Search results for "competition"
showing 10 items of 1409 documents
Managing the liberalization of Italy's retail electricity market: A policy proposal☆
2020
Abstract Italy will phase out electricity retail price regulation by July 1st, 2020. Until then, residential customers and small businesses who do not choose their supplier are served under a regulated tariff named “maggior tutela” (greater protection), supplied by the local distributor at a price set by the regulator. We review the literature on electricity retail competition – with particular regard to its expected effects on prices, innovation, and customer engagement – and the conditions under which competition is expected to deliver benefits. We perform a Structure-Conduct-Performance analysis of Italy's retail electricity market for residential customers, finding two issues potentiall…
The influence of transformational and authentic leadership on the satisfaction of hotel customers in the Canary Islands
2019
Leadership provides a strategy to deal with intense competition and high customer expectations in the hotel industry. This paper analyses the ability of managers’ transformational and authentic leadership to predict customer satisfaction. A sample of 18,944 customers and managers of eight hotels in the Canary Islands was used for the analysis. The data were collected using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire-6s, the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire and ReviewPro management software. The data were analysed to confirm the ability of transformational and authentic leadership to predict overall customer satisfaction. The results indicate that the transformational subscales of idealised i…
The Modern Strategies in the Cyber Warfare
2018
As there is no generally accepted definition for cyber warfare, it is a term that is quite liberally used in describing events and actions in the digital cyber world. The concept of cyber warfare became extremely popular from 2008 to 2010, partly superseding the previously used concept of information warfare which was launched in the 1990s. For some, cyber warfare is war that is conducted in the virtual domain. For others, it is a counterpart to conventional “kinetic” warfare. According to the OECD’s 2001 report, cyberwar military doctrines resemble those of so-called conventional war: retaliation and deterrence. Researchers agree with the notion that the definition of cyberwar should addre…
Vertical Governance, National Regulation and Autonomy of Local Policy Making
2015
International audience; This chapter introduces a categorization of the 11 European countries according to their general vertical governance structures between national, regional and local levels in welfare policy making. It investigates the extent to which, and how, local policies and service provision are regulated and controlled from the national state level, and how much space this leaves for local policy actors in welfare policy formation. The analysis takes into account that local welfare policies are formulated in the context of national and to some extent international policies. The 11 countries can be divided into three groups, having a centralized (England, Ireland), multi-level (…
An AFLP clock for the absolute dating of shallow-time evolutionary history based on the intraspecific divergence of southwestern European alpine plan…
2009
The dating of recent events in the history of organisms needs divergence rates based on molecular fingerprint markers. Here, we used amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs) of three distantly related alpine plant species co-occurring in the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Pyrenees and the southwestern Alps/Massif Central to establish divergence rates. Within each of these species (Gentiana alpina, Kernera saxatilis and Silene rupestris), we found that the degree of AFLP divergence (D(N72)) between mountain phylogroups was significantly correlated with their time of divergence (as inferred from palaeoclimatic/palynological data), indicating constant AFLP divergence rates. As these rates d…
Differential cycles of range contraction and expansion in European high mountain plants during the Late Quaternary: insights from Pritzelago alpina (…
2003
Nuclear DNA sequence variation of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs) were used to illuminate the evolutionary history of Pritzelago alpina, a herbaceous perennial of (sub)alpine to nival habitats of the European high mountains. Maximum likelihood analysis of ITS sequences of P. alpina, Hornungia petraea and Hymenolobus procumbens (the 'Pritzelago alliance') resolved P. alpina and H. petraea as sister taxa. ITS divergence estimates support an origin for P. alpina in the Late Tertiary, while intraspecific diversification started in the Late Quaternary (0.4-0.9 million years ago). AFLP analysis of 76 individuals of P. alpina, representing …
Are Sick Individuals Weak Competitors? Competitive Ability of Snails Parasitized by a Gigantism-Inducing Trematode
2013
Parasitized individuals are often expected to be poor competitors because they are weakened by infections. Many trematode species, however, although extensively exploiting their mollusc hosts, also induce gigantism (increased host size) by diverting host resources towards growth instead of reproduction. In such systems, alternatively to reduced competitive ability due to negative effects of parasitism on host performance, larger size could allow more efficient resource acquisition and thus increase the relative competitive ability of host individuals. We addressed this hypothesis by testing the effect of a trematode parasite Diplostomum pseudospathaceum on the competitive ability of its sna…
Infracommunity level aggregation in the monogenean communities of crucian carp (Carassius carassius).
2005
Aggregation is one of the distinctive features in parasite-host relationships, which has generally been studied at the level of host communities. Parasite aggregation at the infracommunity level may nevertheless be important for intraspecific interactions such as parasite mating success and opportunities for cross-fertilization. In the present paper, we studied the infracommunity aggregation of 3 highly abundantDactylogyrus(Monogenea) species occurring on the gills of crucian carp (Carassius carassius). In line with the previous work on monogenean communities, we observed no competition between the species. At the species level, parasites were distributed unevenly on the gills showing aggre…
High maternal species density mediates unidirectional heterospecific matings inCalopteryxdamselflies
2012
Hybridization is a well-known phenomenon, but there are still relatively few studies addressing the question of reproductive isolation between related sympatric animal species with largely overlapping ranges. Population density, relative abundance, and operational sex ratio (OSR) are among the factors known to have an influence on the frequency of heterospecific matings in sympatric populations. Here we had two aims. First, we used microsatellite markers and field observations to study the frequency of hybrids, and backcrosses, and the rate of heterospecific matings between two sympatric damselfly species Calopteryx splendens (Harris, 1780) and Calopteryx virgo (Linne, 1758). Second, we inv…
Transfer of powers and reallocation of the social capital available to junior governments
1993
The article starts from the assumption that the production of junior governments in sub-central jurisdictions such as the department of the region is related both to the powers or resources that they receive from the central government and to the social capital which is available to them. A model is proposed in which both elements are considered as factors o f production. The second being able to move only slowly across levels of jurisdiction, the central government is itself unable to transfer rapidly powers or resources from one level to another without running the risk of an efficiency loss of the whole which it would find unacceptable in terms of electoral support.