Satisfaction with creativity: a study of organisational characteristics and individual motivations

In answering the question of what influences satisfaction for creativity in the workplace, this work takes into account the extent to which the organization supports human aspiration to creativity. The empirical model uses survey data encompassing over 4,000 workers in Italian social enterprises. Results show that satisfaction for creativity is supported, at organizational level, by teamwork-oriented action, including the quality of processes, relations and on-the job autonomy. At the individual level, satisfaction for creativity is enhanced by the strength of intrinsic and socially oriented motivations and by competence. The analysis of interaction terms shows that teamwork and workers' intrinsic motivations are complementary in enhancing the perception of creativity-enhancing work settings, while a high degree of required competences appears to substitute good relationships with superiorscreativity, job satisfaction, organizational processes, motivations, teamwork,autonomy, interpersonal relations

Modeling the emergence of polarity patterns for the intercellular transport of auxin in plants

The hormone auxin is actively transported throughout plants via protein machineries including the dedicated transporter known as PIN. The associated transport is ordered with nearby cells driving auxin flux in similar directions. Here we provide a model of both the auxin transport and of the dynamics of cellular polarisation based on flux sensing. Our main findings are: (i) spontaneous intracellular PIN polarisation arises if PIN recycling dynamics are sufficiently non-linear, (ii) there is no need for an auxin concentration gradient, and (iii) ordered multi-cellular patterns of PIN polarisation are favored by molecular noise.Comment: 17 pages and 9 figures (Main Text), 9 pages and 4 figures (Supplementary Material), revised version with some rearrangement

A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR THE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF COOPERATIVE FIRMS: Self-defined rules, common resources, motivations, and incentives

Cooperatives are characterised by mutual-benefit coordination mechanisms aimed at the fulfilment of individual behaviour and outcomes in cooperatives by bringing together new-institutionalism, behavioural and evolutionary economics. Our framework considers four main dimensions of the governance of cooperative firms: (1) the development and application of self-defined rules by the members of the cooperative; (2) the management, and appropriation of common resources and outcomes; (3) intrinsic motivations and reciprocating behaviours; (4) the implementation of suitable incentive mixes based on inclusion and reciprocity, including both pecuniary and non- pecuniary elements. An example is offered in order to highlight possible problems in the governance of cooperative firms, in particular the processes of distribution and appropriation of surplus. The example aims at introducing the discussion of the new framework of analysis.cooperative firms, common resources, motivations, incentives

First CLADAG data mining prize : data mining for longitudinal data with different marketing campaigns

The CLAssification and Data Analysis Group (CLADAG) of the Italian Statistical Society recently organised a competition, the 'Young Researcher Data Mining Prize' sponsored by the SAS Institute. This paper was the winning entry and in it we detail our approach to the problem proposed and our results. The main methods used are linear regression, mixture models, Bayesian autoregressive and Bayesian dynamic models

Human resource management practices and organizational performance. The mediator role of immaterial satisfaction in Italian Social Cooperatives

The paper deals with the mediating role of immaterial satisfaction between substantive human resources (HR) features and organizational performance. We address this relationship in the Italian social service sector using a survey dataset that includes 4134 workers and 320 not-for-profit social cooperatives. The obtained results show that human resource management (HRM) practices influence immaterial satisfaction and, satisfaction positively impacts on firm performance. However, the impact of the different HRM practices is not the same. In this sense, worker involvement and workload pressure have a positive impact on firm performance; but task autonomy or collaborative teamwork do not have impact on organizational performance

Video Acceleration Magnification

The ability to amplify or reduce subtle image changes over time is useful in contexts such as video editing, medical video analysis, product quality control and sports. In these contexts there is often large motion present which severely distorts current video amplification methods that magnify change linearly. In this work we propose a method to cope with large motions while still magnifying small changes. We make the following two observations: i) large motions are linear on the temporal scale of the small changes; ii) small changes deviate from this linearity. We ignore linear motion and propose to magnify acceleration. Our method is pure Eulerian and does not require any optical flow, temporal alignment or region annotations. We link temporal second-order derivative filtering to spatial acceleration magnification. We apply our method to moving objects where we show motion magnification and color magnification. We provide quantitative as well as qualitative evidence for our method while comparing to the state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted paper at CVPR 2017. Project webpage: http://acceleration-magnification.github.io

Fuel tourism in border regions

The gasoline price differential existing across the border between Switzerland and its neighbouring countries (gasoline price in Switzerland is generally lower than in the neighbouring countries) has encouraged the phenomenon of fuel tourism to develop. People living in the bordering regions of Italy, France and Germany have had an incentive to buy gasoline in Switzerland for several years. This phenomenon increased employment and fiscal revenues from fuel taxes in Switzerland, whereas in the neighbouring countries we observed lower fiscal revenues and a decrease of employment in the gasoline distribution sector. These repercussions on the government revenues have induced the North-Italian province of Lombardy to adopt measures against fuel tourism (in Italy, similar measures have already been adopted in the regions neighbouring Slovenia). For instance, the inhabitants in the regions near the border can take advantage of price rebates at the fuel stations. The reaction to the price decreases was very important: Six months after the introduction of the rebates at the Italian fuel stations, the fuel demand in the Swiss border regions decreased by 20 to 40%. On the other hand, fuel stations in Italy have realised important increases in selling. The case of fuel tourism gives a good economic example for price responsiveness. The extent to which fuel tourism can be a problem for the border region depends on the sensitivity of car owners to fuel price differentials and on the intensity of cross-bordering movements (density of population). In this paper we analyse the impact of country-specific fiscal policies on gasoline demand using aggregate data at a regional level for three Swiss border regions over the period 1986 to 1997. The data include fuel selling of three main gasoline companies in an area of 10 km from the border. For the area further away form the border, data for a sample of fuel stations are available. A log-log stochastic equation for gasoline consumption was estimated, using fuel price differences as well as regional income and other regional variables (for instance car density, commuters, number of border offices, prices of cigarettes) as independent variables. Initial estimation results show a very significant impact of price differentials on fuel demand and an important share of fuel tourism on the overall gasoline sales of Swiss border regions. It can be shown that gasoline consumption by consumers in bordering regions is very sensitive to price differentials of standardized goods like gasoline (that is goods, which do not differ from one country to the other). From an energy policy point of view this result implies that, as long as price differentials persist, there is little room in border regions for discouraging residential gasoline consumption using tax increases. Policy measures like those introduced in Italy and in other countries, in order to minimize the negative side-effects of a neighbour with low fuel taxes, seem to be successful in avoiding a loss of taxes as well as losses for owners of gas stations in the border region with higher taxes. Of course, for Switzerland this could imply a restructuring of the fuel-selling sector in border regions.