Business Management

We address the subjective experience of social network gamers playing Restaurant
City, a game hosted on Facebook. We adopted a netnographic approach to studying
the culture of transient Internet communities shaping the player off-line commu-
nities. Fieldwork was conducted over the entire life span of the game (3 years). Data
were analyzed using a qualitative thematic approach and the software EdEt. The
results describe the evolution of the gaming experience through online interaction
and its importance in everyday off-line life. Players were observed to play an
important role in the production of social meanings associated with gaming and with
the gaming community online and off-line. We discuss the implications of our
findings regarding how the gaming process is a far more complex scenario than
envisaged by a business vision based on acquisition, retention, and monetization.

Multi-objective optimization techniques are the ideal support tools for the decision-making process. They provide a set of optimal solutions for each of the significant aspects of the problem, thus summarizing the alternatives to be considered. Having a limited number of alternatives makes it easier for decision makers to perform their tasks, since they can focus their efforts towards the analysis of the available options. In this paper, the main characteristics of multi-objective optimization are summarized, and a real experience is described regarding the optimization of mobile units assignment at a health care company in Argentina using a new method based on swarm intelligence called varMOPSO.

Aunque la existencia de estacionalidad diaria no ha sido tan
estudiada en los mercados de renta fija como en los de acciones,
existen varios trabajos en los que se apunta su existencia
en los mercados estadounidenses bonos. En este artículo,
hemos estudiado la posible existencia de un comportamiento
heterogéneo en los diferentes días de la semana, en el mercado
de operaciones al contado con Bonos y Obligaciones del
Estado BOEs.

Within the framework of ALM, we understand that immunization is the main method to assure a certain yield in a future date departing from an initial portfolio. As in the crisp case, in a fuzzy environment, one of the goals is the determination of the duration of a bond and of a bond portfolio, when the interest rate is a fuzzy number. After that, we will be able to design an immunization strategy. One of the problems of the immunization strategies derives from the fact that the immunization process allows the variation of the TSIR in a parallel way to the initial, this assumes the hypothesis that the TSIR follows an additive process to the spot rate. Therefore, if this hypothesis is not guaranteed, it cannot be guaranteed the profitability expected at the beginning of the investment. This is called the risk of identification of the stochastic process.

The distribution of firms’ growth and firms’ sizes is a topic under intense scrutiny. In this paper, we show that a thermodynamic model based on the maximum entropy principle, with dynamical prior information, can be
constructed that adequately describes the dynamics and distribution of firms’ growth. Our theoretical framework is tested against a comprehensive database of Spanish firms, which covers, to a very large extent, Spain’s economic
activity, with a total of 1 155 142 firms evolving along a full decade. We show that the empirical exponent of Pareto’s law, a rule often observed in the rank distribution of large-size firms, is explained by the capacity of economic
system for creating/destroying firms, and that can be used to measure the health of a capitalist-based economy. Indeed, our model predicts that when the exponent is larger than 1, creation of firms is favoured; when it is smaller than 1, destruction of firms is favoured instead; and when it equals
1 (matching Zipf’s law), the system is in a full macroeconomic equilibrium, entailing ‘free’ creation and/or destruction of firms. For medium and smaller firmsizes, the dynamical regime changes, the whole distribution can no longer
be fitted to a single simple analytical form and numerical prediction is required. Our model constitutes the basis for a full predictive framework regarding the economic evolution of an ensemble of firms. Such a structure can be potentially used to develop simulations and test hypothetical scenarios,
such as economic crisis or the response to specific policy measures.