Marketing Particularities in Tourism and Services

The marketing has as an essential objective the orientation of firms’ activities based on the market needs. This presupposes, necessarily, the existence of an informational system very well established, that observes any rapid changing market environment: the consumer, distributor and competition. Marketing services is a marketing specialized domain, autonomous, clearly differentiated, in the process of consolidation and development. The services characteristics such as: immateriality, inseparability, variability, inability of storage, they normally lead to a discussion on whether the marketing of services is similar to or different from that of physical goods.marketing services, market environment, immateriality, inseparability

Marketing Particularities in Tourism and Services

The marketing has as an essential objective the orientation of firms’ activities based on the market needs. This presupposes, necessarily, the existence of an informational system very well established, that observes any rapid changing market environment: the consumer, distributor and competition. Marketing services is a marketing specialized domain, autonomous, clearly differentiated, in the process of consolidation and development. The services characteristics such as: immateriality, inseparability, variability, inability of storage, they normally lead to a discussion on whether the marketing of services is similar to or different from that of physical goods

Corruption and firm behavior

This paper investigates how corruption affects firrm behavior. Firms can engage in two types of corruption when seeking a public service: cost-reducing "collusive" corruption and cost increasing "coercive" corruption. Using an original and unusually rich dataset on bribe payments at ports matched to firrm-level data, we observe how firms respond to each type of corruption by adjusting their shipping and sourcing strategies. "Collusive" corruption is associated with higher usage of the corrupt port, while "coercive" corruption is associated with reduced demand for port services. Our results suggest that firms respond to the opportunities and challenges created by different types of corruption, organizing production in a way that increases or decreases demand for the public service. Understanding how firms respond to corruption has important implications for how we conceptualize, identify and measure the overall impact of corruption on economic activity

Agricultural Value Chain Development: Threat or Opportunity for Women's Employment?

This document presents information on how agricultural markets are rapidly globalizing, generating new consumption patterns and new production and distribution systems. Value chains, often controlled by multinational or national firms and supermarkets, are capturing a growing share of the agri-food systems in developing regions. They can provide opportunities for quality employment for men and women, yet they can also be channels to transfer costs and risks to the weakest nodes, particularly women. They often perpetuate gender stereotypes that keep women in lower paid, casual work and do not necessarily lead to greater gender equality

DIP: Disruption-Tolerance for IP

Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTN) have been a popular subject of recent research and development. These networks are characterized by frequent, lengthy outages and a lack of contemporaneous end-to-end paths. In this work we discuss techniques for extending IP to operate more effectively in DTN scenarios. Our scheme, Disruption Tolerant IP (DIP) uses existing IP packet headers, uses the existing socket API for applications, is compatible with IPsec, and uses familiar Policy-Based Routing techniques for network management

SLAng: A language for defining service level agreements

Application or web services are increasingly being used across organisational boundaries. Moreover, new services are being introduced at the network and storage level. Languages to specify interfaces for such services have been researched and transferred into industrial practice. We investigate end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and highlight that QoS provision has multiple facets and requires complex agreements between network services, storage services and middleware services. We introduce SLAng, a language for defining Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that accommodates these needs. We illustrate how SLAng is used to specify QoS in a case study that uses a web services specification to support the processing of images across multiple domains and we evaluate our language based on it

Duration-differentiated Energy Services with a Continuum of Loads

As the proportion of total power supplied by renewable sources increases, it gets more costly to use reserve generation to compensate for the variability of renewables like solar and wind. Hence attention has been drawn to exploiting flexibility in demand as a substitute for reserve generation. Flexibility has different attributes. In this paper we consider loads requiring a constant power for a specified duration (within say one day), whose flexibility resides in the fact that power may be delivered at any time so long as the total duration of service equals the load's specified duration. We give conditions under which a variable power supply is adequate to meet these flexible loads, and describe how to allocate the power to the loads. We also characterize the additional power needed when the supply is inadequate. We study the problem of allocating the available power to loads to maximize welfare, and show that the welfare optimum can be sustained as a competitive equilibrium in a forward market in which electricity is sold as service contracts differentiated by the duration of service and power level. We compare this forward market with a spot market in their ability to capture the flexiblity inherent in duration-differentiated loads

A Taxonomy for Attack Patterns on Information Flows in Component-Based Operating Systems

We present a taxonomy and an algebra for attack patterns on component-based operating systems. In a multilevel security scenario, where isolation of partitions containing data at different security classifications is the primary security goal and security breaches are mainly defined as undesired disclosure or modification of classified data, strict control of information flows is the ultimate goal. In order to prevent undesired information flows, we provide a classification of information flow types in a component-based operating system and, by this, possible patterns to attack the system. The systematic consideration of informations flows reveals a specific type of operating system covert channel, the covert physical channel, which connects two former isolated partitions by emitting physical signals into the computer's environment and receiving them at another interface.Comment: 9 page