Search results for "Profit"
showing 10 items of 406 documents
Countering accusations with inoculation: The moderating role of consumer-company identification.
2013
Abstract Accusations of wrongdoing, baseless or justified, can severely tarnish a company's reputation. Once disseminated, even baseless accusations can persist and cause considerable damage for a company. This study examines the proactive crisis communication strategy of inoculating individuals against invalid accusations before they go viral. An experiment was conducted in a real world consumer context among members of an online consumer panel using an electronics discounter as the research stimulus. Expanding previous inoculation research on the role of value-relevant involvement for inoculation and the effectiveness of inoculation in the case of different preexisting attitudes, we find …
A new scenario for banks: glocal banking. A theoretical approach to propose for Europe
2017
In the early 1990s, with the development of information and communication technology (ICT), global banks began looking for a new world consisting of markets rather than relationships through the development of standardised services in the markets. However, in the early 21st century, with the collapse of the speculative bubble and the financial crisis of 2008, which caused financial instability and damaged the real economy, the entire banking system and the market itself suffered profound changes in profitability. Thus, began efforts to develop a new cultural relationship between banks and companies known as 'glocal banking'. These include: studying the needs of customers, planning and provi…
Training strategic thinking: Experimental evidence
2014
Abstract Strategic behavior is crucial for strong firm performance, especially in competitive environments. Thus, designing a good strategy is a key issue for firms. Designing a strategy requires a combination of strategic thinking—which involves analyzing a firm's strategic environment, defining a vision of its future, and devising new ideas to out-think competitors – and strategic planning – which implies using these ideas to formulate a business plan. Although many firms excel at strategic planning, few devote enough resources to strategic thinking, which results in strategic insanity (i.e., firms repeatedly applying the same strategies with the expectation of different outcomes). To fos…
Bifurcations in business profitability: An agent-based simulation of homophily in self-financing groups
2021
Abstract Formal financial institutions inadequately distribute startup capital to business ventures of ethnic minorities, women, low-educated, and young people. Self-financing groups fill this gap because in these associations agents accumulate their savings into a fund that is later used to provide loans to the members. This study builds and simulates an agent-based model that compares the profitability of businesses started by members of self-financing groups against businesses financed by commercial loans. The results indicate that—besides the self-generation of debt capital—businesses of members of self-financing groups can have higher returns due to the consolidation of social capital …
An empirical analysis of online price dispersion in the Italian airline industry
2015
Firms operating in the electronic marketplace set and adjust prices to affect demand and profitability. In service markets, such as airline markets, different prices are commonly offered by diverse firms to accommodate to a variety of market segments having particular sets of consumer attitudes. This variation in prices is the price dispersion and is based on market distinctiveness deriving from customer heterogeneity as well as the peculiar competition in the specific market arena. In this paper we use a panel dataset from the Italian airline market to investigate the role of competition and different online channels in the emergence of price dispersion. Specifically, we examine the unclea…
A branch-and-cut algorithm for the Orienteering Arc Routing Problem
2016
[EN] In arc routing problems, customers are located on arcs, and routes of minimum cost have to be identified. In the Orienteering Arc Routing Problem (OARP),in addition to a set of regular customers that have to be serviced, a set of potential customers is available. From this latter set, customers have to be chosen on the basis of an associated profit. The objective is to find a route servicing the customers which maximize the total profit collected while satisfying a given time limit on the route.In this paper, we describe large families of facet-inducing inequalities for the OARP and present a branch-and-cut algorithm for its solution. The exact algorithm embeds a procedure which builds…
A novel heuristics-based energy management system for a multi-carrier hub enriched with solid hydrogen storage
2014
In this paper, an efficient optimization algorithm for the energy management of a grid-connected energy hub plant is proposed. The Simulated Annealing algorithm is adopted for the solution of the energy management problem aiming at the profit maximization for the owner of the energy hub plant. The use of a heuristic algorithm was required by the non-linearity of the efficiencies of each component in the energy transformation stages. The proposed heuristics is applied to a large energy hub, corresponding to the simulation of the test-bed that is being designed and developed inside the ongoing INGRID European research project.
A thermoeconomics-based approach to the integrated optimization of design and operation for decentralised energy systems and variable load conditions
2006
The many comprehensive approaches formulated for the optimization of large industrial energy systems have been rarely applied to small and medium scale units, because of the difficulties in handling a continuously variable energy demand and of the lower margins for energy and emissions saving. Today, the growing interest for decentralised energy systems in the civil sector stimulates major efforts for the optimization of such plants, with a particular focus on the control system and on a management strategy able to exploit the opportunities existing in the free energy market. In this paper a methodology is proposed for the optimization of design and operation of variable demand systems supp…
Optimal Sizing and Siting of Distributed Energy Resources Considering Public and Private Incentive Policies
2008
The present work presents the formulation and solution approach for the problem of optimal sizing and siting of distributed energy resources based on Photovoltaic, PV, technology. The considered system is an isolated grid (small island) and the parts involved are the utility and the customers. As it happens in islands, the same utility generates and delivers energy to customers, for this reason, the installation of dispersed generation units is beneficial for reducing power losses, regularizing the voltage profile, but also for increasing the profit. The problem is solved by means of the Non dominated sorting Genetic Algorithm II, NSGA-II, identifying the optimal size and location of PV sys…
Due Dates and RCPSP
2006
Due dates are an essential feature of real projects, but little effort has been made in studying the RCPSP with due dates in the activities. This paper tries to bridge this gap by studying two problems: the TardinessRCPSP, in which the objective is total tardiness minimization and the DeadlineRCPSP, in which the due dates are strict (deadlines) and the objective is makespan minimization. The first problem is NP-hard and the second is much harder, since finding a feasible solution is already NP-hard. This paper has three objectives: Firstly to compare the performance on both problems of well-known RCPSP heuristics - priority rules, sampling procedures and metaheuristics - with new versions w…