Biagio Simonetti - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Biagio Simonetti
Accreditation and Quality Assurance, 2012
In recent decades it has become increasingly important for public research centres to attract ext... more In recent decades it has become increasingly important for public research centres to attract external clients, including government, private and public bodies and companies. They do this by demonstrating their research excellence. A research centre's ability to provide professional research services can be assessed by competent technical bodies which verify that the research centre's laboratories operate according to certain predetermined criteria or standards. Although there is no set of generally accepted standards, some regional accreditation bodies already offer accreditation assessment for the R&D laboratories which are in their territory. This article analyses the successful application of a quality management system (QMS) in a public research centre employing 57 people including researchers, technicians and administrative staff. This system is based on the scheme of regional accreditation of industrial research laboratories which was inspired by ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 17025:2005 and set up by the regional authority. The overall aim of the management system is to monitor all of the industrial research and services which the centre offers to external users, such as government, private and public bodies and companies, and to guarantee that final products, usually technical reports and prototypes, respond to their needs. The accreditation applies to all of the activity of the research centre except for basic research. In this article the critical factors influencing the success of the implementation of the management system are outlined together with benefits and opportunities. Weak points and problems are analysed, and the actions which were undertaken in order to prevent and manage problems are described.
In addition to acknowledging the members of the Editorial Board, the Editors would like to thank ... more In addition to acknowledging the members of the Editorial Board, the Editors would like to thank the persons reported below for their kindly help in reviewing EJASA papers.
The problem of studying the causes of obesity is largely discussed in the literature by experts i... more The problem of studying the causes of obesity is largely discussed in the literature by experts in nutrition and related diseases and is of particular interest in most recent years among scholars of business disciplines, especially as regards the impact on socio-health costs. After an overview of the geographical differences of obesity, related not only to eating habits, but also to lifestyles as well as hereditary factors, the purpose of this paper is try to trace the main functional relationships between BMI and health-care costs through the use of Multiple Corrispondence Analysis and Partial Least Squares Regression.
This work is copyrighted by Università del Salento, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attr... more This work is copyrighted by Università del Salento, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License. For more information see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/it/ Anomalies are those irregularities that cannot be defined by the standard finance theories. In this paper, we examined the existence of an intra-month effect and weekend effect in stock returns of Pakistan stock exchange. which approximates to about 23 years data. Returns on this data were calculated and calendar anomalies were examined. Our results show that there exists an intra-month effect. Similarly, the existence of the weekend effect in the stock market is also observed. Hence, Karachi stock market shows anomalous behavior in the returns.
Algorithms as a Basis of Modern Applied Mathematics
The parameter estimation methods of fuzzy linear regression available in the literature have adap... more The parameter estimation methods of fuzzy linear regression available in the literature have adapted several techniques ranging from mathematical programming to fuzzy least squares which is based on distance notion. Therefore, the literature is vast. However, researchers still try to look for a method that is expected to have estimated spreads as small as possible and good predictions. Each parameter estimation method proposed in the literature has treated fuzzy numbers based on how it implements the data. Namely, the proposed methods somehow restrict the usage of the fuzzy data. In this chapter, a novel method consisting of new notions and calculation procedures is proposed in order to find the parameter estimates of fuzzy linear regression.
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) [8] is a powerful process to help people to express prioriti... more The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) [8] is a powerful process to help people to express priorities and make the best decision when both qualitative and quantitative aspects of a decision need to be considered. In this paper, in order to eliminate the influence of outliers, we use an approach based on Robust Partial Least Squares (R-PLS)[12] regression for the computation of the values for the weights of a comparison matrix. A simulation study to compare the results with other methods for computing the weights proposed to analyze comparison matrix.
Social Indicators Research
The current literature on the campaigns of political marketing is based on mass communication. Ho... more The current literature on the campaigns of political marketing is based on mass communication. However, the online community introduces new opportunities, one of them is captology. As a part of captology, the persuasive strategies take increasing attention from both authors and practitioners. There is a growing literature that persuasive technologies are useful in the attitudinal and behavioral change of the targeted group, which is the aim of political marketing. This research introduces the persuasive strategies into political marketing literature. In this manuscript, respondents are discriminated based on their susceptibility to the persuasive strategies to determine which persuasive strategy has effects on liberals and conservative. Findings suggest that liberals and conservatives can be discriminated based on their susceptibility to persuasive strategies using machine learning algorithms. The findings of the study offer new insights into political marketing campaigns.
Scientific Bulletin – Economic Sciences, 2019
Tourism is an important concept for the EU countries which is economically the second market in t... more Tourism is an important concept for the EU countries which is economically the second market in the world. The countries try to increase their tourism revenues as they contribute to the economy. International tourism is considered as a major source of exporting revenues for the EU member countries. Having too much importance in the economy, this paper aims to examine the long term and short term relationships among international tourism revenues and tourism related factors such as tourism expenditure, tourist arrivals and GDP of the EU member countries. As a methodology, Granger causality and Johansen cointegration methods are used. The panel data analysis is performed for 22 years using annual data of the EU member countries. The main findings of the tests reveal the existence of long run relationship between tourism revenue and GDP, tourism arrivals and GDP and tourism expenditure and GDP.
En A new family of time series models, called the Full Range Autoregressive model, is introduced ... more En A new family of time series models, called the Full Range Autoregressive model, is introduced which avoids the difficult problem of order determination in time series analysis. Some of the basic statistical properties of the new model are studied.
International Journal of Business and Society, 2014
The success of corporate social initiatives of firms depends largely on the perception of these h... more The success of corporate social initiatives of firms depends largely on the perception of these have from the outside. This perception is liked directly to the values that have developed individuals in the areas where they play their academic or occupational activities. In fact, people in different occupations and education environment develop different value system which influences their behavior and choices. The University environment in Social Sciences studies offered a value opportunity to explore the value structure and how this structure influences the attitudes (patterns/behavior) towards the social initiatives of a company. The current study has pursued to aims. First, basing on existing research, the current study explores whether Schwartz’s value theory is applicable to the Spanish Social Science students at the undergraduate level. Second, the research intend to bring new knowledge to the relationship between basic values and those patterns which determine the perception ...
This chapter aims to identify the difference between conventional and Islamic capital asset prici... more This chapter aims to identify the difference between conventional and Islamic capital asset pricing model in order to ensure the efficient investment management of products and markets. Based on theoretical literature and critical and empirical analysis, it provides key justifications for why and how Islamic capital asset pricing model outperforms the conventional capital asset pricing model. The data has been extracted from 69 companies in the period 2000 to 2017, listed at Karachi stock exchange. It provides potential contribution towards the existing body of knowledge through incorporating risk and return perspective in capital market theory. Here, it has been found that Islamic investment is a low risk investment as compared to a conventional one. Moreover, Islamic lenders must share some proportional in profit and risk, which trade-off in risk shares, not in risk-return. It is suggested that Islamic investment strategy is more profitable than the other in case of direct sharing...
Anomalies are those irregularities that cannot be defined by the standard finance theories. In th... more Anomalies are those irregularities that cannot be defined by the standard finance theories. In this paper, we examined the existence of an intra-month effect and weekend effect in stock returns of Pakistan stock exchange. Data has been gathered from KSE-100 index which is largest and most liquid stock market in Pakistan. Daily stock index data has been gathered from November 2, 1991, through December 31, 2014, which approximates to about 23 years data. Returns on this data were calculated and calendar anomalies were examined. Our results show that there exists an intra-month effect. Similarly, the existence of the weekend effect in the stock market is also observed. Hence, Karachi stock market shows anomalous behavior in the returns.
As a result of changes in approach from traditional to virtual banking system, security in data e... more As a result of changes in approach from traditional to virtual banking system, security in data exchange has become more important; thus, it seems essentially necessary to present a pattern based on smart models in order to reduce fraud in this field. A new algorithm has been provided in this article to improve security and to specify the limits of giving special services to Internet banking users in order to pave appropriate ground for virtual banking. In addition to identifying behavioral models of customers, this algorithm compares the behaviors of any customer with this model and finally computes the rate of trust in customer’s behavior. The hybrid data-mining and knowledge based structure has been adapted in this algorithm according to fuzzy systems. In this research, qualitative data was gathered from interviews with banking experts, analyzed by Expert Choice to identify the most important variables of customer behavior analysis, and to analyze customer behavior and customer b...
EnglishThe objective of this research is to analyze if one of the main components of rural touris... more EnglishThe objective of this research is to analyze if one of the main components of rural tourism destinations, certified rural accommodation establishments in Spain, have appropriate levels of quality implementation to boost the birth and development of competitive rural tourism destinations at national and international level with other destinations. The empirical study was conducted in 221 rural accommodation establishments certified with a national quality standard, specific of the tourism sector. The results show that this standard allows establishments to implement the necessary mechanisms to manage the key areas of the organization adequately from a quality approach. The implementation level of each of the key areas is close to 70%, except for process management that does not exceed 50%. Furthermore, it was found that the way of managing key areas, positively influences the results on customers, employees, society and key results. However, the data show that rural establishm...
Journal of Data Science
We present an analysis of a health survey data by multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and mult... more We present an analysis of a health survey data by multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and multiple taxicab correspondence analysis (MTCA), MTCA being a robust L 1 variant of MCA. The survey has one passive item, gender, and 22 active substantive items representing health services offered by municipal authorities; each active item has four answer categories: this service is used, never tried, tried with no access, non response. We show that the first principal MTCA factor is perfectly characterized by the sum score of the category this service is used over all service items. Further, we prove that such a sum score characterization always exists for any survey data.
Quality & Quantity
Digital transformation and technological advances are causing a radical change in communication s... more Digital transformation and technological advances are causing a radical change in communication structures and in the way information is consumed. With rapid development of computing and the Internet, data is generated, recorded, stored and accumulated on a large scale, making it necessary for economic sectors to act quickly in order to adapt their businesses to the online environment and thus, ensure their own survival. The application of Big Data in tourism enables to transform all this data into useful information, so that companies in the sector can define and optimize their strategies in order to increase their profits. This article performs a comparative bibliometric analysis of the presence and impact of scientific production related to Big Data within the area of tourism research indexed in the WoS and Scopus databases. The aim is to know key aspects such as its growth, correlation, citation, coverage, overlap, dispersion or concentration that will support future researchers when they start their work in this emerging field. From the analysis of the 113 articles selected between the two bases through an advanced search for terms with a time limit set in 2019, it can be concluded that this is a new field of knowledge, which has aroused great interest since 2017, publishing about two thirds of the articles during the period 2017–2019. Although WoS and Scopus differ in general terms in scope and coverage policies, both systems are complementary and not exclusive. In the specific area of Big Data and Tourism Research, Scopus is the base that provides better coverage by collecting a higher number of articles and receiving more citations.
Quality & Quantity
Social media platforms, which are accepted as a channel for selling, listening and receiving cont... more Social media platforms, which are accepted as a channel for selling, listening and receiving continuous feedback from customers, have the opportunity to expand beyond the limits of traditional mass media channels. Social media mechanisms work well if the right message is delivered to the right person, so knowing the person concerned is a prerequisite for communication. This article aims to explore the potential of photos shared, liked and commented on social media as a consumer segmentation tool. The findings of study should help understand customer segments and deliver customized products, services, and advertisements. An online survey consisting of pictures and items was conducted in Turkey. The aim was to evaluate users' pictorial preferences to identify different consumer segments. The Support Vector Machine procedure revealed the existence of two clusters. It enables them to recognize different segments, to see marketers as individuals in order to communicate with themselves and to understand world views from a variety of perspectives.
Accreditation and Quality Assurance, 2012
In recent decades it has become increasingly important for public research centres to attract ext... more In recent decades it has become increasingly important for public research centres to attract external clients, including government, private and public bodies and companies. They do this by demonstrating their research excellence. A research centre's ability to provide professional research services can be assessed by competent technical bodies which verify that the research centre's laboratories operate according to certain predetermined criteria or standards. Although there is no set of generally accepted standards, some regional accreditation bodies already offer accreditation assessment for the R&D laboratories which are in their territory. This article analyses the successful application of a quality management system (QMS) in a public research centre employing 57 people including researchers, technicians and administrative staff. This system is based on the scheme of regional accreditation of industrial research laboratories which was inspired by ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 17025:2005 and set up by the regional authority. The overall aim of the management system is to monitor all of the industrial research and services which the centre offers to external users, such as government, private and public bodies and companies, and to guarantee that final products, usually technical reports and prototypes, respond to their needs. The accreditation applies to all of the activity of the research centre except for basic research. In this article the critical factors influencing the success of the implementation of the management system are outlined together with benefits and opportunities. Weak points and problems are analysed, and the actions which were undertaken in order to prevent and manage problems are described.
In addition to acknowledging the members of the Editorial Board, the Editors would like to thank ... more In addition to acknowledging the members of the Editorial Board, the Editors would like to thank the persons reported below for their kindly help in reviewing EJASA papers.
The problem of studying the causes of obesity is largely discussed in the literature by experts i... more The problem of studying the causes of obesity is largely discussed in the literature by experts in nutrition and related diseases and is of particular interest in most recent years among scholars of business disciplines, especially as regards the impact on socio-health costs. After an overview of the geographical differences of obesity, related not only to eating habits, but also to lifestyles as well as hereditary factors, the purpose of this paper is try to trace the main functional relationships between BMI and health-care costs through the use of Multiple Corrispondence Analysis and Partial Least Squares Regression.
This work is copyrighted by Università del Salento, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attr... more This work is copyrighted by Università del Salento, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License. For more information see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/it/ Anomalies are those irregularities that cannot be defined by the standard finance theories. In this paper, we examined the existence of an intra-month effect and weekend effect in stock returns of Pakistan stock exchange. which approximates to about 23 years data. Returns on this data were calculated and calendar anomalies were examined. Our results show that there exists an intra-month effect. Similarly, the existence of the weekend effect in the stock market is also observed. Hence, Karachi stock market shows anomalous behavior in the returns.
Algorithms as a Basis of Modern Applied Mathematics
The parameter estimation methods of fuzzy linear regression available in the literature have adap... more The parameter estimation methods of fuzzy linear regression available in the literature have adapted several techniques ranging from mathematical programming to fuzzy least squares which is based on distance notion. Therefore, the literature is vast. However, researchers still try to look for a method that is expected to have estimated spreads as small as possible and good predictions. Each parameter estimation method proposed in the literature has treated fuzzy numbers based on how it implements the data. Namely, the proposed methods somehow restrict the usage of the fuzzy data. In this chapter, a novel method consisting of new notions and calculation procedures is proposed in order to find the parameter estimates of fuzzy linear regression.
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) [8] is a powerful process to help people to express prioriti... more The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) [8] is a powerful process to help people to express priorities and make the best decision when both qualitative and quantitative aspects of a decision need to be considered. In this paper, in order to eliminate the influence of outliers, we use an approach based on Robust Partial Least Squares (R-PLS)[12] regression for the computation of the values for the weights of a comparison matrix. A simulation study to compare the results with other methods for computing the weights proposed to analyze comparison matrix.
Social Indicators Research
The current literature on the campaigns of political marketing is based on mass communication. Ho... more The current literature on the campaigns of political marketing is based on mass communication. However, the online community introduces new opportunities, one of them is captology. As a part of captology, the persuasive strategies take increasing attention from both authors and practitioners. There is a growing literature that persuasive technologies are useful in the attitudinal and behavioral change of the targeted group, which is the aim of political marketing. This research introduces the persuasive strategies into political marketing literature. In this manuscript, respondents are discriminated based on their susceptibility to the persuasive strategies to determine which persuasive strategy has effects on liberals and conservative. Findings suggest that liberals and conservatives can be discriminated based on their susceptibility to persuasive strategies using machine learning algorithms. The findings of the study offer new insights into political marketing campaigns.
Scientific Bulletin – Economic Sciences, 2019
Tourism is an important concept for the EU countries which is economically the second market in t... more Tourism is an important concept for the EU countries which is economically the second market in the world. The countries try to increase their tourism revenues as they contribute to the economy. International tourism is considered as a major source of exporting revenues for the EU member countries. Having too much importance in the economy, this paper aims to examine the long term and short term relationships among international tourism revenues and tourism related factors such as tourism expenditure, tourist arrivals and GDP of the EU member countries. As a methodology, Granger causality and Johansen cointegration methods are used. The panel data analysis is performed for 22 years using annual data of the EU member countries. The main findings of the tests reveal the existence of long run relationship between tourism revenue and GDP, tourism arrivals and GDP and tourism expenditure and GDP.
En A new family of time series models, called the Full Range Autoregressive model, is introduced ... more En A new family of time series models, called the Full Range Autoregressive model, is introduced which avoids the difficult problem of order determination in time series analysis. Some of the basic statistical properties of the new model are studied.
International Journal of Business and Society, 2014
The success of corporate social initiatives of firms depends largely on the perception of these h... more The success of corporate social initiatives of firms depends largely on the perception of these have from the outside. This perception is liked directly to the values that have developed individuals in the areas where they play their academic or occupational activities. In fact, people in different occupations and education environment develop different value system which influences their behavior and choices. The University environment in Social Sciences studies offered a value opportunity to explore the value structure and how this structure influences the attitudes (patterns/behavior) towards the social initiatives of a company. The current study has pursued to aims. First, basing on existing research, the current study explores whether Schwartz’s value theory is applicable to the Spanish Social Science students at the undergraduate level. Second, the research intend to bring new knowledge to the relationship between basic values and those patterns which determine the perception ...
This chapter aims to identify the difference between conventional and Islamic capital asset prici... more This chapter aims to identify the difference between conventional and Islamic capital asset pricing model in order to ensure the efficient investment management of products and markets. Based on theoretical literature and critical and empirical analysis, it provides key justifications for why and how Islamic capital asset pricing model outperforms the conventional capital asset pricing model. The data has been extracted from 69 companies in the period 2000 to 2017, listed at Karachi stock exchange. It provides potential contribution towards the existing body of knowledge through incorporating risk and return perspective in capital market theory. Here, it has been found that Islamic investment is a low risk investment as compared to a conventional one. Moreover, Islamic lenders must share some proportional in profit and risk, which trade-off in risk shares, not in risk-return. It is suggested that Islamic investment strategy is more profitable than the other in case of direct sharing...
Anomalies are those irregularities that cannot be defined by the standard finance theories. In th... more Anomalies are those irregularities that cannot be defined by the standard finance theories. In this paper, we examined the existence of an intra-month effect and weekend effect in stock returns of Pakistan stock exchange. Data has been gathered from KSE-100 index which is largest and most liquid stock market in Pakistan. Daily stock index data has been gathered from November 2, 1991, through December 31, 2014, which approximates to about 23 years data. Returns on this data were calculated and calendar anomalies were examined. Our results show that there exists an intra-month effect. Similarly, the existence of the weekend effect in the stock market is also observed. Hence, Karachi stock market shows anomalous behavior in the returns.
As a result of changes in approach from traditional to virtual banking system, security in data e... more As a result of changes in approach from traditional to virtual banking system, security in data exchange has become more important; thus, it seems essentially necessary to present a pattern based on smart models in order to reduce fraud in this field. A new algorithm has been provided in this article to improve security and to specify the limits of giving special services to Internet banking users in order to pave appropriate ground for virtual banking. In addition to identifying behavioral models of customers, this algorithm compares the behaviors of any customer with this model and finally computes the rate of trust in customer’s behavior. The hybrid data-mining and knowledge based structure has been adapted in this algorithm according to fuzzy systems. In this research, qualitative data was gathered from interviews with banking experts, analyzed by Expert Choice to identify the most important variables of customer behavior analysis, and to analyze customer behavior and customer b...
EnglishThe objective of this research is to analyze if one of the main components of rural touris... more EnglishThe objective of this research is to analyze if one of the main components of rural tourism destinations, certified rural accommodation establishments in Spain, have appropriate levels of quality implementation to boost the birth and development of competitive rural tourism destinations at national and international level with other destinations. The empirical study was conducted in 221 rural accommodation establishments certified with a national quality standard, specific of the tourism sector. The results show that this standard allows establishments to implement the necessary mechanisms to manage the key areas of the organization adequately from a quality approach. The implementation level of each of the key areas is close to 70%, except for process management that does not exceed 50%. Furthermore, it was found that the way of managing key areas, positively influences the results on customers, employees, society and key results. However, the data show that rural establishm...
Journal of Data Science
We present an analysis of a health survey data by multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and mult... more We present an analysis of a health survey data by multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and multiple taxicab correspondence analysis (MTCA), MTCA being a robust L 1 variant of MCA. The survey has one passive item, gender, and 22 active substantive items representing health services offered by municipal authorities; each active item has four answer categories: this service is used, never tried, tried with no access, non response. We show that the first principal MTCA factor is perfectly characterized by the sum score of the category this service is used over all service items. Further, we prove that such a sum score characterization always exists for any survey data.
Quality & Quantity
Digital transformation and technological advances are causing a radical change in communication s... more Digital transformation and technological advances are causing a radical change in communication structures and in the way information is consumed. With rapid development of computing and the Internet, data is generated, recorded, stored and accumulated on a large scale, making it necessary for economic sectors to act quickly in order to adapt their businesses to the online environment and thus, ensure their own survival. The application of Big Data in tourism enables to transform all this data into useful information, so that companies in the sector can define and optimize their strategies in order to increase their profits. This article performs a comparative bibliometric analysis of the presence and impact of scientific production related to Big Data within the area of tourism research indexed in the WoS and Scopus databases. The aim is to know key aspects such as its growth, correlation, citation, coverage, overlap, dispersion or concentration that will support future researchers when they start their work in this emerging field. From the analysis of the 113 articles selected between the two bases through an advanced search for terms with a time limit set in 2019, it can be concluded that this is a new field of knowledge, which has aroused great interest since 2017, publishing about two thirds of the articles during the period 2017–2019. Although WoS and Scopus differ in general terms in scope and coverage policies, both systems are complementary and not exclusive. In the specific area of Big Data and Tourism Research, Scopus is the base that provides better coverage by collecting a higher number of articles and receiving more citations.
Quality & Quantity
Social media platforms, which are accepted as a channel for selling, listening and receiving cont... more Social media platforms, which are accepted as a channel for selling, listening and receiving continuous feedback from customers, have the opportunity to expand beyond the limits of traditional mass media channels. Social media mechanisms work well if the right message is delivered to the right person, so knowing the person concerned is a prerequisite for communication. This article aims to explore the potential of photos shared, liked and commented on social media as a consumer segmentation tool. The findings of study should help understand customer segments and deliver customized products, services, and advertisements. An online survey consisting of pictures and items was conducted in Turkey. The aim was to evaluate users' pictorial preferences to identify different consumer segments. The Support Vector Machine procedure revealed the existence of two clusters. It enables them to recognize different segments, to see marketers as individuals in order to communicate with themselves and to understand world views from a variety of perspectives.