Quality externalities among hotel establishments: what is the impact of tour operators?

This paper is about quality decisions in a vertical structure where competitive producers sell to powerful retailers. Specifically, we focus the analysis on the role played by a tour operator (TO) on quality investments when distributing the capacity of a given tourist destination. We emphasize the presence of quality externalities among hotel establishments, and see that sometimes a TO distribution can provide a solution to the tragedy of the commons in qualityprovision. Thus, we analyze what implications do vertical relations have for quality in this industry, and then derive some policy recommendations. This paper is about quality decisions in a vertical structure where competitive producers sell to powerful retailers. Specifically, we focus the analysis on the role played by a tour operator (TO) on quality investments when distributing the capacity of a given tourist destination. We emphasize the presence of quality externalities among hotel establishments, and see that sometimes a TO distribution can provide a solution to the tragedy of the commons in qualityprovision. Thus, we analyze what implications do vertical relations have for quality in this industry, and then derive some policy recommendations

Applications of Lipatov's high energy effective action to NLO BFKL jet phenomenology

We report on recent progress in the evaluation of next-to-leading order (NLO) observables using Lipatov's QCD high energy effective action. We calculate both real and virtual corrections to the quark induced forward jet vertex at NLO, making use of a new regularization method and a subtraction mechanism. As a new result we determine the real part of the NLO Mueller-Tang impact factor which is the only missing element for a complete NLO BFKL description of dijet events with a rapidity gap.Comment: 4 pages, 29 figures, proceedings of the XX Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects, 26-30 March, University of Bonn (2012

Using the BFKL resummation to fit DIS data: collinear and running coupling effects

The proton structure function F2 is studied in the low x regime using BFKL evolution. The next to leading logarithmic (NLL) analysis requires the inclusion of running coupling effects which lead to off-diagonal terms in the evolution kernel. An all-orders resummation is used to improve the collinear behavior of the NLL BFKL result. We emphasize the theoretical uncertainties that appear throughout the analysis and give a comparison to the combined HERA data.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, proceedings of the XX Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects, 26-30 March, University of Bonn (2012

Child health in rural Colombia: determinants and policy interventions

In this paper we study the determinants of child anthropometrics on a sample of poor Colombian children living in small municipalities. We focus on the influence of household consumption, and public infrastructure. We take into account the endogeneity of household consumption using two different sets of instruments: household assets and municipality average wage. We find that household consumption is an important determinant of child health. The importance of the effect is confirmed by the two different sets of instruments. We find that using ordinary least squares would lead to conclude that the importance of household consumption is much smaller than the instrumental variable estimates suggest. The presence of a public hospital in the municipality positively influences child health. The extent of the piped water network positively influences the health of children if their parents have at least some education. The number of hours of growth and development check-ups is also an important determinant of child health. We find that some of these results only show up once squared and interaction terms have been included in the regression. Overall, our estimates suggest that both public and private investments are important to improve child health in poor environments

Exclusive central production of heavy quarks at the LHC

We study the exclusive production of heavy flavors at central rapidities in hadron-hadron collisions within the kT factorisation formalism. Since this involves regions of small Bjorken x in the unintegrated gluon densities, we include the next-to-leading order BFKL contributions working directly in transverse momentum representation. Our results are presented in a form suitable for Monte Carlo implementation.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

Gluon Regge trajectory at two loops from Lipatov's high energy effective action

We present the derivation of the two-loop gluon Regge trajectory using Lipatov's high energy effective action and a direct evaluation of Feynman diagrams. Using a gauge invariant regularization of high energy divergences by deforming the light-cone vectors of the effective action, we determine the two-loop self-energy of the reggeized gluon, after computing the master integrals involved using the Mellin-Barnes representations technique. The self-energy is further matched to QCD through a recently proposed subtraction prescription. The Regge trajectory of the gluon is then defined through renormalization of the reggeized gluon propagator with respect to high energy divergences. Our result is in agreement with previous computations in the literature, providing a non-trivial test of the effective action and the proposed subtraction and renormalization framework.Comment: 22 page

Characterization of dynamical regimes and entanglement sudden death in a microcavity quantum - dot system

The relation between the dynamical regimes (weak and strong coupling) and entanglement for a dissipative quantum - dot microcavity system is studied. In the framework of a phenomenological temperature model an analysis in both, temporal (population dynamics) and frequency domain (photoluminescence) is carried out in order to identify the associated dynamical behavior. The Wigner function and concurrence are employed to quantify the entanglement in each regime. We find that sudden death of entanglement is a typical characteristic of the strong coupling regime.Comment: To appear in Journal of Physics: Condensed Matte

The quark induced Mueller-Tang jet impact factor at next-to-leading order

We present the NLO corrections for the quark induced forward production of a jet with an associated rapidity gap. We make use of Lipatov's QCD high energy effective action to calculate the real emission contributions to the so-called Mueller-Tang impact factor. We combine them with the previously calculated virtual corrections and verify ultraviolet and collinear finiteness of the final result.Comment: 29 pages, many figure