Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009.
ELearning provides healthcare professionals an interesting alternative of participating to Continuing Medical Education (CME) activities. It offers the possibility to attend courses at a distance, and it allows creating personal learning schedules without needing to leave the job or the family. Hospitals can choose to organize CME activities for their employees and therefore may also opt to...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009.
Discussion on the introduction of the smoking ban in Ticino has all the characteristics of a debate, where every participant takes a position. In this context, observing argumentative content means reconstructing the core of the discussion. However, understanding argumentative content is difficult because argumentation is a complex activity. Content analysis allows reconstruction of a small...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009 ; 2009ECO002.
The present work explores the option pricing world under three different perspectives: theoretical models, numerical methods and real options. In the first chapter we develop a novel option pricing model. We define a stochastic volatility process for the underlying evolution using the realized volatility as a proxy of the true but unobservable volatility of the underlying. That reduces...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009 ; 2009INFO002.
Performance and high-availability are the crucial factors in the development of nowadays distributed database systems. Both of these challenges are commonly addressed by means of the same technique, database replication. The overall throughput of the system is increased by leveraging parallel computation on different sites, and in case of replica failures, availability is improved by...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009 ; 2009INFO003.
Approximation algorithms are motivated by the fact that for many important optimization problems we cannot hope to efficiently find an optimal solution (unless P=NP). Instead, we have to settle for second best — a solution that is close to being optimal. A natural question that arises is: how close to the optimal solution can one get with an efficient algorithm? The past two decades have...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009 ; 2009ECO001.
The aim of this thesis project is to investigate the managerial behavior, the conflict of interest as well as the flow of information in the financial markets, in particular in the setting around equity offerings. An Initial Public Offering (IPO)s represents a fertile testing ground for these topics as this event constitutes a major structural change in the life of a company. At the time of...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009.
The doctorate is a degree that has been influenced by developments in society and higher education over the last decades. The international literature has widely acknowledged differences in the doctorate between disciplines as well as between national contexts. In some contexts, new types of doctoral degrees, including professional doctorates, have emerged. This piece of research is interested in...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009.
L’obiettivo di questa tesi è quello di analizzare il ruolo del giornalismo quale fonte delle rappresentazioni pubbliche del sistema politico, prendendo come caso di studio il particolare contesto mediatico e culturale italiano. Un caso di studio che ha messo in luce la fragilità del sistema dell’informazione contemporanea, apportando evidenze empiriche al modello descrittivo...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009 ; 2009INFO001.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a fast developing research area with many new exciting applications arising, ranging from micro climate and environmental monitoring through health and structural monitoring to interplanetary communications. At the same time researchers have invested a lot of time and effort into developing high performance energy efficient and reliable communication protocols...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2008 ; 2008ECO006.
The existence of asymmetric information amongst market’s agents determines consequences and behaviour that can impact investors’ decision processes. This thesis is an empirical analysis of some of this consequences. It is composed of three integrated essays. The first two investigate the impact on the firm’s cost of capital and on the firm’s trading liquidity from a reduction in the...
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