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The sharing economy has allowed people from all over the world to more effectively utilize their assets. Owners or controllers of assets in the sharing economy are free to set any price they want subject to prevailing market demand as long as they operate in an imperfectly competitive market environment. This paper examines how various characteristics of an Airbnb listing (size, number of photos, ratings, host responsiveness, superhost status, distance from city centre, etc.) affect the prices of accommodation and determines which factors strongly affect price using weighted least squares (WLS) and quantile regression. A hedonic pricing model was developed and applied to data from the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville to determine how the different characteristics of an Airbnb listing affect the price of accommodation in these major three Spanish tourist cities. The estimation results, which are resilient to various robustness checks, indicate that overall rating as well as characteristics indicative of the size of the accommodation have the strongest positive influence on price, while the number of reviews and distance from the city centre have the strongest negative influence on price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on the study of the quality of experience lived by tourists when visiting a cultural heritage destination by using a tourist product based on a virtual tour. The research is justified by the increased demand by tourists to have a memorable experience in a destination as well as the growing offer on virtual reality and augmented reality technologies applied to the tourism sector. The database consists of online comments extracted from those who visited two well-known tourism destinations in Spain, Seville and Barcelona, where the immersive virtual reality technology named Past View is currently used. A total of 119 online comments on the tourists' experience after the use of the Past View smart glasses and posted in the e-WOM community Trip Advisor were valid for the analysis. Using a correspondence analysis of textual data, the results shed light about how virtual reality technologies influence on tourists' quality of experience. The findings drawn from the empirical analysis provide destination marketing organizations suitable and useful information to promote the destination and therefore encouraging entrepreneurs to innovate in tourism sector to attend the desire of tourists to have a memorable tourist experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar-powered air conditioners offer a high potential for energy-efficient cooling with a high economic feasibility. They can significantly reduce the energy consumption in the building sector, which is essential to meet the greater ambition of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% in the EU by 2050. This paper presents a computational model development capable of simulating the behaviour of a photovoltaic-assisted heat pump in different locations and working conditions. In addition, this model has been used to optimise a solar on-grid air conditioning system. The generated model has been validated with experimental data obtained in a real facility for a whole summer of operation (more than 100 tested days) in a Mediterranean climate (Alicante, Spain). According to the simulation results, the average Energy Efficiency Ratio (EER) of the system is 16.0, 10.7 and 7.8 in Barcelona, Madrid and Seville, respectively. The optimisation analysis has proven that the severity of the climatic region increases the costs as well as the optimum PV power to drive the AC unit. The obtained values for the the PV power and the annualised cost are 400 W and 506.2 € for Barcelona, 900 W and 536.7 € for Madrid, and 1300 W and 564.7 € for Seville. The annualised cost and the CO 2 emission levels are higher for the conventional system (no PV panels) than for the solar on-grid system, regardless of the installed PV power. This difference can be up to 66.64 € (10.55%) and 112.94 kg CO 2 (64.83%) per summer season in the case of Seville. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors have addressed in the past different railway engineering problems, mainly using computer algebra systems. They recently showed how it was possible to obtain compatible routes overtaking stations on double track lines (with any number of tracks and any topology) dealing with cycles. As a side achievement it was found that there were alternative track layouts for this type of railway station. Here a complete and comprehensive new package denoted Estaciones , also implemented in Maple , that does not use cycles, is introduced. It offers different procedures related to reachability, trails, number of shortest paths, etc. As main achievement, an improved track layout diagram for overtaking stations (with advantages with respect to the one in the previous paper) is found. Note that track layout diagrams are a hot topic: for example, Adif (Spanish infrastructure administrator) is nowadays remodelling the track layouts of the main railway stations of Madrid, Seville and Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people use social networks extensively in their daily lives, and using social media is, without doubt, the media practice they do the most. Therefore, there are increasing efforts to include students' use of social media outside the classroom into university learning practices. However, there is still very little innovative application of mobile technology and its social networks in Spanish universities. In this article we explore Spanish university students' perceptions of the use of social networks for educational purposes in the classroom. We found students to have an ambivalent perception as they are both critical and approving of using mobile devices in university teaching. We present data from the research project "Media competencies of citizens in emerging digital media in university environments" funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain. The study is based on 897 questionnaires given to Spanish university students studying various degrees, as well as four focus groups held in Seville, Madrid, Huelva and Barcelona during the 2017-2018 academic year. The data show that there is little use of social networks for educational and creative purposes in Spanish universities, and formal practices (organized by the teacher) are very different from informal practices (organized spontaneously by students). The latter is the most common among university students and WhatsApp is the most used internal tool, followed far behind by Facebook and Instagram. Students appreciate the direct and immediate communication of these networks, but are concerned about their distracting influence in the classroom and the possibility that teachers could invade their privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]