There is limited knowledge on the extent to which scientists may strategically respond to metrics by adopting questionable practices, namely practices that challenge the scientific ethos, and the individual and contextual factors that affect their likelihood. This article aims to fill these gaps by studying the opportunistic use of selfcitations, i.e. citations of one's own work to boost metric scores. Based on sociological and economic literature exploring the factors driving scientists' behaviour, we develop hypotheses on the predictors of strategic increase in self-citations. We test the hypotheses in the Italian Higher Education system, where promotion to professorial positions is regulated by a national habilitation procedure that considers the number of publications and citations received. The sample includes 886 scientists from four of science's main disciplinary sectors, employs different metrics approaches, and covers an observation period beginning in 2002 and ending in 2014. We find that the introduction of a regulation that links the possibility of career advancement to the number of citations received is related to a strong and significant increase in self-citations among scientists who can benefit the most from increasing citations, namely assistant professors, associate professors and relatively less cited scientists, and in particular among social scientists. Our findings suggest that while metrics are introduced to spur virtuous behaviours, when not properly designed they favour the usage of questionable practices.

This paper investigates the connectivity of the European air transportation network. A time-dependent minimum path approach is employed to calculate the minimum travel time between each pair of airports in the network, inclusive of flight times and waiting times. The connectivity offered by each alliance's network is compared with that of the overall network. The results show that roughly twothirds of the fastest indirect connections are not operated by the alliance system; this could be exploited to enable a new passenger strategy of ''self-help hubbing''. r

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Gestionale è approvato dal Comitato di Redazione. I Working Papers della Collana costituiscono un servizio atto a fornire la tempestiva divulgazione dei risultati dell'attività di ricerca, siano essi in forma provvisoria o definitiva.

Purpose This study aims to explore the propensity of university students to use different sustainable transport modes, taking into account individual and specific trip characteristics, as well as students’ psychological traits (i.e. attitudes). Design/methodology/approach Using the transport mode preferences of 827 students who responded to a travel survey, a two-step analysis is conducted. The first step examines the effects of individual characteristics, travel experience and origin or destination features on students’ stated preferences (i.e. self-selected values assigned to personal attitudes). The second step analyses students’ travel mode choices, given their intrinsic mobility attitudes. Findings The results suggest that informing students about environmental issues increases their propensity to use sustainable mobility, leading to an average decrease in private transport usage of 5.8 per cent. Interestingly, improving the public transport service and promoting sustainable transport mobility have different impacts on individual campus areas. For campuses located in the city centre and in the historical hamlet, improvements in public transport are found to decrease solo driving by 3.3 per cent and 5.3 per cent, respectively. In suburban areas, this value increases to 9.5 per cent. Originality/value This work makes two contributions to the literature. First, it focuses on an unexplored setting, namely, that of a multi-campus university, with districts located in three different areas. This is used to explain how students are influenced by their travel experience and the cultural framework in which they are embedded. Second, the two-step analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the differences between attitudes and “intrinsic attitudes”, and their relative influence on the preferred alternative.

The ability to attract students has progressively become a crucial factor for the survival of universities in Southern European countries, due to decreasing governmental funding. Using a competing destinations model for the population of 75 Italian universities in the period 2002-2012, this paper investigates whether they compete for students and how this rivalry has evolved in response to changing enrolment demand. First, we find that there is competition for students among Italian universities. Second, we document that the characteristics of the competition forces changed after the recent financial crisis, with universities located in close proximity to others (i.e., belonging to agglomerated "clusters") becoming more attractive to students.

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