Search results for "Project management"
showing 10 items of 1539 documents
Adapting to High Temperatures: Effect of Farm Practices and Their Adoption Duration on Total Value of Crop Production in Uganda
2021
In this article, we use spatially granular climate data merged with four waves of household survey data in Uganda to examine empirically the relationships among high temperatures, total value of crop production, and the adoption and adoption duration of two sustainable agricultural practices (organic fertilizer adoption and maize–legume intercropping). We do this using a fixed-effect model with instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity issues. Our findings indicate that the adoption of these practices has a positive effect on the total value of crop production, and such effect increases monotonically as temperatures increase from long-term averages. Moreover, the number of yea…
Civil society organizations and social innovation. How and to what extent are they influencing social and political change?
2017
This study aims to understand how civil society organizations (CSOs) perform and influence public arenas. The focus of this paper is the transformative scope of social innovation initiatives promoted by CSOsin two public arenas in Brazil: the fight against electoral corruption and the protection of children and adolescents’ rights. The research consisted of three stages: 1) controversy mapping to understand the configuration ofthese public arenas and compare the trajectories of the public problems studied; 2) observation of the “field of experience” of some CSOs that perform in these arenas; and 3) analysis of “political grammars” produced in public arenas, connecting them to the performanc…
Learning competitive pricing strategies by multi-agent reinforcement learning
2003
Abstract In electronic marketplaces automated and dynamic pricing is becoming increasingly popular. Agents that perform this task can improve themselves by learning from past observations, possibly using reinforcement learning techniques. Co-learning of several adaptive agents against each other may lead to unforeseen results and increasingly dynamic behavior of the market. In this article we shed some light on price developments arising from a simple price adaptation strategy. Furthermore, we examine several adaptive pricing strategies and their learning behavior in a co-learning scenario with different levels of competition. Q-learning manages to learn best-reply strategies well, but is e…
Complexity in project co-creation of knowledge for innovation
2020
The European Union (EU) promotes collaboration across functions and borders in its funded innovation projects, which are seen as complex collaboration to co-create knowledge. This requires the engagement of multiple stakeholders throughout the duration of the project. To probe complexity in EU-funded innovation projects the research question is: How does complexity affect the co-creation of knowledge in innovation projects, according to project participants? The data for this study was collected from project experts in the form of short narratives, using a questionnaire based on the elements of complexity of Mitleton-Kelly (2003). The results indicate that complexity characterises the co-cr…
To survive or succeed? : An analysis of biotechnology firms
2017
In this paper, we address the question whether there exists differences in the determinants that support survival versus success of small and medium-sized high-tech firms. We examine this question in the context of Finnish biotechnology industry by analyzing the survival of all dedicated biotechnology firms in the period of 1978–2008. We argue and show that the success and survival of firms are not necessarily driven by similar determinants. Specifically, we find that while the role of different types of alliances, focused market scope as well as legitimacy of the industry seem to be important both ensuring in survival and enhancing successful performance, determinants related to sources of…
The Legacy and the Tyranny of Time: Exit and Re-Entry of Sovereigns to International Capital Markets
2018
We use a novel continuous-time Weibull model (without and) with a change-point in the duration dependence parameter to investigate the duration of the exit and re-entry of sovereigns to international capital markets. Relying on annual data for a large panel of countries over the period 1970-2011, we find that, as the reputation of debtor countries as good (bad) borrowers solidifies over time, those episodes are more likely to end - i.e. the "legacy of time". Debtor countries can take advantage of the "benefit of doubt" of creditors during short exit spells. However, when exits are long and the reputation as a bad borrower emerges, no more "complacency" makes it more difficult for them to bo…
The importance of consecutive spells of poverty: a path-dependent index of longitudinal poverty
2011
In this paper we propose a new index of individual poverty in the longitudinal perspective, taking into account the way poverty and non-poverty spells follow one another along individual life courses. The Poverty Persistence Index (PPI) is based on all the pairwise distances between the waves of poverty. The PPI is normalized and it assigns a higher degree of (longitudinal) poverty to people who experience poverty in consecutive, rather than separated, periods, for whom the distances from the poverty line are larger along time and moreover, when the worst years are consecutive and/or recent. We also propose an aggregate index of persistence in poverty (APPI) in order to measure the distribu…
Finnish forest-based companies in transition to the circular bioeconomy : drivers, organizational resources and innovations
2020
Abstract Forest-based businesses are the center of the transition to the sustainable and competitive circular bioeconomy in Finland. This study explores the transition of Finnish FBS firms to new business models, with a focus on the organizational resources and capabilities needed for transition. It also identifies the important elements in the business environment and the role of innovations in this process. The study uses thematic interviews with managers from various FBS firms and companies from interfacing sectors, all of which have operations in Finland. Despite the differences between firms, the study finds many common drivers and resources that FBS companies highlight as significant …
Youth Transition from School to Work in Spain
2001
Using a data set drawn from the Encuesta Socio-Demográfica conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística in 1991, we analyze the labor market entrance of Spanish school leavers and the match between education and work at the early stages of working life. The empirical evidence shows that human capital exerts a strong influence on the duration of unemployment. With regard to the job match between education and work we find that young workers are more likely to be underutilized compared to their adult co-workers. Regression results indicate that people with higher education have, all else being equal, a lower probability of being overeducated and a shorter lenght of unemployment. They al…
Job satisfaction as a unified mechanism for agent behaviour in a labour market with referral hiring
2016
This paper proposes to use job satisfaction (JS) as a unified mechanism for guiding agents' behaviour in the labour market. In the labour-market model presented here, JS affects agents' decisions on which vacancies to apply for, which of them to select in case of receiving several acknowledgements from firms and whether to quit the current job. The performance of the model depending on the structure of JS is studied. The model where JS depends on monetary (relative wages), social (relative number of friends), content and career components is compared with models where JS has only the first or the first two of these. It creates a more realistic firm size distribution and smaller duration of …