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This work focuses on consumer evaluation of bluefish products in terms of three distinguished investigation macro-dimensions: Consumer habits, Bluefish Perception, New Product Propensity. We analyse data to extract the contributions of variables in these macro-dimensions and discuss the phenomena of uncertainty and factor indeterminacy in their relevance as drivers of consumers' decisions.

In this paper, data concerning MILANO EXPO2015 is collected from the official twitter page of the event before and after its opening. In order to extract a semi-supervised ontology and to evaluate the global sentiment around the event, a variety of language processing techniques has been applied on the collected “tweets”: Latent Semantic Analysis, sentiment polarity tracking, along with gap analysis has allowed the semantic evaluation of users’ opinions. Moreover, the generalized cross entropy approach has been applied for the first time on web data, adding prior information on the effect of semantic classes on the global sentiment, improving accuracy and adding detail to the analysis.

Although exponential technologies promise to bring unprecedented value at the socio-economic and policy levels, the social acceptability and preparedness for the technological “singularity” should be carefully considered. In particular, whereas digital innovation is able to drive an extraordinary development of entrepreneurial ventures, a number of challenging issues and the ongoing pandemic crisis have increased the need to investigate how technological breakthrough and human capital can be effectively combined in order to build resilient socio-technical and entrepreneurial ecosystems. This paper offers a synopsis of the major investigation areas and a reflection on the themes associated with the emergence of a digital society and the affirmation of digital entrepreneurship ecosystems. The research process follows a systematic literature review and a conceptual development approach aimed to introduce both the concept and a model of the digital society “incubator”. The proposed model identifies the actors, values, flows, and processes that are required to support the construction of a resilient entrepreneurial ecosystem. In this perspective, the study proposes a new focus by hybridizing and integrating both entrepreneurial and technology-related dimensions into a single unifying model. The study also lays the groundwork for further studies aimed at identifying the environmental and institutional factors required to support a smooth and effective transition towards a resilient entrepreneurial and technology-driven society.

International audience; This chapter reports the analysis of the distribution and characteristics of the segments of people associated with the symbolic universes. Analyses comprise seven countries are in Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom. The aim of these analysis is to understand if and to what extent socio-demographic and psycho-social factors that could play a role in moderating the impact of policies are associated with specific symbolic universes. Main findings: (a) the distribution of the different cultural segments differs quite a lot across countries, though the Niche of belongingness cultural segment appear as the most or one of the most frequent in all countries under analysis; (b) as to the socio-demographic profiles of the cultural segments, niche of belongingness and others’ world—i.e. the cultural segments characterized for the most negative worldviews—are associated with worse living conditions—low level of education, high unemployment or low quality of employment; negative self-evaluation of own health; moreover, they present a low level of (self-evaluated) positive personality traits, a low sense of interpersonal and community linkages, negative attitude towards foreigners. Conversely, ordered universe and interpersonal bond have a rather similar profile, characterized by young, highly educated people having a high quality occupational status and satisfaction with their health; moreover, these two cultural segments present positive personality characteristics as well as high level in the psycho-social capacity to valorise and make interpersonal and community life meaningful.

To study the Europeans’ perception on the economic conditions, a model that combine Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) and Combination of Uniform and shifted Binomial (CUB) is proposed. The MIMIC–CUB Model, estimated at country-level using the Partial Least Squares, specifies the influence of the economic forecast news on a latent variable named “Citizens’ perception of the European economics health state”. The survey is related, at both national and EU level, to the period 2005–2014.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the goodness of the input-process-output (IPO) model in order to evaluate work team performance within the Italian National Health Care System (NHS); and second, to test the mediating role of reflexivity as an overarching process factor between input and output. Design/methodology/approach The Italian version of the Aston Team Performance Inventory was administered to 351 employees working in teams in the Italian NHS. Mediation analyses with latent variables were performed via structural equation modeling (SEM); the significance of total, direct, and indirect effect was tested via bootstrapping. Findings Underpinned by the IPO framework, the results of SEM supported mediational hypotheses. First, the application of the IPO model in the Italian NHS showed adequate fit indices, showing that the process mediates the relationship between input and output factors. Second, reflexivity mediated the relationship between input and output, influencing some aspects of team performance. Practical implications The results provide useful information for HRM policies improving process dimensions of the IPO model via the mediating role of reflexivity as a key role in team performance. Originality/value This study is one of a limited number of studies that applied the IPO model in the Italian NHS. Moreover, no study has yet examined the role of reflexivity as a mediator between input and output factors in the IPO model.

The non-indigenous hydrozoan Clytia hummelincki, recorded for the first time in the Mediterranean Sea in 1996, has now become established on barren grounds where conditions of low diversity, high grazing pressure and low levels of competition occur. The mechanisms of persistence of this species, as well as its population dynamics in this habitat and in species-rich, algae-dominated shallow rocky communities were investigated in situ at four sampling sites in the Northern Ionian Sea from October 2012 to September 2014. Multivariate analyses were conducted to assess the differences in population dynamics of this species in both contrasting habitats. Clytia hummelincki reached peak abundance during summer, with numerous reproductive structures observed in August and September. A remarkable regression period was evident in the cold season, when colonies were largely reduced to dormant tissue in the coenosarc of the hydrorhiza and were often covered by encrusting algae. Both regeneration of colonies from resting hydrorhizae and recruitment of new planulae are involved in the maintenance of the populations. Colonies regrew from hydrorhizae less than half of the time. Population dynamics in sea-urchin barren grounds and algae-dominated communities did not differ significantly, suggesting that populations of this hydrozoan are now well established in the central Mediterranean Sea. This species is no longer confined to low diversity, highly grazed, low competition environments.

The current paper aims to present a new modelfor assessingthe Customer Satisfaction. The model, named Prosumership Service Quality Model (PROSERV), can be seen as an extension ofthe European Customer Satisfaction Index (ECSI), where the centrality of the customer is developed in order to take into account the prosumership as a fundamental part of service quality and satisfaction. The theoretical model has been formalized in 4hypotheses: (HP1) the PROSERV-Q questionnaire has a good level of reliability; (HP2) the PROSERV-Q underlies the three level abstraction modelled by PROSERV; the estimated level of overall satisfactionhas high correlation with the external global satisfaction index (HP3) and Loyalty (HP4).In order to test these hypotheses, the PROSERV -and the associated questionnaire PROSERV-Q –are applied to a sample of 680 customers of services. The theoretical model has been conceptualized as a three levels hierarchical structure, and statistically formalized with the PLS Path Modelling (PLS-PM) with higher-order constructs.Results are consistent with hypotheses, in that providing evidence that the three-level PROSERV model is able to capture the fundamental constitutive components of customer satisfactionand, at same time, affects the loyalty.

A sample of Italian manufacturing companies was selected in order to verify the abilities and effects (relationships) of the management factors human resources, leadership and strategic planning on company performance. The Partial Least Squares (PLS) estimation method was used for analyzing the data collected, where the relationships between the management factors and performance were formalized by a Structural Equation Model (SEM). The analysis of the survey data showed unexpected result regarding the non significant direct relationship between Leadership and Performance. The effect of Leadership is obtained by an indirect relationship through Human Resources. The combination of Leadership and Human Resources has hence been identified as the management factors which have the highest impact on the performance of Italian industrial companies. Another interesting and unexpected result was that there was no significant impact of Strategic Planning on Performance. It seems that the leaders of Italian industrial companies have not understood that good strategic planning is a necessary condition for achieving excellence. So another improvement area is in fact Strategic Planning. This area should have the highest priority of any top management team and the focus should include how to establish a strong relationship between strategic planning and performance. No correlation between strategic planning and performance is a strong indication that something is wrong. It is not enough that Leadership is doing Strategic Planning‐Leadership is also about studying and follow up on results in order to assure impacts on performance. This link seems to be missing in Italian industrial companies

In this paper we present a method to evaluate the quality of a rater’s judgement, which can integrate and enrich the use of inter-rater agreement as a reliability measure. Our proposal is an integrative one and evaluates the quality of a rater’s performance through an analysis of the profile of that individual rater’s performance. We discuss its rationale on the basis of the interpretation of inter-rater agreement, highlighting some critical issues. For this purpose, we adopt a computational model based on fuzzy set theory, demonstrating its main characteristics with an exemplary case study.

The authors propose a method for analyzing the psychotherapy process: discourse flow analysis (DFA). DFA is a technique representing the verbal interaction between therapist and patient as a discourse network, aimed at measuring the therapist- patient discourse ability to generate new meanings through time. DFA assumes that the main function of psychotherapy is to produce semiotic novelty. DFA is applied to the verbatim transcript of the psychotherapy. It defines the main meanings active within the therapeutic discourse by means of the combined use of text analysis and statistical techniques. Subsequently, it represents the dynamic interconnections among these meanings in terms of a ‘‘discursive network.’’ The dynamic and structural indexes of the discursive network have been shown to provide a valid representation of the patient-therapist communicative flow as well as an estimation of its clinical quality. Finally, a neural network is designed specifically to identify patterns of functioning of the discursive network and to verify the clinical validity of these patterns in terms of their association with specific phases of the psychotherapy process. An application of the DFA to a case of psychotherapy is provided to illustrate the method and the kinds of results it produces.

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of management factors on enterprise performance, considering a survey that the University Consortium in Engineering for Quality and Innovation has led. The relationships between management factors and enterprise performance are formalized by a Simultaneous Equation Model based on the generalized maximum entropy (GME) estimation method. The format of this paper is as follows. In Section 2, the data collected, the questionnaire evaluation, and the management model analytical formulation are introduced. In Section 3, the GME formulation is specified, showing the main characteristics of the estimation method. In Section 4, the results and a comparison among GME, partial least squares (PLS), and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is shown. In Section 5, concluding remarks are discussed. This is an electronic version of an article published in:E Ciavolino and Jens Jörn Dahlgaard , Simultaneous Equation Model based on the generalized maximum entropy for studying the effect of management factors on enterprise performance, 2009, JOURNAL OF APPLIED STATISTICS, (36), 7, 801-815.JOURNAL OF APPLIED STATISTICS is available online at informaworldTM: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02664760802510026Copyright: Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/default.asp

In this paper, an extension of the Co-inertia Analysis is proposed. This extension is based on a objective function which takes into account directly the external information, as linear restrictions about one set of variables, by rewriting the Co-inertia Analysis objective function according to the principle of Restricted Eigenvalue Problem (Rao (1973)).