Consumer Perception of Local and Organic Products: Substitution or Complementary Goods?

Many consumers are interested in local products because of the perceived benefits of freshness, stronger taste and higher quality. To consumers the origin attribute represents a strong purchasing criterion. With respect to organic produce, local food products may be perceived either as substitutes or as complementary. A qualitative approach to data collection (focus groups) and to data processing (content analysis) has been used to analyse Italian consumers’ perception with respect to local and organic food products. In the framework of the EU project QLIF (FP6-506358) a discussion guide to focus group interview was used in order to identify important purchase criteria, the willingness to pay, as well as the role of organic food products in purchasing criteria. Two animal – yogurt and eggs – and two non animal products – bread and tomatoes – were taken into account. Focus groups interviews indicate that Italian consumers place much importance on the local origin of food products, especially if fresh consumed. The origin with its implication of seasonality, territoriality and localness are among the major motivating and trust factors, however not always linked to organic food products. The lack of availability of local and organic food products together with retailing issues are taken into consideration. Differentiation throughout animal and non-animal products and between processed food products and commodities is analysed. Organic seems to suffer in global markets, localness may suggest a solution. The research provides insights on substitution and complementary marketing strategies

Code Completion with Neural Attention and Pointer Networks

Intelligent code completion has become an essential research task to accelerate modern software development. To facilitate effective code completion for dynamically-typed programming languages, we apply neural language models by learning from large codebases, and develop a tailored attention mechanism for code completion. However, standard neural language models even with attention mechanism cannot correctly predict the out-of-vocabulary (OoV) words that restrict the code completion performance. In this paper, inspired by the prevalence of locally repeated terms in program source code, and the recently proposed pointer copy mechanism, we propose a pointer mixture network for better predicting OoV words in code completion. Based on the context, the pointer mixture network learns to either generate a within-vocabulary word through an RNN component, or regenerate an OoV word from local context through a pointer component. Experiments on two benchmarked datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our attention mechanism and pointer mixture network on the code completion task.Comment: Accepted in IJCAI 201

Moderating effect of the type of brand on the belief-attitude-behaviour model

Drawing from the Signaling theory we built a model of the moderating effects of the type of brand in a belief-attitude-behaviour model, namely brand evaluation, brand attitude and purchase intention. We empirically test this model with 400 consumers in Mexico. Previously we had conducted another survey with also 400 Mexican consumers to classify brands into global, local and glocal. Our results suggest that brand quality, brand familiarity and brand image are common factors that positively influence brand attitude for the three brand categories. In addition, brand attitude is closely linked to brand purchase intention. Moreover, the type of brand moderates the relationship between brand quality and brand attitude, and between brand attitude and brand purchase intention, the relationship being weaker for glocal brands than for local or global

Geography and the Internet: Is the Internet a Substitute or a Complement for Cities?

We study the tendency to connect to the Internet, and the online and offline shopping behavior of connected persons, to draw inferences about whether the Internet is a substitute or a complement for cities. We document that larger markets have more locally-targeted online content and that individuals are more likely to connect in markets with more local online content, suggesting the Internet is a complement to cities. Yet, holding local online content constant, people are less likely to connect in larger markets, indicating that the Internet is also a substitute for cities. We also find that individuals connect to overcome local isolation: notwithstanding a large digital divide, blacks are more likely to connect, relative to whites, when they comprise a smaller fraction of local population, making the Internet a substitute for agglomeration of preference minorities within cities. Finally, using online and offline spending data, we find that connected persons spend more on books and clothing online, relative to their offline spending, if they are farther from offline stores. This indicates that the Internet functions as a substitute for proximity to retail outlets.

Introduction: food relocalisation and knowledge dynamics for sustainability in rural areas

The chapter presents the literature on local food and local knowledge and introduces the case studies analysed in the volum

Proceedings of the Academic Track at State of the Map 2020

Proceedings of the Academic Track at State of the Map 202

Completion of the Ablowitz-Kaup-Newell-Segur integrable coupling

Integrable couplings are associated with non-semisimple Lie algebras. In this paper, we propose a new method to generate new integrable systems through making perturbation in matrix spectral problems for integrable couplings, which is called the `completion process of integrable couplings'. As an example, the idea of construction is applied to the Ablowitz-Kaup-Newell-Segur integrable coupling. Each equation in the resulting hierarchy has a bi-Hamiltonian structure furnished by the component-trace identity

Spatial characteristics of Twitter users : toward the understanding of geosocial media production

Social media is a rich source of spatial data but it has also many flaws and well-known limitations, especially in regard to representation and representativeness, since very little is known about the demographics of the user population. At the same time, the use of locational services, is in fact, dependent on those characteristics. We address this gap in knowledge by exploring divides between Twitter users, based on the spatial and temporal distribution of the content they produce. We chose five cities and data from 2015 to represent different socio-spatial contexts. Users were classified according to spatial and non-spatial measures: home range estimation; standard distance; nearest neighbor index, and; proposed localness index. There are distinct groups of geosocial media producers, which suggests that such datasets cannot be treated as uniform representations. We found a positive correlation between spatial behavior and posting activity. It is suggested that there are universal patterns of behavior that are conditioned by software services-the example of Foucauldian "technologies of self". They can also represent the dominance of the most prolific users over the whole data stream. Results are discussed in the context of the importance and role of user location in social media