How taking a bit longer to do your shopping might save you money

To what extent can shoppers convert the time they spend looking for particular products into monetary savings? Using electronic tags to study the behavior of 12,000 consumers in a large supermarket in Northern California, Fabio Pinna and Stephan Seiler find that consumers can save up to $11 per shopping trip just by searching longer for products

Consumer search: evidence from path-tracking data

We estimate the effect of consumer search on the price of the purchased product in a physical store environment. We implement the analysis using a unique data set obtained from radio frequency identification tags, which are attached to supermarket shopping carts. This technology allows us to record consumers' purchases as well as the time they spent in front of the shelf when contemplating which product to buy, giving us a direct measure of search effort. Controlling for a host of confounding factors, we estimate that an additional minute spent searching lowers price paid by $2.10 which represents 8 percent of average trip-level expenditure

Essays in applied microeconomics

This thesis is composed by three essays and applies econometric methods to analyze different economic research questions using microeconomic data. The first essay (chapter 2) analyzes consumer searching behavior in a grocery context. The second essay (chapter 3) studies the implications of the introduction of a bonus scheme in a principal-agent context using data from furniture sales. The third essay (chapter 4) proposes an empirical strategy to estimate the impact that a worsening in banks’ wholesale funding opportunities (such as the Italian sovereign debt crisis of 2011) has on borrowers’ ability to repay their loans. Chapter 5 concludes the thesis and provides some directions for future work. The first essay (chapter 2), written jointly with Stephan Seiler, estimates the effect of time spent searching in a supermarket on consumers’ expenditure. The analysis is implemented using a unique data-set obtained from radio frequency identification tags which are attached to supermarket shopping carts. This allows us to record consumers’ purchases as well as the time they spent in front of the shelf when contemplating which product to buy, giving us a direct measure of search effort. We estimate the effect of extending search on the price consumers pay within a category while controlling for a host of confounding factors such as category-level price variation over time and measurement error. Our results show that an additional minute spent searching lowers category-level expenditure by $1.40. Extending search-time by one standard deviation allows consumers to appropriate 8 percent of the possible category-level price savings. The second essay (chapter 3) uses data on the staff of a furniture firm to show that, when a fixed bonus scheme conditional on revenues was introduced, it increased the revenues generated by all sales employees, but I find no significant heterogeneous effect of the bonus scheme depending on whether the employee is given control over price or not. The essay also shows that giving the sales staff control over price does not significantly increase revenues. The effect of the bonus scheme and of price delegation on gross profits minus paid bonuses, commissions, and wages were similar. These results are robust to a number of checks, and are consistent with a model of moral hazard and price delegation. The effect of the bonus scheme and of price delegation on gross profits minus paid bonuses, commissions, and wages were similar. These results are robust to a number of checks, and are consistent with a model of moral hazard and price delegation. Chapter 5 concludes and discusses the limitations of the current work and provides some directions for future research

Archeologia e storia dell’arte ad accesso aperto per interpretare le missioni dell’Università

Editoriale N.4 rivista ArcheoArt

Current limitations and future prospects of detection and biomonitoring of NIS in the Mediterranean Sea through environmental DNA

The biodiversity of the Mediterranean Sea is currently threatened by the introduction of Non-Indigenous Species (NIS). Therefore, monitoring the distribution of NIS is of utmost importance to preserve the ecosystems. A promising approach for the identification of species and the assessment of biodiversity is the use of DNA barcoding, as well as DNA and eDNA metabarcoding. Currently, the main limitation in the use of genomic data for species identification is the incompleteness of the DNA barcode databases. In this research, we assessed the availability of DNA barcodes in the main reference libraries for the most updated inventory of 665 confirmed NIS in the Mediterranean Sea, with a special focus on the cytochrome oxidase I (COI) barcode and primers. The results of this study show that there are no barcodes for 33.18% of the species in question, and that 45.30% of the 382 species with COI barcode, have no primers publicly available. This highlights the importance of directing scientific efforts to fill the barcode gap of specific taxonomic groups in order to help in the effective application of the eDNA technique for investigating the occurrence and the distribution of NIS in the Mediterranean Se

Investigating on the factors responsible for <i>Caulerpa racemosa</i> invasion = Indagini sui fattori responsabili dell'invasione di <i>Caulerpa racemosa</i>

The introduced alga Caulerpa racemosa (Forsskal) J. Agardh (Caulerpales, Chlorophyta) has become an important component of rocky assemblages in the subtidal of the Mediterranean. Understanding the faetors that regulate the establishment and spread of this species is, therefore, crucial to predicting future pathways of invasion and susceptible locales. Further, the aim of this study was to investigate on the factors responsible for Ihe successful invasion of C. racemosa in the Asinara Gulf (NW-Sardinia)

Resistance and resilience of ecosystem descriptors and properties to dystrophic events: a study case in a Mediterranean lagoon

Mediterranean lagoons are naturally exposed, during the dry season, to dystrophic and hypoxic events determining dis-equilibrium conditions along temporal and spatial scales, which are linked to metabolism and life cycle of the biotic components. In summer 2008, Lesina lagoon (SE Italian coastline) was interested by a geographically localized dystrophic crisis which affected up to 8% of the total lagoon surface. Temporal dynamics of principal descriptors of abiotic (water, sediment) and biotic (phytoplankton, benthic macroinvertebrate) compartments have been followed during the 2008 by collecting data inside stressed and control lagoon areas before a dystrophic event and in the six months after the dystrophic event. The aim of the study was to analyse the pathways of ecosystem responses to dystrophic stress, searching for the characteristic scales of ecosystem compartment resistance and resilience. The characteristic time-scale of abiotic and biotic component time responses varied from days, for the selected markers of the water column, to year, for the benthic ones. Short-term biotic and abiotic responses in the water column were strongly coupled while biotic and abiotic responses at the sediment level were remarkably un-coupled. Dynamics and recovery time of water column and benthic components do not match in Lesina following the dystrophic crisis, highlighting an intrinsic individualistic behavior within the lagoon community driving ecosystem processes and ecosystem level responses. Taxonomic and non-taxonomic descriptors of both phytoplankton and benthic macroinvertebrates showed different response patterns as early warning signals and overall resilience. The emphasized differences in the stability components, i.e., resistance and resilience, of water column and sediment abiotic and biotic characteristics as well as of taxonomic and non-taxonomic descriptors has key implication in planning monitoring strategies and programs for transitional waters in the Mediterranean and Black Sea EcoRegions