An assessment of tourist security in the city of Malaga

Security related to touristic activities is a topic that has not been developed deeply in the literature. Perhaps due to the lack of a several specific characteristics or its management as part of more general security initiatives, it rarely receives individual attention. Despite that, in countries and cities where tourism is a powerful industry, the protection of certain environments or people may lead to the implementation of very well defined policies. This opens a substantial debate that connects criminal policies with the protection of private interests, the excessive focus on traditional property crimes, the security image that the city or state intends to communicate and even a potential damage to certain local citizen, sometimes excluded, marginalized or targeted by these policies since they are not able not offer added value to the touristic strategy (disneylazation of cities?). To assess a first evaluation of the situation in the city of Malaga we have conducted a series of victimization surveys to two specific profiles: first, general tourists that visit the city center, where the city´s monumental, artistic and gastronomic offer is focused; and second, cruise tourist that arrive to the city port, who have a very routinized and short touristic experience. The city of Malaga has suffered? a series of deep changes… (datos económicos de málaga antes y ahora) We have complemented such surveys with in-depth interviews to police officers that work in the same touristic environments and to active offenders who commit crimes mostly over tourists. This descriptive research aims to gather information on the current situation in Malaga and compare it with a previous stage of the city, in which the tourism industry wasn´t able to affect that much on the city´s response to crime.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

An Empirical Analysis of the Corporate Effect in MNCs

(WP03/02 Clave pdf) This paper investigates the sources of variability of MNC performance in different areas of the world, particularly the influence of corporate-level factors, the geographical areas, and their specific industries. The key goal is to measure to what extent MNC corporate-level resources, such as ownership advantages and core competencies, affect the performance of the MNC´s international subsidiaries.

Establishment of surface functionalization methods for spore-based biosensors and implementation into sensor technologies for aseptic food processing

Aseptic processing has become a popular technology to increase the shelf-life of packaged products and to provide non-contaminated goods to the consumers. In 2017, the global aseptic market was evaluated to be about 39.5 billion USD. Many liquid food products, like juice or milk, are delivered to customers every day by employing aseptic filling machines. They can operate around 12,000 ready-packaged products per hour (e.g., Pure-Pak® Aseptic Filling Line E-PS120A). However, they need to be routinely validated to guarantee contamination-free goods. The state-of-the-art methods to validate such machines are by means of microbiological analyses, where bacterial spores are used as test organisms because of their high resistance against several sterilants (e.g., gaseous hydrogen peroxide). The main disadvantage of the aforementioned tests is time: it takes at least 36-48 hours to get the results, i.e., the products cannot be delivered to customers without the validation certificate. Just in this example, in 36 hours, 432,000 products would be on hold for dispatchment; if more machines are evaluated, this number would linearly grow and at the end, the costs (only for waiting for the results) would be considerably high. For this reason, it is very valuable to develop new sensor technologies to overcome this issue. Therefore, the main focus of this thesis is on the further development of a spore-based biosensor; this sensor can determine the viability of spores after being sterilized with hydrogen peroxide. However, the immobilization strategy as well as its implementation on sensing elements and a more detailed investigation regarding its operating principle are missing. In this thesis, an immobilization strategy is developed to withstand harsh conditions (high temperatures, oxidizing environment) for spore-based biosensors applied in aseptic processing. A systematic investigation of the surface functionalization’s effect (e.g., hydroxylation) on sensors (e.g., electrolyte-insulator semiconductor (EIS) chips) is presented. Later on, organosilanes are analyzed for the immobilization of bacterial spores on different sensor surfaces. The electrical properties of the immobilization layer are studied as well as its resistance to a sterilization process with gaseous hydrogen peroxide. In addition, a sensor array consisting of a calorimetric gas sensor and a spore-based biosensor to measure hydrogen peroxide concentrations and the spores’ viability at the same time is proposed to evaluate the efficacy of sterilization processes

The Daugavet property of C∗C^*-algebras, JB∗JB^*-triples, and of their isometric preduals

A Banach space $X$ is said to have the Daugavet property if every rank-one operator $T:X\longrightarrow X$ satisfies $\|Id + T\| = 1 + \|T\|$. We give geometric characterizations of this property in the settings of $C^*$-algebras, $JB^*$-triples and their isometric preduals. We also show that, in these settings, the Daugavet property passes to ultrapowers, and thus, it is equivalent to an stronger property called the uniform Daugavet property.Comment: To appear in J. Funct. Anal., final form, 19 page

Differentiation and the relationship between product market competition and price discrimination

We investigate how the effect of competition on price discrimination varies depending on the level of quality provided by companies in the hospitality industry. Our findings reconcile conflicting results of previous literature on this topic. Namely, we provide strong empirical evidence that competition affects differently the price of single and double rooms of hotels with greater quality versus those with lower quality. In the presence (absence) of differentiation, competition increases (decreases) price discrimination. Our findings are robust to the use of econometric techniques that alleviate endogeneity concerns.