infonet-economy

Web platforms and applications are generating a normalized environment for users to consume information. This process of making the Internet experience “clickable” and “fun” comes at a price: we are less inclined to face important decisions on how applications work, data are handled, or how algorithms decide. This article will examine the possibility of shifting from predetermined...

Consumer behaviour is often complex and even sometimes not economically rational. Wrongly, the first techno-economic energy planning models assumed the economic rationality hypothesis and, therefore, represented consumers’ behaviour incorrectly. Nevertheless, the current trend is to couple these models with behavioural approaches that were specially developed to describe the real...

Based on qualitative research that was conducted on enterprises from the industrial sector, we acquired new knowledge on the use and the needs of management accounting and control practices. The focus of the study was small and middle industries based in the French-speaking part of Switzerland using an ERP (Enterprise Resources Planning) system. The research aims to highlight the...

We present a numerical model for the simulation of 3D poly-dispersed sediment transport in a Newtonian flow with free surfaces. The physical model is based on a mixture model for multiphase flows. The Navier–Stokes equations are coupled with the transport and deposition of the particle concentrations, and a volume-of-fluid approach to track the free surface between water and air. The...

In the context of home healthcare services, patients may need to be visited multiple times by different healthcare specialists who may use a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles. In addition, some of these visits may need to be synchronized with each other for performing a treatment at the same time. We call this problem the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with Synchronized...

Environmental taxes are often underexploited. This paper analyses the effectiveness of a garbage tax, assessing its effects on multiple outcomes as well as its acceptability. We study how a Supreme Court decision, mandating the Swiss Canton of Vaud to implement a tax on garbage, affects garbage production and beliefs about the tax. We adopt a difference-in-differences approach...

This paper focuses on the application of tractable route choice models and presents a set of methods for deriving relevant disaggregate and aggregate route choice indicators, namely link and route flows. Tractability is achieved at the disaggregate level by the recursive logit model and at the aggregate level by the mental representation item (MRI) approach. These two approaches are...

The consensus that complexity begets stability in ecosystems was challenged in the seventies, a result recently extended to ecologically-inspired networks. The approaches assume the existence of a feasible equilibrium, i.e. with positive abundances. However, this key assumption has not been tested. We provide analytical results complemented by simulations which show that equilibrium...