How to react to a shock? Effects of Airbnb hosts' choices and market segmentation at the time of Covid-19

We investigate the way service providers who operate on an online peer-to-peer (P2P) platform readapted their marketing choices to face the Covid-19 pandemic. Through an empirical investigation on a large dataset of Airbnb properties in Rome, observed from January 2018 to December 2020, we provide a threefold contribution by investigating how Airbnb hosts reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic shock, in terms of marketing choices, such as price adjustments and flexible cancellation policies; the direct effects of these choices on their economic returns; and how service providers on Airbnb reacted to address the new needs of their customers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings provide useful insights for researchers and practitioners and show that the adoption of combined marketing choices led to more than proportional effects on performances as it allowed Airbnb hosts to exploit profitable market segmentation mechanisms

The effects of polydispersity and metastability on crystal growth kinetics

We investigate the effect of metastable gas-liquid (G-L) separation on crystal growth in a system of either monodisperse or slightly size-polydisperse square well particles, using a simulation setup that allows us to focus on the growth of a single crystal. Our system parameters are such that, inside the metastable G-L binodal, a macroscopic layer of the gas phase "coats" the crystal as it grows, consistent with experiment and theoretical free energy considerations. Crucially, the effect of this metastable G-L separation on the crystal growth rate depends qualitatively on whether the system is polydisperse. We measure reduced polydispersity and qualitatively different local size ordering in the crystal relative to the fluid, proposing that the required fractionation is dynamically facilitated by the gas layer. Our results show that polydispersity and metastability, both ubiquitous in soft matter, must be considered in tandem if their dynamical effects are to be understood.Comment: Published in Soft Matter. DOI: 10.1039/C3SM27627

‘The only game in town?’: football match-fixing in Greece

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12117-014-9239-3Football match-fixing in Greece has a relatively long history, however, from the late 1990s it has been considered as a serious problem for the sport in the country. Despite the history of the phenomenon in the country, Greece has only relatively recently been identified as one of the hotspots for football match-fixing on an international level. Following the recent scandal exposure of fixed matches in Greece in 2011, also known as Koriopolis (a pun name on the Italian scandal Calciopolis and the Greek word ‘korios’ or phone-tap), detailed information about numerous matches played in the 2008/09, 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons that attracted UEFA’s attention were brought into the public eye. Soon after, legal action was taken against individuals involved in the process, with a number of club officials facing lifelong bans from any footballrelated activity, and football clubs either relegated or excluded from European competitions and the Super League itself for their involvement in the scandal. In May 2013, the number of people facing charges exceeded 200, with some of them having already been imprisoned for their involvement in the scandal. Following the aforementioned scandal exposure, a vast amount of information regarding football match-fixing was made available to the public. The aim of the current article is to provide an account of the social organisation of football match-fixing in Greece. Our account is based on three main sources of data: the telephone conversations that were the result of wiretapping by the National Intelligence Agency in relation to the latest football match-fixing scandal (of 2011), published media sources, and interviews with informed actors from the realm of Greek football

The role of venture capitalists in the regional innovation ecosystem : a comparison of networking patterns between private and publicly backed venture capital funds

This paper empirically examines the development of social networks among venture capitalists and other professionals of the regional innovation ecosystem. Using an online survey of venture capitalists, the article considers their networking behaviour, focusing particularly on the distinction between those employed by private and those employed by publicly backed venture capital funds, and on the composition and spatial search of their networks. It investigates whether the frequency of interaction between venture capitalists and other members of the innovation ecosystem is associated with the nature of the venture capital funds. The paper provides the first detailed investigation of the relationship between different types of venture capitalists and other players of the innovation ecosystem such as universities incubators, research institutes, and business support organisations. The results show that there are distinctive differences within the two seemingly similar professional groups (private and public venture capitalists), and public dependence of the venture capital fund is strongly and significantly associated with higher volumes of interactions. The more publicly dependent a fund is, the more it interacts with other players of the innovation system. This finding has important implications for both academics and practitioners and suggests that publicly backed funds have a wider role to play in mobilising the different players of the regional innovation ecosystem

Process of medical malpractice risk allocation in the Italian public health systems

This paper is aimed at analysing the key issues of the process of medical malpractice risk allocation in the Italian public health system. We introduce the function of liability insurance and we discuss also the problems related to optimal coverage design. We then turn to the empirical section thanks to a large database which includes all the information contained in 308 tender notices concerning the acquisition of RCT/O coverage by the Italian local public health firms between 2003 and 2006. The analysis of the data collected provides a first assessment of i) the ability of the Italian public sector to find risk coverage on the private insurance market, ii) the dynamics of prices and market power of insurance firms, and iii) the role of insurance brokers. We propose two alternative scenarios which explain the proposed empirical evidence

On portfolio selection and capital asset pricing

LIUC Paper