How costumers’ way of life influence the value co-creation

Purpose: This article is a contribution to the understanding of how value arises in wellestablished markets, and under which circumstances actors integrate resources from different service ecosystems to generate value. To understand this phenomenon, it is fundamental to consider which practices are performed by customers to co-create value and how they do so. Design/Methodology/Approach: Using a qualitative approach, the study provides fresh empirical insight into well-established market processes of value creation. After a literature review an ethnographic approach was chosen in order to understand how co-creation processes occur in the empirical setting of an international restaurant chain. Several observations, conversations and semi-structured interviews were undertaken concerning the analysis of the topic under study. Findings: The results show that even in a well-established market, a provider must consider individual customers’ distinct needs, present in their daily practices, to be able to assist them in the value creation process. It is argued that the practice styles are the building blocks for prevailing ways of life that actors assume, according to the context in which they are, to integrate resources. Practical implications: The study includes implications for service providers of a wellfounded market for facilitating value co-creation along with customers and fulfils the need to better understand this phenomenon. Originality/Value: Recent studies call for empirical evidence on co-creation processes in mature markets, accordingly, this study brings an additional understanding on how actors, depending on the context, adopt different ways of life that require unique resources, which activate to achieve what they want, in order to establish room for co-creation.peer-reviewe

Board Structure and Price Informativeness

We develop and test the hypothesis that private information incorporated into stock prices affects the structure of corporate boards. Stock price informativeness may be a complement to board monitoring, because the information revealed by prices can be used by directors to monitor management. But price informativeness may also be a substitute for board monitoring, because more informative prices can trigger external monitoring mechanisms, such as takeovers. We find robust evidence for the substitution effect: Stock price informativeness, as measured by the probability of informed trading (PIN), is negatively related to board independence. Consistent with the model's predictions, this relationship is particularly strong for firms exposed to external governance mechanisms and internal governance mechanisms, and firms for which firm-specific knowledge is relatively unimportant. We address endogeneity concerns in a number of different ways and conclude that our results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variables or reverse causality. The results are also robust to using different measures of price informativeness and different proxies for board monitoringCorporate boards, Independent directors, Price informativeness

Geochemistry and risk assessment of street dust in Luanda, Angola, a tropical urban environment

A total of 92 samples of street dust were collected in Luanda, Angola, were sieved below 100 μm, and analysed by ICP-MS for 35 elements after an aqua-regia digestion. The concentration and spatial heterogeneity of trace elements in the street dust of Luanda are generally lower than in most industrialized cities in the Northern hemisphere. These observations reveal a predominantly “natural” origin for the street dust in Luanda, which is also manifested in that some geochemical processes that occur in natural soils are preserved in street dust: the separation of uranium from thorium, and the retention of the former by carbonate materials, or the high correlation between arsenic and vanadium due to their common mode of adsorption on solid particles in the form of oxyanions. The only distinct anthropogenic fingerprint in the composition of Luanda's street dust is the association Pb–Cd–Sb–Cu (and to a lesser extent, Ba–Cr–Zn). The use of risk assessment strategies has proved helpful in identifying the routes of exposure to street dust and the trace elements therein of most concern in terms of potential adverse health effects. In Luanda the highest levels of risk seem to be associated (a) with the presence of As and Pb in the street dust and (b) with the route of ingestion of dust particles, for all the elements included in the study except Hg, for which inhalation of vapours presents a slightly higher risk than ingestion. However, given the large uncertainties associated with the estimates of toxicity values and exposure factors, and the absence of site-specific biometric factors, these results should be regarded as preliminary and further research should be undertaken before any definite conclusions regarding potential health effects are drawn

Automatic evaluation of migration quality in distributed networks of converters

Migration has always played an important role in digital preservation. The most recent developments in this context introduce networks of remotely distributed converters. In this paper we propose an extension to current migration networks to enable users to: a) determine to what extent have the essential characteristics of digital objects been preserved during a migration; b) generate detailed migration reports for inclusion in the objects’ preservation metadata; and c) provide advice on the available migration paths or target formats that will best suit users’ requirements.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT