An Open Source Based Data Warehouse Architecture to Support Decision Making in the Tourism Sector

In this paper an alternative Tourism oriented Data Warehousing architecture is proposed which makes use of the most recent free and open source technologies like Java, Postgresql and XML. Such architecture's aim will be to support the decision making process and giving an integrated view of the whole Tourism reality in an established context (local, regional, national, etc.) without requesting big investments for getting the necessary software.Tourism, Data warehousing architecture

Political Cycles : The Opposition Advantage

We propose a two dimensional infinite horizon model of public consumption in which investments are decided by a winner-take-all election. Investments in the two public goods create a linkage across periods and parties have different specialities. We show that the incumbent party vote share decreases the longer it stays in power. Parties chances of winning do not converge and, when the median voter is moderate enough, no party can maintain itself in power for ever. Finally, the more parties are specialized and the more public policies have long-term effects, the more political cycles are likely to occur.Cycles, Alternation, Public goods, Advantage, Opposition

Value Through Diversity: Microfinance and Islamic Finance and Global Banking

Internet resources, extended media coverage and international organizations’ reports recently witness the increasing interest of western banks in new models of finance, particularly Islamic finance and microfinance. This new trend is not only channeled through the frame of corporate social responsibilities programs and policies or limited to ad hoc financial institutions (like microcredit banks or Islamic banks) as it is entering the financial offer of mainstream banks. The paper primarily outlines that many elements of microfinance could be considered consistent with the broader goals of Islamic banking. Apart from pure economic considerations which are not the aim of this analysis, the paper supports the thesis that by addressing new markets and embracing unconventional financial proposals, the global banking sector can contribute to the quest for diversity-oriented policies posed by an increasingly globalised scenario. The consequences this new trend is likely to have on inner banking structures are still unknown and are likely to interest the issue of wealth distribution. Moreover, from a more general point of view, by showing that even different moral ethos deep rooted in different cultural paradigms can be as profitable and available as western capitalistic ones, the banking sector can play a potential role in disseminating awareness on specific cultural and religious issues, resulting in increased integration of Muslim communities and low income investors in the long run and supporting commercial banks the close relation between economy and culture.Microfinance, Islamic finance, Diversity, Multiculturalism, Global banking

The Economics of Local Tourist Systems

In this paper we analyse the Local Tourist System (LTS) as a particular case of Marshallian Industrial District. The LTS allows the identification of more effective policy tools for managing tourism. First, through the concept of LTS, the policy maker can take into account the complexity of tourism, characterised by a strong heterogeneity of goods, services and subjects involved; second, LTS helps promote a stronger co-ordination between the public and the private sector, by identifying a homogeneous territory and recognising its importance in tourists' decisions; third, through the LTS the policymaker can analyze the externalities and promotes the idea of collaborating networks in a context of local development. In the LTS framework, the anticommon problem can be analysed and contrasted. As the tourist has to buy different but intertwined goods which compose the holiday package, the failure in one of the markets can lead to the overall failure of the package. A LTS policy has to: i) co-ordinate the price policy of the different firms supplying “single components” of the tourist product; ii) fix the price of the whole product; iii) impute a price to each component. We demonstrate that, through price policy co-ordination and under general conditions, the LTS can increase the size of tourism and the firms’ profits, thereby reaching a more effective and efficient target in tourism policy. The recent introduction of LTS in the Italian legislation can be seen as a positive attempt of improving co-ordination in a complex sector such as tourism.Local tourist systems, Tourism policy

An Analysis of the Evolution of Tourism Destinations from the Point of View of the Economic Growth Theory

In this paper we try to build a bridge between the traditional analysis of the evolution of tourism destinations and economic growth theory. With such an aim we develop an environmental growth model for an economy specialized in tourism and we derive the pattern of tourism development with numerical calculations. The results of our simulations do not contradict the general pattern of evolution implied in the Tourism Area Life Cycle Hypothesis, being environmental deterioration and public goods congestion the main reasons for the stagnation of the tourism destination. We also show the importance of the quality of private tourism services in the evolution of the tourism destination.Tourism, Economic growth, Tourism lifcycle

Platform Competition with Endogenous Multihoming

A model of two-sided market (for credit cards) is introduced and discussed. In this model, agents can join none, one, or more than one platform (multihoming), depending on access prices and the choices made by agents on the opposite market side. Although emerging multihoming patterns are, clearly, one aspect of equilibrium in a two-sided market, this issue has not yet been thoroughly addressed in the literature. This paper provides a general theoretical framework, in which homing partitions are conceived as one aspect of market equilibrium, rather than being set ex-ante, through ad-hoc assumptions. The emergence of a specific equilibrium partition is a consequence of: (1) the structure of costs and benefits, (2) the degree and type of heterogeneity among agents, (3) the intensity of platform competition.Two-sided markets, Network externalities, Standards, Platforms, Multihoming

Pairwise-Stability and Nash Equilibria in Network Formation

Suppose that individual payoffs depend on the network connecting them. Consider the following simultaneous move game of network formation: players announce independently the links they wish to form, and links are formed only under mutual consent. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the network link marginal payoffs such that the set of pairwise stable, pairwise-Nash and proper equilibrium networks coincide, where pairwise stable networks are robust to one-link deviations, while pairwise-Nash networks are robust to one-link creation but multi-link severance. Under these conditions, proper equilibria in pure strategies are fully characterized by one-link deviation checks.Network formation, Pairwise-stability, Proper equilibrium

Multi-keyword multi-click advertisement option contracts for sponsored search

In sponsored search, advertisement (abbreviated ad) slots are usually sold by a search engine to an advertiser through an auction mechanism in which advertisers bid on keywords. In theory, auction mechanisms have many desirable economic properties. However, keyword auctions have a number of limitations including: the uncertainty in payment prices for advertisers; the volatility in the search engine's revenue; and the weak loyalty between advertiser and search engine. In this paper we propose a special ad option that alleviates these problems. In our proposal, an advertiser can purchase an option from a search engine in advance by paying an upfront fee, known as the option price. He then has the right, but no obligation, to purchase among the pre-specified set of keywords at the fixed cost-per-clicks (CPCs) for a specified number of clicks in a specified period of time. The proposed option is closely related to a special exotic option in finance that contains multiple underlying assets (multi-keyword) and is also multi-exercisable (multi-click). This novel structure has many benefits: advertisers can have reduced uncertainty in advertising; the search engine can improve the advertisers' loyalty as well as obtain a stable and increased expected revenue over time. Since the proposed ad option can be implemented in conjunction with the existing keyword auctions, the option price and corresponding fixed CPCs must be set such that there is no arbitrage between the two markets. Option pricing methods are discussed and our experimental results validate the development. Compared to keyword auctions, a search engine can have an increased expected revenue by selling an ad option.Comment: Chen, Bowei and Wang, Jun and Cox, Ingemar J. and Kankanhalli, Mohan S. (2015) Multi-keyword multi-click advertisement option contracts for sponsored search. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 7 (1). pp. 1-29. ISSN: 2157-690

Restricting the benefit flow from neighbors : experiments on network formation

In an experimental framework on network formation inspired by the two-way information flow model of Bala and Goyal (2000), we observe that many groups participating in the experiment reach the strict Nash network resp. come very close to this network. Compared to the results of previous network experiments this is new. Among other things, the role of inequity aversion in explaining our experimental results is discussed