The main purpose of this paper is to present an empirical analysis of the sequence relating the performance of the firm to its behavior, which in turn depends upon the origin and personal characteristics of the entrepreneurs. The data are drawn from new Spanish firms. A typology of new entrepreneurs is constructed, based on their basic work aspirations. Each type of entrepreneur is then examined, in terms of the origin and personal characteristics of the members of the class. The results of the study show that significant differences exist among the entrepreneurs and firms of each type, especially in terms of the size of the firm (number of employees) and its evolution over time. The implications of these results, for the theory of entrepreneurship and for the design of policies towards the creation of new firms, are then derived.
The aim of this study is to analyze the antecedents of urban waste recycling behavior. To achieve this goal, a concrete urban waste management program was chosen. The study focuses on the Selective Collection Program (SCP) in Zaragoza, a medium-sized city in northeastern Spain. The research starts with a conceptual model in which the variables that potentially affect recycling behavior can be classified into two groups: incentives and barriers. Moreover, the sociodemographic characteristics of the individuals are included in our study. Given that the proposed model requires specification of latent variables or constructs, the analysis is based on the Structural Equation Models (SEM) methodology. The results revealed that environmental awareness, knowledge of the environmental impact of urban waste, and the positive perception of management by local government exercise a positive effect on individual recycling behavior, while perceived personal difficulties (space and time availability) and distance to and from the container have a negative effect. As regards sociodemographic variables, this study found that annual family income sustains a negative relationship with recycling behavior, while age maintains a positive one. The results obtained clearly show the important role that the public authorities play, especially municipal governments, in achieving the waste recycling objectives established in accordance with international legislation.
The consensus problem is a fundamental paradigm in distributed systems, because it captures the difficulty to solve other agreement problems. Many current systems evolve with time, e.g., due to node mobility, and consensus has been little studied in these systems so far. Specifically, it is not well established how to define an appropriate set of assumptions for consensus in dynamic distributed systems. This paper studies a hierarchy of three classes of time-varying graphs, and provides a solution for each class to the problem of Terminating Reliable Broadcast (TRB). The classes introduce increasingly stronger assumptions on timeliness, so that the trade-off between weakness versus implementability and efficiency can be analysed. Being TRB equivalent to consensus in synchronous systems, the paper extends this equivalence to dynamic systems.
A new class of models, formalisms and mechanisms has recently evolved for describing concurrent and distributed computations based on the concept of "coordination". The purpose of a coordination model and associated language is to provide a means of integrating a number of possibly heterogeneous components together, by interfacing with each component in such a way that the collective set forms a single application that can execute on and take advantage of parallel and distributed systems. In this chapter we initially define and present in sufficient detail the fundamental concepts of what constitutes a coordination model or language. We then go on to classify these models and languages as either "data-driven" or "control-driven" (also called "process-" or "task-oriented"). Next, the main existing coordination models and languages are described in sufficient detail to let the reader appreciate their features and put them into perspective with respect to each other. The chapter ends with a discussion comparing the various models and some conclusions.
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