La propensione all'acquisto dei prodotti "Made in Italy": analisi del comportamento dei consumatori tra qualità percepita e disponibilità a pagare. Un'investigazione empirica

Il presente contributo ha l’obiettivo di analizzare l’atteggiamento del consumatore nei confronti dei prodotti “Made in Italy”, in particolare allo scopo di individuarne gli attributi associati e i sistemi valoriali che possono influenzare l’acquisto. Le domande di ricerca sono essenzialmente le seguenti: 1) Esiste una riconoscibilità del “Made in Italy” in termini di caratterizzazione qualitativa dei prodotti? Se si, 2) Esiste una disponibilità pagare, in termini quantitativi, un “premium price” per tali prodotti? Si offre una disamina attraverso due metodologie. Da un punto di vista teorico, viene presentata la principale letteratura sul tema cercando di individuare i filoni scientifici di riferimento come il Country of Origin, il Country Image e la Brand Image, che si inseriscono in un contesto più ampio riguardante la Willingness to Pay. Dal punto di vista empirico, si è investigato, mediante l’uso di un questionario, sull’esistenza e sulla tipologia di una relazione tra la percezione della qualità la disponibilità a pagare un prodotto “Made in Italy”. Presentando gli esiti della ricerca condotta, i principali risultati mostrano che il “Made in Italy” è ben fissato come categoria concettuale nella mente dei consumatori. C’è un significativo “premium price” riconosciuto dagli stessi verso i prodotti “Made in Italy” per i settori analizzati (alimentare, abbigliamento e arredamento). Il “premium price” non è omogeneamente individuato per i vari settori merceologici analizzati, anche se per tutti i settori il valore comunemente riscontrato è relativo al 10%-30%

Building new business model from multiple case study research in the Internet of Me

The digital revolution has greatly changed the approach to culture, work, leisure time, the way we interact and communicate with people: the digitization of information has taken root and has become essential in all areas of social life as a phenomenon that guides and monitors the transformation of society in all its various forms, bringing great changes in almost all areas and especially in the world of work and industry. Industry 4.0 refers to a fourth industrial revolution (following water/steam power, mass production and automation through IT and robotics) and introduces the concept of "cyber-physical systems" to differentiate this new evolutionary phase from the electronic automation that has gone before. The term Industry 4.0 refers to the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector, driven by four disruptions: 1) the astonishing rise in data volumes, computational power, and connectivity, especially new low-power wide-area networks; 2) the emergence of analytics and business-intelligence capabilities; 3) new forms of human-machine interaction such as touch interfaces and augmented-reality systems; 4) improvements in transferring digital instructions to the physical world, such as advanced robotics and 3-D printing. One of the core elements of the fourth industrial revolution is the systematic application of IoT technologies (Internet of Things) and IoM (Internet of Me) to production processes on a global scale. The aim of the paper is primarily an analysis of what are the possible future benefits of IoT and IoM, trying to understand the effort and their opportunities for a consumer oriented business. Then to analyze the competitive advantage that companies are pursuing when they implement a business which is IoT / IoM oriented. The project research question relates to the possible extrapolation of a standardized behavioural pattern, in order to draw guidelines for companies who want to start a similar strategic management, through the direct experiences of an Italian start-up first mover group in the sectors involved in IoT and IoM revolution, defining risks, opportunities and threats. Theresearch presents two phases methodologically joinedbetween them: from a theoretical point of view it is defined the change from the Business Model towards the “ecosystem” of Business Model in the strategy IoT/IoM oriented,and from a empirical point of view the business development of some start-up companies using IoT and IoM technologies is studied, through the direct interview qualitative tool

Where do migrants and natives belong in a community : a Twitter case study and privacy risk analysis

Today, many users are actively using Twitter to express their opinions and to share information. Thanks to the availability of the data, researchers have studied behaviours and social networks of these users. International migration studies have also benefited from this social media platform to improve migration statistics. Although diverse types of social networks have been studied so far on Twitter, social networks of migrants and natives have not been studied before. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying characteristics and behaviours of migrants and natives on Twitter. To do so, we perform a general assessment of features including profiles and tweets, and an extensive network analysis on the network. We find that migrants have more followers than friends. They have also tweeted more despite that both of the groups have similar account ages. More interestingly, the assortativity scores showed that users tend to connect based on nationality more than country of residence, and this is more the case for migrants than natives. Furthermore, both natives and migrants tend to connect mostly with natives. The homophilic behaviours of users are also well reflected in the communities that we detected. Our additional privacy risk analysis showed that Twitter data can be safely used without exposing sensitive information of the users, and minimise risk of re-identification, while respecting GDPR

A critical overview of tools for assessing cognition in bipolar disorder

Cognitive deficits are prevalent in bipolar disorder even during the euthymic phase, having a negative impact on global functioning and quality of life. As such, more and more mental health professionals agree that neuropsychological assessment should be considered an essential component of the clinical management of bipolar patients. However, no gold standard tool has been established so far. According to bipolar disorder experts targeting cognition, appropriate cognitive tools should be brief, easy to administer, cost-effective and validated in the target population. In this commentary, we critically appraised the strengths and limitations of the tools most commonly used to assess cognitive functioning in bipolar patients, both for screening and diagnostic purposes

APEnet+: a 3D toroidal network enabling Petaflops scale Lattice QCD simulations on commodity clusters

Many scientific computations need multi-node parallelism for matching up both space (memory) and time (speed) ever-increasing requirements. The use of GPUs as accelerators introduces yet another level of complexity for the programmer and may potentially result in large overheads due to the complex memory hierarchy. Additionally, top-notch problems may easily employ more than a Petaflops of sustained computing power, requiring thousands of GPUs orchestrated with some parallel programming model. Here we describe APEnet+, the new generation of our interconnect, which scales up to tens of thousands of nodes with linear cost, thus improving the price/performance ratio on large clusters. The project target is the development of the Apelink+ host adapter featuring a low latency, high bandwidth direct network, state-of-the-art wire speeds on the links and a PCIe X8 gen2 host interface. It features hardware support for the RDMA programming model and experimental acceleration of GPU networking. A Linux kernel driver, a set of low-level RDMA APIs and an OpenMPI library driver are available, allowing for painless porting of standard applications. Finally, we give an insight of future work and intended developments