modify the outcome that pure power politics would have let to.

Decision Support Methods for Global Optomization

Immobile location-allocation (LA) problems is a type of LA problem that consists in determining the service each facility should offer in order to optimize some criterion (like the global demand), given the positions of the facilities and the customers. Due to the complexity of the problem, i.e. it is a combinatorial problem (where is the number of possible services and the number of facilities) with a non-convex search space with several sub-optimums, traditional methods cannot be applied directly to optimize this problem. Thus we proposed the use of clustering analysis to convert the initial problem into several smaller sub-problems. By this way, we presented and analyzed the suitability of some clustering methods to partition the commented LA problem. Then we explored the use of some metaheuristic techniques such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing or cuckoo search in order to solve the sub-problems after the clustering analysis

List-based decision problems

When encountering a set of alternatives displayed in the form of a list, the decision maker usually determines a particular alternative, after which she stops checking the remaining ones, and chooses an alternative from those observed so far. We present a framework in which both decision problems are explicitly modeled, and axiomatically characterize a stop-and-choose rule which unifies position-biased successive choice and satisficing choice.

Involvement of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase cascade for cocaine-rewarding properties

A central feature of drugs of abuse is to induce gene expression in discrete brain structures that are critically involved in behavioral responses related to addictive processes. Although extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) has been implicated in several neurobiological processes, including neuronal plasticity, its role in drug addiction remains poorly understood. This study was designed to analyze the activation of ERK by cocaine, its involvement in cocaine-induced early and long-term behavioral effects, as well as in gene expression. We show, by immunocytochemistry, that acute cocaine administration activates ERK throughout the striatum, rapidly but transiently. This activation was blocked when SCH 23390 [a specific dopamine (DA)-D1 antagonist] but not raclopride (a DA-D2 antagonist) was injected before cocaine. Glutamate receptors of NMDA subtypes also participated in ERK activation, as shown after injection of the NMDA receptor antagonist MK 801. The systemic injection of SL327, a selective inhibitor of the ERK kinase MEK, before cocaine, abolished the cocaine-induced ERK activation and decreased cocaine-induced hyperlocomotion, indicating a role of this pathway in events underlying early behavioral responses. Moreover, the rewarding effects of cocaine were abolished by SL327 in the place-conditioning paradigm. Because SL327 antagonized cocaine-induced c-fos expression and Elk-1 hyperphosphorylation, we suggest that the ERK intracellular signaling cascade is also involved in the prime burst of gene expression underlying long-term behavioral changes induced by cocaine. Altogether, these results reveal a new mechanism to explain behavioral responses of cocaine related to its addictive properties.

A targeted association study of immunity genes and networks suggests novel associations with placental malaria infection

A large proportion of the death toll associated with malaria is a consequence of malaria infection during pregnancy, causing up to 200,000 infant deaths annually. We previously published the first extensive genetic association study of placental malaria infection, and here we extend this analysis considerably, investigating genetic variation in over 9,000 SNPs in more than 1,000 genes involved in immunity and inflammation for their involvement in susceptibility to placental malaria infection. We applied a new approach incorporating results from both single gene analysis as well as gene-gene interactionson a protein-protein interaction network. We found suggestive associations of variants in the gene KLRK1 in the single geneanalysis, as well as evidence for associations of multiple members of the IL-7/IL-7R signalling cascade in the combined analysis. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale genetic study on placental malaria infection to date, opening the door for follow-up studies trying to elucidate the genetic basis of this neglected form of malaria.

Predicting cancer involvement of genes from heterogeneous data

Background: Systematic approaches for identifying proteins involved in different types of cancer are needed. Experimental techniques such as microarrays are being used to characterize cancer, but validating their results can be a laborious task. Computational approaches are used to prioritize between genes putatively involved in cancer, usually based on further analyzing experimental data. Results: We implemented a systematic method using the PIANA software that predicts cancer involvement of genes by integrating heterogeneous datasets. Specifically, we produced lists of genes likely to be involved in cancer by relying on: (i) protein-protein interactions; (ii) differential expression data; and (iii) structural and functional properties of cancer genes. The integrative approach that combines multiple sources of data obtained positive predictive values ranging from 23% (on a list of 811 genes) to 73% (on a list of 22 genes), outperforming the use of any of the data sources alone. We analyze a list of 20 cancer gene predictions, finding that most of them have been recently linked to cancer in literature. Conclusion: Our approach to identifying and prioritizing candidate cancer genes can be used to produce lists of genes likely to be involved in cancer. Our results suggest that differential expression studies yielding high numbers of candidate cancer genes can be filtered using protein interaction networks.