Search results for "MARKET"
showing 10 items of 5046 documents
“Natural wine” consumers and interest in label information: An analysis of willingness to pay in a new Italian wine market segment
2019
Abstract Increasing public attention to issues of health and environmental sustainability has contributed to a growing consumer demand for “natural” food and drinks. As has been observed, this trend has also affected the wine market, leading to the spread of so-called “natural wine”. According to the literature, consumers who are aware of the social and environmental impact of their consumption choices pay more attention to the information displayed on the label as a tool to reduce the risk associated with their purchase. This study seeks to identify which consumers are willing to pay for natural wine and to understand what information on the label influences their choice. This study is one…
Financial winners and losers since the privatization of the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry: a profit decomposition approach
2020
Evaluating changes in profit, price and productivity over time can be of great importance for regulated water industries. We investigate the drivers of profit, price (capital, labour and other inputs) and productivity change (cost efficiency change, technical change and scale effect) and the recipients of productivity change (consumers, the business itself, employees and other resource suppliers) of the English and Welsh water and sewerage companies over the period of 1995–2016. The results indicate that the profit decreased over time due to the negative quantity effect, which offset the positive price effect. A further decomposition of the quantity effect illustrates the negative impact of…
Improving stock index forecasts by using a new weighted fuzzy-trend time series method
2017
Define a new technical indicator for measuring the trend of the fuzzy time series.Introduce a new weighted fuzzy-trend time series method to forecast stock indices.Compare ex-post performances of weighted FTS methods using stock market indices.Assess statistical significance of ex-post forecast accuracy for weighted FTS methods. We propose using new weighted operators in fuzzy time series to forecast the future performance of stock market indices. Based on the chronological sequence of weights associated with the original fuzzy logical relationships, we define both chronological-order and trend-order weights, and incorporate our proposals for the ex-post forecast into the classical modeling…
Metaheuristic procedures for the lexicographic bottleneck assembly line balancing problem
2015
The goal of this work is to develop an improved procedure for the solution of the lexicographic bottleneck variant of the assembly line balancing problem (LB-ALBP). The objective of the LB-ALBP is to minimize the workload of the most heavily loaded workstation, followed by the workload of the second most heavily loaded workstation and so on. This problem-recently introduced to the literature (Pastor, 2011)-has practical relevance to manufacturing facilities. We design, implement and fine-tune GRASP, tabu search (TS) and scatter search (SS) heuristics for the LB-ALBP and show that our procedures are able to obtain solutions of a quality that outperforms previous approaches. We rely on both s…
Conceptual Key Competency Model for Smart Factories in Production Processes
2020
Abstract Background and Purpose: The aim of the study is to develop a conceptual key competency model for smart factories in production processes, focused on the automotive industry, as innovation and continuous development in this industry are at the forefront and represent the key to its long-term success. Methodology: For the purpose of the research, we used a semi-structured interview as a method of data collection. Participants were segmented into three homogeneous groups, which are industry experts, university professors and secondary education teachers, and government experts. In order to analyse the qualitative data, we used the method of content analysis. Results: Based on the anal…
Emotional Design: Discovering Emotions Across Cars’ Morphologies
2020
The primary focus behind the overall design involves shifting from a designer-centric concept to a user-centric one. In essence, cars are utilitarian from an engineering point of view and symbolic-emotional from a social point of view. The modern car retains a strong social position and also generates vivid emotions. The tellability of a car is the priority when communicating with a customer. As a result, this paper proposes a computational approach towards studying the relationship between car morphology and the aforementioned produced emotions. Emotions are considered self-measurable and physiologically distinct. Each car is thus self-evaluated emotionally by a panel of potential users. T…
Evaluation Framework for Analyzing the Applicability of Criteria Lists for the Selection of Requirements Management Tools Supporting Distributed Coll…
2016
Effective requirements management and enabling tools are critical for successfully developing and maintaining services and products. The identification and selection of an appropriate requirements management tool can be a costly, time-consuming, and error-prone undertaking especially in the context of software product line requirements management, requiring the tools to support both product and platform development activities that often involve geographically distributed, collaborating, and competing stakeholders. Criteria lists have been developed to facilitate the selection. This research (1) creates an evaluation framework to review the applicability of the lists for the selection of req…
Crowd-Averse Robust Mean-Field Games: Approximation via State Space Extension
2016
We consider a population of dynamic agents, also referred to as players. The state of each player evolves according to a linear stochastic differential equation driven by a Brownian motion and under the influence of a control and an adversarial disturbance. Every player minimizes a cost functional which involves quadratic terms on state and control plus a cross-coupling mean-field term measuring the congestion resulting from the collective behavior, which motivates the term “crowd-averse.” Motivations for this model are analyzed and discussed in three main contexts: a stock market application, a production engineering example, and a dynamic demand management problem in power systems. For th…
Pricing Sovereign Contingent Convertible Debt
2016
We develop a pricing model for sovereign contingent convertible bonds (S-CoCo) with payment standstills triggered by a sovereign's credit default swap CDS spread. One innovation is the modeling of CDS spread regime switching which is prevalent during crises. Regime switching is modeled as a hidden Markov process and is integrated with a stochastic process of spread levels to obtain S-CoCo prices through simulation. The paper goes a step further and uses the pricing model in a Longstaff-Schwartz. American option pricing framework to compute state contingent S-CoCo prices at some risk horizon, thus facilitating risk management. Dual trigger pricing is also discussed using the idiosyncratic CD…
The Challenge of Coexistence in Socially Vulnerable Schools
2017
Abstract Society in general and schools in particular continue to express their concerns with regard to the many challenges posed nowadays by living in a globalized world, where learning to coexist involves knowing oneself and those around us. Therefore, the professionals from the education sector and specially from the most vulnerable contexts demand the necessity to know strategies and initiatives which enable them to build a democratic school, where learning to coexist is the key to educate engaged citizens living in an increasingly intercultural, changing world. The study presented here has been conducted in two differentiated, but complementary, phases. During the first phase a documen…