A multi-agent simulation approach to sustainability in tourism development

In the last decades the increasing facility in moving and the simultaneous fall of the transportation costs have strongly increased the tourist flows. As a consequence, different destinations, especially those which are rich of natural resources, unable or unready to sustain huge tourism flows, present serious problems of sustainability and Tourism Carrying Capacity (TCC). At the present, it is universally recognized that every tourist destination should plan effective and pro-reactive protection policies of its cultural, environmental and social resources. In order to facilitate policies definition it may be useful to measure the Tourist Carrying Capacity, but the literature has highlighted that this is not an easy task for different reasons: among the others, the complexity and the dynamicity of the concept, the absence of a universally accepted definition and the impossibility of assigning an objective scientific value and to apply a rigorous analysis. Thereby, more recently an alternative, or even complementary, interpretation of TCC has developed; it is called LAC, Limit of Acceptable Changes where the focus shifts from: “How much use an area can tolerate?†to “How much change is acceptable?â€, aiming at evaluating the costs and benefits from alternative management tourism actions. The aim of the paper is to present an innovative framework, based on the LAC approach - MABSiT, Mobile Agent Behavior Simulation in Tourism - developed by the authors, which is composed by five modules: elaboration data, DBMS, ad-hoc maps, agents and ontology. Its modular structure allows to easily study the interactions among the components in order to observe the behavior of the single agents. In an aggregate form, it is possible to define group dynamics, where one possible effect is the influence on the variation of agents’ satisfaction perception in comparison to the surroundings environment. The paper will be structured as follows: an introduction will be followed by a literature review; than the methodology and the framework will be presented and applied to a case study: Vieste, a known maritime destination of South of Italy, which is characterized by high problems of seasonality in the summer. Finally, some conclusions and policy recommendations will be drawn.

The indirect effects of manufacturing internationalization on logistics - Evidence from the Italian districts

The aim of the paper is to investigate the indirect impact of internationalisation process, undertaken by the district firms located in Veneto region (north-eastern Italy), on the logistics’ employment change within the same industrial districts. The results of the empirical analysis have showed that within the districts there is not a clear positive relationship between internationalisation and the employment growth in the logistics sector. This might be due, either to a strong insourcing of logistics activities by district firms, or to a trend of outsourcing such activities to logistics suppliers located outside the industrial districts. The paper is organised into five sections. An introduction is followed by a literary review on the direct and indirect effects of manufacturing internationalisation on the home country, with a specific focus on logistics. The sample and the methodology are described in section three, section four presents the empirical results. Conclusions and further research questions follow.internationalisation, industrial districts, logistics sector, indirect effects.

Does the logistics sector gain from manufacturing internationalisation? An empirical investigation on the Italian case

The present paper deals with the impact of manufacturing internationalisation, in the forms of international trade, cooperation agreement and FDI, on the logistics sector. Some descriptive statistics are provided for the Italian macro-areas and the logistics employment and an econometric analysis is carried out at the "regional-industry" level (20 NUTS2 regions and 11 logistics sub-sectors) with reference to the Italian case in the period 1996-2001. Results show that export and FDIs positively affect the logistics employment variation in 1996-2001, while import and cooperation agreements display a negative or not significant impact.logistics, employment, internationalisation, trade, FDI, cooperation agreement.

Bayesian outlier detection in Capital Asset Pricing Model

We propose a novel Bayesian optimisation procedure for outlier detection in the Capital Asset Pricing Model. We use a parametric product partition model to robustly estimate the systematic risk of an asset. We assume that the returns follow independent normal distributions and we impose a partition structure on the parameters of interest. The partition structure imposed on the parameters induces a corresponding clustering of the returns. We identify via an optimisation procedure the partition that best separates standard observations from the atypical ones. The methodology is illustrated with reference to a real data set, for which we also provide a microeconomic interpretation of the detected outliers

Logistics FDI in Italy: integration strategies and motivations

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Small Sample Properties of Copula-GARCH Modelling: A Monte Carlo Study

Copula-GARCH models have been recently proposed in the financial literature as a statistical tool to build flexible multivariate distributions. Our extensive simulation studies investigate the small sample properties of these models and examine how misspecification in the marginals may affect the estimation of the dependence function represented by the copula. We show that the use of normal marginals when the true Data Generating Process is leptokurtic or asymmetric, produces negatively biased estimates of the normal copula correlations. A striking result is that these biases reach their highest value when correlations are strongly negative, and viceversa. This result remains unchanged with both positively skewed and negatively skewed data, while no biases are found if the variables are uncorrelated. Besides, the effect of marginals asymmetry on correlations is smaller than that of leptokurtosis. We finally analyse the performance of these models in terms of numerical convergence and positive definiteness of the estimated copula correlation matrix.Copulas, Copula-GARCH models, Maximum Likelihood, Simulation, Small Sample Properties.

A multi-agent simulation approach to sustainability in tourism development

In the last decades the increasing facility in moving and the simultaneous fall of the transportation costs have strongly increased the tourist flows. As a consequence, different destinations, especially those which are rich of natural resources, unable or unready to sustain huge tourism flows, present serious problems of sustainability and Tourism Carrying Capacity (TCC). At the present, it is universally recognized that every tourist destination should plan effective and pro-reactive protection policies of its cultural, environmental and social resources. In order to facilitate policies definition it may be useful to measure the Tourist Carrying Capacity, but the literature has highlighted that this is not an easy task for different reasons: among the others, the complexity and the dynamicity of the concept, the absence of a universally accepted definition and the impossibility of assigning an objective scientific value and to apply a rigorous analysis. Thereby, more recently an alternative, or even complementary, interpretation of TCC has developed; it is called LAC, Limit of Acceptable Changes where the focus shifts from: "How much use an area can tolerate?" to "How much change is acceptable?", aiming at evaluating the costs and benefits from alternative management tourism actions. The aim of the paper is to present an innovative framework, based on the LAC approach - MABSiT, Mobile Agent Behavior Simulation in Tourism - developed by the authors, which is composed by five modules: elaboration data, DBMS, ad-hoc maps, agents and ontology. Its modular structure allows to easily study the interactions among the components in order to observe the behavior of the single agents. In an aggregate form, it is possible to define group dynamics, where one possible effect is the influence on the variation of agents' satisfaction perception in comparison to the surroundings environment. The paper will be structured as follows: an introduction will be followed by a literature review; than the methodology and the framework will be presented and applied to a case study: Vieste, a known maritime destination of South of Italy, which is characterized by high problems of seasonality in the summer. Finally, some conclusions and policy recommendations will be drawn

Does the transport industry gain from manufacturing internationalization? An empirical investigation on the Italian regions

The present paper deals with the impact of manufacturing internationalisation, in the forms of international trade, cooperation agreements – measured by inward and outward processing trade (IPT and OPT, respectively) - and FDI, on the transport industry employment. Descriptive statistics and econometric analysis are carried out at the “regional-industry” level (20 NUTS2 regions and 8 transport sub-industries) with reference to Italy in the period 1996-2001. Results show that export, FDI and the components of IPT (temporary import and re-export) positively affect the transport employment variation in 1996-2001, while import and the components of OPT (temporary export and re-import) display a negative impact