Internet and mature industries. Its role in the creation of value in the supply chain. The case of tile ceramic manufacturers and distributors in Spain

For traditional industries it is a real challenge, not only to achieve a clear product differentiation, but also to provide adequate services in order to ensure value and customer fidelity.     

Acoustic sounding of the atmosphere

Measurement of vertical and horizontal wind velocity is of great importance in many contexts, such as investigation of air pollution, weather forecasting, and air-traffic control. In recent years continuously recording acoustic sounders have been developed which give reliable results at reasonable cost: some 200 are now in use in at least 15 countries.     

Can public arts education replace arts subsidization?

The debate about whether the arts should be supported or not is far from new, and most governments support the arts in one way or the other. The literature considers several arguments in favor of such interventions. Public education may seem to be an action which could, in the long run, lead to possible reductions of subsidies. Surveys show that those who have been exposed to the arts when young participate more when adult. However, the “non-market” transmission from parents to children generates an external effect, which has to be taken into account to reach first-best situations. We construct an overlapping generations model in which young consumers are exposed to both public education toward the arts and to non-altruistic transmission of such a taste from their parents. We show that the first-best can be reached only if there is both public cultural education and subsidization of arts consumption. Therefore, education cannot be considered as a substitute for subsidies to arts consumption. However, as is often the case in European countries, government intervention is usually below the first-best level. Using a model calibrated on French data, we show that it is then preferable to subsidize education, while consumption, especially of the older generations, should be taxed rather than subsidized.

My lost museum: User expectations and motivations for creating personal digital collections on museum websites

The recent development of personal digital collections systems on museum websites has prompted researchers to examine the motivations and expectations of museum visitors as they interact with those systems. Results from an online survey completed by visitors to six different museum websites show that users of personal digital collections systems are primarily motivated by a desire to create simple collections of objects and images, and are less influenced by the more complicated features museums have implemented to encourage user participation. The significance of these findings is explored through a discussion of user expectations and motivations with respect to creating personal digital collections, and an attempt is made to reconcile some of the disparities between the perceptions of survey respondents and the experiences of museum professionals developing and implementing personal digital collections systems.