Negoziare confini: dagli stati di cose ai transiti

Negotiating boundaries: from state of affairs to matter of transit. The research deals with the everyday management of spatial uncertainty, starting with the wider historical question of terrains vagues (a French term for wastelands, dismantled areas and peripheral city voids, or interstitial spaces) and focusing later on a particular case study. The choice intended to privilege a small place (a mouth of a lagoon which crosses a beach), with ordinary features, instead of the esthetical “vague terrains”, often witnessed through artistic media or architectural reflections. This place offered the chance to explore a particular dimension of indeterminacy, mostly related with a certain kind of phenomenal instability of its limits, the hybrid character of its cultural status (neither natural, nor artificial) and its crossover position as a transitional space, between different tendencies and activities. The first theoretical part of the research develops a semiotic of vagueness, by taking under exam the structuralist idea of relation, in order to approach an interpretive notion of continuity and indeterminacy. This exploration highlights the key feature of actantial network distribution, which provides a bridge with the second methodological parts, dedicated to a “tuning” of the tools for the analysis. This section establishes a dialogue with current social sciences (like Actor-Network Theory, Situated action and Distributed Cognition), in order to define some observational methods for the documentation of social practices, which could be comprised in a semiotic ethnography framework. The last part, finally, focuses on the mediation and negotiation by which human actors are interacting with the varying conditions of the chosen environment, looking at people’s movements through space, their embodied dealings with the boundaries and the use of spatial artefacts as framing infrastructure of the site.

Reasoning with incomplete and imprecise preferences

Preferences are present in many real life situations but it is often difficult to quantify them giving a precise value. Sometimes preference values may be missing because of privacy reasons or because they are expensive to obtain or to produce. In some other situations the user of an automated system may have a vague idea of whats he wants. In this thesis we considered the general formalism of soft constraints, where preferences play a crucial role and we extended such a framework to handle both incomplete and imprecise preferences. In particular we provided new theoretical frameworks to handle such kinds of preferences. By admitting missing or imprecise preferences, solving a soft constraint problem becomes a different task. In fact, the new goal is to find solutions which are the best ones independently of the precise value the each preference may have. With this in mind we defined two notions of optimality: the possibly optimal solutions and the necessary optimal solutions, which are optimal no matter we assign a precise value to a missing or imprecise preference. We provided several algorithms, bases on both systematic and local search approaches, to find such kind of solutions. Moreover, we also studied the impact of our techniques also in a specific class of problems (the stable marriage problems) where imprecision and incompleteness have a specific meaning and up to now have been tackled with different techniques. In the context of the classical stable marriage problem we developed a fair method to randomly generate stable marriages of a given problem instance. Furthermore, we adapted our techniques to solve stable marriage problems with ties and incomplete lists, which are known to be NP-hard, obtaining good results both in terms of size of the returned marriage and in terms of steps need to find a solution.

Consumer Perception and Willingness to Pay for Local Food

A growing number of empirical studies recently investigated consumers' valuation for local food products. However, different aspects related to the local food consumption still remain vague or unexplored. As such, the objective of the present research is to fulfill the existing literature using a mixed methodological approach for the investigation of consumers' preferences and Willingness to Pay (WTP) for local food products. First of all, local food is still a blurred concept and this factor might be source of individuals' misperception for the local origin meaning. Therefore, a qualitative research has been performed in order to investigate the meaning and the perception of the local food in the Italian food market. Results from this analysis have been used as inputs for the building of a non-hypothetical Real Choice Experiment (RCE) to estimate consumers' WTP for locally and organically produced apple sauce. The contribution of this study is three-fold: (1) consumers' valuation for the local origin is interpreted in terms of regional borders, over the organic food claim in case of an unusual food product in the area of interest, (2) the interaction between individuals' personality traits and consumers’ preferences for local and organic foods is analyzed, (3) the role of Commitment Cost creation in consumers' choice making in case of uncertainty due to the use of a novel food product and of an unconventional food claim is investigated. Results suggest that consumers are willing to pay a higher price premium for organic over locally produced apple sauce, possibly because of the presence of a regulated certification. In accordance with Commitment Cost theory, the organic label might thus decrease consumers' uncertainty for the features of the product in question. Results also indicate that individuals' personality can be source of heterogeneity in consumers' preferences.