CEGE - Contribuições em Revistas Científicas / Contribution to Journals
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- The effects of misclassification costs and skewed distributions in two-group classificationPublication . Duarte Silva, A. P.; Stam, A.; Neter, J.In this study, Monte Carlo simulation experiments were employed to examine the performance of four statistical two-group classification methods when the data distributions are skewed and misclassification costs are unequal, conditions frequently encountered in business and economic applications. The classification methods studied are linear and quadratic parametric, nearest neighbor and logistic regression methods. It was found that when skewness is moderate, the parametric methods tend to give best results. Depending on the specific data condition, when skewness is high, either the linear parametric, logistic regression, or the nearest-neighbor method gives the best results. When misclassification costs differ widely across groups, the linear parametric method is favored over the other methods for many of the data conditions studied.
- Linking quality management to manufacturing strategy: an empirical investigation of customer focus practicesPublication . Sousa, RuiQuality management (QM) has often been advocated as being universally applicable to organizations. This is in contrast with the manufacturing strategy contingency approach of operations management (OM) which advocates internal and external consistency between manufacturing strategy choices. This article investigates, using the case-study method, whether customer focus practices—a distinctive subset of the whole set of QM practices—are contingent on a plant’s manufacturing strategy context. The study strongly suggests that customer focus practices are contingent on a plant’s manufacturing strategy and identifies mechanisms by which this takes place. The findings inform the implementation of QM programs.
- Convivência internacional, economia e valoresPublication . Mendes, Américo M. S. Carvalho
- Luzes e sombras da globalizaçãoPublication . Mendes, Américo M. S. CarvalhoO autor versa aqui sobre o fenómeno da globalização, centrando a sua atenção sobretudo no plano económico (predomínio da economia de mercado), decorrente da sua natureza expansionista. Além disso, tem em conta o efeito das novas tecnologias da informação e a expansão das democracias e da inerente afirmação dos direitos humanos. Analisa a potencialidade de conflitos decorrente das tensões entre democracia e economia de mercado. Aponta algumas pistas de actuação, em face da situação analisada.
- PortugalPublication . Feliciano, Diana; Mendes, AméricoThe evidence provided in this report shows that the Portuguese forest sector has been responsive to demands for its products, not only timber, but also cork and some other non wood forest goods and services. The area of forests almost tripled since the mid of the 1990s and the main cause of this has been that response to market conditions. Given the very high salience of private ownership, private forest owners played a major role in that response, even when there were no supported public policies, which was the case until the 1980s. Private forest owners obviously have not been alone in making up these adjustments to demand. Forest industries have been the essential connecting link between the forests and the final consumers, either in the domestic markets, or abroad. The first jump in expanding the forest resource base was the installation of the cork oak stands in the southern regions, mostly from the mid of the XIXth century until the mid of the XXth century. This was and still remains an export oriented business. It has successfully resisted the arrival of plastics, and is now facing new forms of competition from this material. Again this competition is meeting an active response from the industry and the forest owners, but a lot is still undecided about the end of this game. Pulp and paper is another story of creation of a new forest resource base and a new industry oriented essentially towards exports. Like in the case of cork, the quality of the product has been generally good, but here also new threats are arising. The resource base of the industry is under increasing risk of forest fires and the fundamentals of the Portuguese economy, in recent years, are not favouring exporting business. The wood based panel industry is another case where the forest resources built up by private forestry during the last one hundred years were able to trigger and sustain industrial conglomerates of large international scope. Nowadays the leading group in the world in this industry is Portuguese. The tree species at the base of this industry is maritime pine. This is the species which has been suffering most with forest fires and this is not good news for the industry. However, entrepreneurs here have been able to evolve towards other products and other markets. The rest of the forest industries (sawmilling, carpentry and furniture) are essentially made of small, even very small enterprises relying almost entirely on the domestic market. Rising real incomes and lower real interest rates, until the turn of the century helped these activities. These favourable conditions stopped to hold at the same time as the exposure to foreign competition became more intense. The strong dependence of these industries on the macroeconomic situation of the country is now pushing them towards improvements in labour productivity, at lower levels of employment.
- Quality management practices as a forerunner of absorptive capacity. An empirical studyPublication . Pérez-Aróstegui, María N.; Sousa, Rui; Lloréns-Montes, JavierAbsorptive capacity is one of the most important constructs to emerge in strategic and organizational research in recent years. This article analyzes the antecedents that determine a firm’s absorptive capacity from the perspective of Quality Management (QM). It studies the effect of seven QM practices (leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, human resource management, supplier management, process management, and information and analysis) on this construct. The model and the hypotheses proposed are tested on a sample of 230 Spanish firms. The results show the impact of the different QM practices on the level of absorptive capacity.
- Efficiency gains and structural remedies in merger controlPublication . Vasconcelos, HélderThis paper studies the role of structural remedies in merger control in a Cournot setting where (endogenous) mergers are motivated by prospective efficiency gains and must be submitted to an Antitrust Authority (AA) which might require partial divestiture for approval. From a merger policy perspective, this paper’s main contribution is two-fold. First, it shows that if mergers do not involve all firms in the industry, then merger remedies help the AA to increase consumer surplus only if assets are divested to competitors already in the market. Second, it presents a model which clarifies that there can only exist social costs to ‘over-fixing’ the anticompetitive effects of a merger if merger review policy treats mergers as one-time events. When a more dynamic view is taken of sequential merger review, then there can never be an ‘over-fixing’ problem. In this case, however, remedies are shown to be needed to make myopic merger review optimal.
- A node rooted flow-based model for the local access network expansion problemPublication . Corte-Real, Margarida; Gouveia, LuísIn this paper, we present a new formulation for the local access network expansion problem. Previously, we have shown that this problem can be seen as an extension of the well-known Capacitated Minimum Spanning Tree Problem and have presented and tested two flow-based models. By including additional information on the definition of the variables, we propose a new flow-based model that permits us to use effectively variable eliminations tests as well as coefficient reduction on some of the constraints. We present computational results for instances with up to 500 nodes in order to show the advantages of the new model in comparison with the others.
- Looking for a change point in French monetary policy in the early eightiesPublication . Santos, Carlos; Oliveira, Maria AlbertaWe investigate where, in the early eighties, did a change occur in French monetary policy. The novelty in our treatment of this subject is the use of the impulse saturation break test. The results clearly identify the adoption of the Franc Fort policy as the key change in the period. The resulting econometric model is congruent and reveals no signs of persistence in inflation.
- Can neuroscience inform economics? Rationality, emotions and preference formationPublication . Martins, Nuno Miguel OrnelasThe interaction between neuroscience and economics has gained much prominence recently, leading to the emergence of the new and expanding field of neuro-economics. I will argue that, although there is much insight to be gained from the interaction between neuroscience and economics, the implications of recent developments in neuroscience and neuroeconomics for the deductivist methodology of mainstream economics, and its emphasis on prediction of events, have not been sufficiently addressed. In fact, much research on neuroeconomics has contributed to the formulation of deductivist models aimed at the prediction of events, when the more fruitful use of neuroscience in economics consists rather in the utilisation of its insights for the development of an explanation of social behaviour that moves beyond the mainstream deductivist methodology. The somatic marker hypothesis, developed by Damasio and others working closely with him, will be suggested as an alternative framework for conceptualising the emergence of social behaviour from a neurobiological substrate.