Tres biaixos dels economistes de l'FMI

Al llibre La sortida del laberint, Miquel Puig comenta tres biaixos que patiren els economistes del FMI que els van impedir de preveure la crisi del 2008:

• pensament gregari ("si veig que les coses van malament però tothom pensa que les coses van bé, és que estic equivocat"),
• pensament conservador ("si dic el mateix que tothom i estic equivocat, ningú no m'ho retraurà; si dic el contrari i estic equivocat, perdré la feina i la reputació"),
• pensament corporatiu ("tant els inspectors com els inspeccionats hem estudiat a les millors universitats, ocupem posicions de gran responsabilitat perquè les mereixem, el món està ben dirigit perquè el dirigim nosaltres, per tant, el món va bé")

El llibre es pot trobar a qualsevol biblioteca de la província de Barcelona. Recomano la seva lectura a qualsevol interessat en les causes de fons dels mals de l'economia espanyola.

Referència

Miquel Puig (2013). La sortida del laberint: el camí per superar la crisi creant llocs de treball decents. Llibres a l'Abast, 414. Edicions 62.

Opening a restaurant in Barcelona

The aim of my Data Science Capstone Project is to find the adequate neighbourhood in Barcelona to open a restaurant of a specific category, based on restaurants existing in a district. The idea behind the project is that people will tend to look for restaurants of a specific category in places where they know that there are restaurants of this kind. Barcelona has a growing tourist industry, and this analysis can be specially interesting for Barcelonian entrepreneurs looking to open a new restaurant venue. The template can be used for anyone that wants to explore the possibilities of opening a restaurant in a city.

I have used Foursquare location data to identify a sample of the restaurants existing in each neighbourhood. I have used Wikipedia to get the location of each neighbourhood, and then I have explored each location using the Foursquare app. Then I have filtered the locations with categories describing restaurants. I have obtained a sample of 1908 restaurants across several neighbourhoods of Barcelona. Then, I have obtained the proportion of each of the 58 categories of restaurants located in each neighbourhood, and I have used this information to cluster the neighbourhoods in different categories using k-means clustering. After testing several number of clusters, I have retained a clustering into three categories. The results of clustering can be viewed in the following map:

The most common restaurant category in  the red cluster is Tapas Restaurant. Tapas restaurants offer small plates (tapas, in Spanish) of Spanish food (e.g., patatas bravas). Tapas are always enjoyed in a context of leisure, either by tourists (in city centre neighbourhoods) or by locals (in the north neighbourhoods). Tourists can visit northern neighbourhoods (e.g. Horta or Turo de la Peira) for a more authentic tapas experience. This cluster includes 23 neighbourhoods, including the most touristic places in the center of Barcelona.

In purple cluster the most common category is Mediterranean Restaurant. These restaurants offer pizza and pasta, together with some Spanish specialities. These restaurants can be visited either by leisure or at a working pause at noon. These neighbourhoods have also a varied offer of international cuisine restaurants, sometimes owned by immigrant entrepreneurs.

The light blue cluster covers more than one half of Barcelona. In those neighbourhoods the predominant restaurant categories are Restaurant or Spanish Restaurant, followed by Mediterranean restaurant. People is going to these restaurants in the working pause. In Spain there is a tradition of making a long work stop (sometimes from 14 to 16) to have a strong lunch, with two plates and dessert. This is offered in Spanish Restaurants and Restaurants, and sometimes in Mediterranean Restaurants as menu del día. So we can expect that most of the revenue of these restaurants will be obtained in midday in working days, and that the leisure restaurant market is less buoyant in those neighbourhoods.

This analysis offers information about people's habits of interest for people wanting to start a restaurant business. This information must be complemented with information about real state market: for instance, Tapas bar can be opened more easily in neighbourhoods on the north of Barcelona belonging to cluster 1, where renting a place to open a restaurant can be cheaper. Futher analysis can be undertaken with the Foursquare app exploring trending venues in different moments of the week (weekends and working days) and of the day (working hours and night).

Human resource management and social network analysis

Human resource management research has been traditionally focused on individual and job attributes. Juman resource management research and practice could be furthered by studying attributes of relationships between individuals or jobs. Some fields where social network analysis is useful are (Hollenbeck and Jamieson, 2015):

• Identification and selection of employees. Social network analysis can help to predict future performance, for instance, by identifying what kind of employees plays brokerage roles across structural holes (i.e., links otherwise disconnected subgroups). It can also help to identify talent pools outside the organization, by identifying relationships of employees with external actors. Finally, it can help to identify isolated actors, which may have higher probabilities of turnover.
• Improving training and development programs. The outcome of training efforts depends of a strong network among employees. The identification of friendship and advice networks can help to improve communication, manage organizational culture and foster strategy implementation.
• Guide compensation and pay decisions by identifying key employees. Organizations must reward their employees on the results and behaviors that it expects from them. Most of this traits are socially driven (e.g., effective teamwork and prosocial behaviour, or integrating new employees). Social network analysis helps to recognize who is demonstrating these behaviours. 

References

Hollenbeck, J. R., & Jamieson, B. B. (2015). Human capital, social capital, and social network analysis: Implications for strategic human resource management. Academy of management perspectives, 29(3), 370-385.

Core and critical cities of global region airport networks

Citation

Lordan, O., & Sallan, J. M. (2019). Core and critical cities of global region airport networks. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 513, 724-733.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2018.08.123

Abstract

Air transport is one of the key infrastructures of today’s global economy. Connections between airports define airport networks, where nodes are cities served by airports, connected by edges if there is at least one direct flight connecting them. The aims of this research are to relate structural properties of airport networks which explain how these networks respond to isolation of critical nodes, and to gain insight into relevant socio-economic factors that influence the development of airport networks. We split the world airport network (WAN) into seven global region airport networks (GRANs), using the divisions established by OAG database. We gather information about structural properties of each GRAN determining core cities through k-core decomposition, and critical cities through robustness analysis. We find that differences of robustness across GRANs can be explained by the fraction of core cities relative to total cities. Furthermore, analysis of multilevel structure reveal relevant differences between GRANs, rooted on geographical and socio-economic factors, and give insight about how network robustness in airport networks can be enhanced.

Efficient multi-unit procurement mechanism with supply disruption risk

Citation

Xiang, J., Zhang, J., & Sallan, J. M. (2018). Efficient multi-unit procurement mechanism with supply disruption risk. Journal of Interdisciplinary Mathematics, 21(4), 883-895.
doi: 10.1080/09720502.2018.1478250

Abstract

In this paper, we study the multi-attribute multi-unit procurement mechanism design problem facing a set of potential suppliers who suffer from disruption risks. Each supplier's production cost depends on its disruption probability, and both are private information. We propose a Vickery-Clark-Groves auction with disruption risk (VCG-DR) for this problem and show that the mechanism is incentive-compatible, individual-rational and social efficient. Moreover, we compare the performance of the proposed mechanism and the popular single-attribute multi-unit forward auction (SA-MFV) with reserved attribute by numerical experiments. The results show that VCG-DR outperforms SA-MFV in both social efficiency and optimality.

The triple helix model of innovation

Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (2000) present the evolution of innovation systems in terms of academia-state-industry relationships, which has taken three different models. In the etatistic model, the nation state encompasses academia and industry and directs the relations between them. The laissez-faire model consists of separate the three institutional spheres with strong borders dividing them and highly circumscribed relations among the spheres. The Triple Helix model is a knowledge infrastructure of overlapping institutional spheres,each taking the role of the other and with hybrid organizations emerging at the interfaces. These hybrid organization can be university spin-off firms, tri-lateral initiatives for knowledge-based economic development and strategic alliances among firms, government laboratories and academic research groups. The Triple Helix model represents an evolution from linear models of innovation (mode 1), with defined transitions between basic research, applied research and experimental development to nonlinear models of innovation (mode 2).

The integration of academia in innovation systems leads to an expansion of the mission of the university (Etzkowitz, 2003). The first mission of university was preservation and dissemination of knowledge through teaching. The first academic revolution made research a second university mission, and the second revolution added the technology transfer and economic development missions. The second revolution transformed the way that research was organized in academia: from professors assisted by assistants to research groups where professors and assistant professors have large autonomy, assisted by graduate students. The development of research groups leads to individual and collective entrepreneurship within academia, and to increasing collaboration with the state and the industry. The new mission of the university motivates the creation of new organizational units, like enterprise incubators and technology transfer units. University management has to choose between separating or integrating business activities and managing conflicts of interest.

Carayannis and Campbell (2009) introduces a fourth element in the triple helix model, which is the media-based and culture-based public. This fourth elements emphasizes the need that innovation policy should communicate its objectives and rationales to the public to seek for legitimation and justification. This can be achieved through cultural artifacts such as movies, that can arise awareness on utility of innovation among the public for supporting R&D policies and to enroll prospective students in science and engineering.

References

Carayannis, E. G., & Campbell, D. F. J. (2009). “Mode 3” and “Quadruple Helix”: toward a 21st century fractal innovation ecosystem. International Journal of Technology Management, 46(3/4), 201. http://doi.org/10.1504/IJTM.2009.023374

Etzkowitz, H. (2003). Research groups as ‘quasi-firms’: the invention of the entrepreneurial university. Research Policy, 32(1), 109–121. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(02)00009-4

Etzkowitz, H., & Leydesdorff, L. (2000). The dynamics of innovation: from National Systems and “Mode 2” to a Triple Helix of university–industry–government relations. Research Policy, 29(2), 109–123. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(99)00055-4

Student-perceived organizational support and perceived employability in the marketing of higher education

Citation

Trullas, I., Simo, P., Fusalba, O. R., Fito, A., & Sallan, J. M. (2018). Student-perceived organizational support and perceived employability in the marketing of higher education. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 1–16.
UPCommons:
doi: http://doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2018.1488334

Abstract

In the current context, the need for marketing in institutions of higher education is undeniable. The specification of the student not merely as a ‘customer’ means that traditional marketing no longer has sufficient capacity to explain the behavior of the student body. In this study, a four-level relationship marketing model is tested to check the influence of perceived organizational support (POS) and perceived employability on identification with the institution and the perceived price-quality ratio and how these influence student satisfaction. In addition, the constructs prior to POS and perceived employability are identified, which are explicit enough to enable specific marketing actions to be carried out. As POS is a construct defined for the labor market, its use applied to relational marketing comes up as something innovative.

To this end, Likert scales have been designed and validated to measure these constructs. The results of this test show how the perception of organizational support depends on the relationship of the student body with the administration and management of the center. Likewise, the perception of employability depends on the perceived reputation and the perception of the promotion of employability. Furthermore, it is confirmed that satisfaction is positively related to identification and the perceived price-quality ratio, which in turn are positively related to organizational support and perceived employability.