Search results for "ASSESSMENT"
showing 10 items of 5125 documents
Antecedents of online banking satisfaction and loyalty: empirical evidence from Finland
2009
This study endeavours to contribute to a better understanding of Service Quality (SQ) in online banking by examining the various dimensions related to creating a satisfactory online banking experience. The authors develop a conceptual model and test it with a convenience sample of 183 online banking users. The empirical test of the model finds strong support for the links between perceived security and Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease Of Use (PEOU), reliability and PU and PEOU, between PEOU and satisfaction and finally between satisfaction and loyalty. The study finally provides both theoretical and practical contributions, outlines the main limitations of the study and gives id…
Economic Allocation in Life Cycle Assessment The State of the Art and Discussion of Examples
2012
Summary This article examines methods for analyzing allocation in life cycle assessment (LCA); it focuses on comparisons of economic allocation with other feasible alternatives. The International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) guideline 14044 indicates that economic allocation should only be used as a last resort, when other methods are not suitable. However, the LCA literature reports several examples of the use of economic allocation. This is due partly to its simplicity and partly to its ability to illustrate the properties of complex systems. Sometimes a price summarizes complex attributes of product or service quality that cannot be easily measured by physical criteria. On th…
Accounting for service quality to customers in the efficiency of water companies: evidence from England and Wales
2015
This paper investigates the role of service quality to customers in the efficiency assessment of water companies in England and Wales. To achieve this, data envelopment analysis techniques are employed to compute the technical efficiency of the water companies following two approaches: (i) traditional assessment based on quantity variables (without the inclusion of service quality variables) and (ii) alternative assessment considering quantity and service quality variables as undesirable outputs. The analysis covers 22 water and sewerage companies and water only companies providing drinking water services. The results indicate that the traditional efficiency assessment reveals a high level …
The role of trust in cruise passenger behavioral intentions : The moderating effects of the cruise line brand
2014
Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a framework to investigate the relationship between perceived value, satisfaction, trust and behavioral intentions and the moderator effect of the cruise line on cruise passengers’ perceptions.Design/methodology/approach– A structural model was developed. In order to verify the hypotheses, a total of 729 cruise passengers were sampled. The study of the data used structural equation models by means of a multi-group analysis.Findings– The results of this study suggest significant paths to increase behavioral intentions: perceived service quality? satisfaction? trust?. In addition, it has been proved that the cruise line moderates the r…
Condition Assessment of Norwegian Bridge Elements Using Existing Damage Records
2020
The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) has recorded bridge element damages in a database for all the bridges it manages since the 1990s. This paper presents a comparison of three methods to establish element condition based on damage records. The methods consist in a non-parametric procedure based on the worst damage registered in the element, linear regression considering also bridge and road characteristics data and classification through an artificial neural network. The methods are assessed using a set of 159 bridges inspected in 2016. The results show that diagnostics of bridge element condition can reach high accuracy by using an artificial neural network classifier and taki…
Dietary Patterns at the Individual Level through a Nutritional and Environmental Approach: The Case Study of a School Canteen
2022
The public catering sector has important responsibilities in seeking a change toward more sustainable choices for many aspects related to the environmental impacts of their services. The environmental impact of production processes can be studied through life cycle assessment (LCA), which allows a greater awareness of choices and has rarely been applied to catering. In this work, we studied the impacts of two dishes (braised meat and cauliflower meatballs) in a school canteen, their impacts were studied using the daily energy requirement (expressed in kcal) as a functional unit. Global warming potential (GWP) and nonrenewable energy (NRE) were calculated starting from the supply of raw mate…
Resilienza delle foreste Mediterranee ai cambiamenti climatici - Guida al progetto [Resilience of Mediterranean forests to climate change – Project g…
2017
The overall objective of the project LIFE11+ ENV/IT/000215 RESILFORMED – Resilience of Mediterranean forests to climate change is to preserve the forest systems from the risks due to climate change, through naturalization processes, increased biodiversity and improved responsiveness, in the recovery process, coming from destabilizing events. The specific objective is to implement a regional forest policy able to increase resilience capacity of Sicilian forests, improving their ecosystem capacity and fostering the biodiversity preservation. The project has proposed to pursue five concrete results: 1) drafting guidelines for effective Mediterranean forest management with respect to climate ch…
Pesticides: Chemical and Biological.
2013
There is a requirement by World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other International Organizations to develop environmentally sustainable systems for controlling pests that are less reliant on chemical pesticides as the primary management tool. However biological control alone cannot at the moment solve all pest problems and must be considered instrument to be used in combination with other methods. Compatibility of chemical pesticides (CP) and biological pesticides (BP) is one of the key for the implementation of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programs. Testing the compatibility of CP and BP is necessary if these two agents are to be applied together…
Soil erosion risk, Sicilian Region (1:250,000)
2014
Assessing the risk of soil erosion caused by water at the regional level is important for current and future planning of land use and environmental actions to combat land degradation. The gravity of the risk depends not only on the rate of soil erosion by water, but also on other factors, primarily soil depth and workability of the underlying rocks and sediments, which may be used to calculate the eroded soil. We estimate the rate of erosion by water (tons ha-1 year-1) applying the Universal Soil Loss Equation model. The map of soil content (tons ha21) to the effective rooting depth was divided by the map of soil erosion rate to obtain the risk of erosion by water in Sicily, expressed in te…