Publications related to Competitive Pressure on the Rate and Scope of Innovation

Flood, farms and credit: The role of branch banking in the era of climate change

Using Iran's unexpected flood in April 2019 as a natural experiment, we show that local branches bridge the time gap between the disaster and governmental aids by immediately increasing their lending for two months following the flood. Analyzing proprietar ...

Elsevier2024

Reversible photo-electrochemical device for solar hydrogen and power generation

Sophia Haussener, Alexandre Dominique M. Cattry, Saurabh Yuvraj Tembhurne, Matthieu Jonin, Mahendra Patel

A reversible photo-electrochemical device operating under concentrated irradiation could offer a stand-alone solution for producing solar fuel (in photo-driven electrolysis mode) and power (in fuel cell mode). This strategy would present the advantage of h ...

2024

Non-intrusive physiological parameters sensing for personalized human thermal comfort prediction

Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Dolaana Khovalyg, Mohamad Rida, Mohamed Ossama Ahmed Abdelfattah

Sensing and projecting an individual’s human thermal comfort in buildings is a complex but crucial task for transitioning toward human-centered indoor climate control. Non-intrusive collection of physiological and personal information from the human body, ...

2023

Assessing the readiness of municipalities for digital process innovation

Mert Duygan

Pre-adoption phases of innovation are understudied in the innovation literature. This article addresses preadoption phases of innovation by running a prospective analysis. We assess the readiness of municipalities for the adoption of a digital tool that br ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2023

Prompting Large Language Models to Power Educational Chatbots

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Juan Carlos Farah, Fanny Kim-Lan Lasne

The recent rise in both popularity and performance of large language models has garnered considerable interest regarding their applicability to education. Technologies like ChatGPT, which can engage in human-like dialog, have already disrupted educational ...

Springer2023

Expert perceptions of game-changing innovations towards net zero

Marc Vielle, Sigit Pria Perdana

Current technological improvements are yet to put the world on track to net-zero, which will require the uptake of transformative low-carbon innovations to supplement mitigation efforts. However, the role of such innovations is not yet fully understood; so ...

2023

Geotechnical Engineering in the Digital and Technological Innovation Era

The book collects the keynote contributions and the papers presented at the “8th Italian Conference of Researchers in Geotechnical Engineering 2023, CNRIG’23”. The conference was held on July 5–7, 2023, at the University of Palermo (Italy), and it was orga ...

Springer2023

Harnessing Rule-Based Chatbots to Support Teaching Python Programming Best Practices

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Adrian Christian Holzer, Juan Carlos Farah

In recent years, the use of chatbots in education has been driven by advances in natural language processing and the increasing availability of digital education platforms. Although the added value of educational chatbots appears promising, researchers hav ...

Springer2023

Transit Time Estimation in Catchments: Recent Developments and Future Directions

Andrea Rinaldo, Gianluca Botter, Myungjin Kim, Paolo Benettin

Water transit time is now a standard measure in catchment hydrological and ecohydrological research. The last comprehensive review of transit time modeling approaches was published 15+ years ago. But since then the field has largely expanded with new data, ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2022

Optimization and equilibrium problems with discrete choice models

Stefano Bortolomiol

Many transportation markets are characterized by oligopolistic competition. In these markets customers, suppliers and regulators make decisions that are influenced by the preferences and the decisions of all other agents. In particular, capturing and under ...

EPFL2022

Mixplorer: Scaffolding Design Space Exploration through Genetic Recombination of Multiple Peoples’ Designs to Support Novices’ Creativity

Pierre Dillenbourg, Kevin Gonyop Kim, Richard Lee Davis

The ability to consider a wide range of solutions to a design problem is a crucial skill for designers, and is a major differentiator between experts and novices. One reason for this is that novices are unaware of the full extent of the design space in whi ...

2022

Determining crack kinematics from imaged crack patterns

Katrin Beyer, Amir Rezaie, Bryan German Pantoja Rosero, Ketson Roberto Maximiano Dos Santos

Determining the relationship between the cause of damage and the subsequent structural behavior of infrastructure systems requires an accurate characterization of the propagation of cracks, which represents the evolution of the damage state. When no inform ...

2022

Essays on the Economics of Innovation: Incentives, Diffusion, and Disparity

Ling Zhou

As an important policy instrument for guiding innovation, the patent system involves a long-standing tension between creating economic rewards for the original innovators and stifling subsequent R&D activities. The availability of new data allows us to pro ...

EPFL2021

Test rooms to study human comfort in buildings: A review of controlled experiments and facilities

Dusan Licina, Mengdi Kong

Occupants' comfort perception affects building energy consumptions. To improve the understanding of human comfort, which is crucial to reduce energy demand, laboratory experiments with humans in controlled environments (test rooms) are fundamental, but the ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2021

Price-based regulation of oligopolistic markets under discrete choice models of demand

Michel Bierlaire, Virginie Janine Camille Lurkin, Stefano Bortolomiol

We propose a framework to find optimal price-based policies to regulate markets characterized by oligopolistic competition and in which consumers make a discrete choice among a finite set of alternatives. The framework accommodates general discrete choice ...

2022

Measures against the abandonment of common property summer pastures: experimental evidence from joint appropriation-provision games

Ivo Philippe Baur

Common property summer pastures constitute longstanding evidence that the tragedy of the commons can be prevented through self-organization. As a byproduct of their sustainable governance, high nature value farming systems with well-integrated patchy lands ...

RESILIENCE ALLIANCE2021

Adapting Virtual Embodiment through Reinforcement Learning

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut, Yawen Hou

In Virtual Reality, having a virtual body opens a wide range of possibilities as the participant's avatar can appear to be quite different from oneself for the sake of the targeted application (e.g. for perspective-taking). In addition, the system can part ...

2021

A Simulation-Based Heuristic to Find Approximate Equilibria with Disaggregate Demand Models

Michel Bierlaire, Virginie Janine Camille Lurkin, Stefano Bortolomiol

Oligopolistic competition occurs in various transportation markets. In this paper, we introduce a framework to find approximate equilibrium solutions of oligopolistic markets in which demand is modeled at the disaggregate level using discrete choice models ...

INFORMS2021

Does protectionist anti-takeover legislation lead to managerial entrenchment?

Marc André Frattaroli

I study a protectionist anti takeover law introduced in 2014 that covers a subset of all firms in the economy. The law decreased affected firms' likelihood of becoming the target of a merger or acquisition and had a negative impact on shareholder value. Th ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA2020

Metropolitan Innovation Systems: Inquiry into the co-evolving relations between Industry, University and Government

Jiayun Shen

Innovation is crucial and decisive for the long-term development of a metropolitan region in the global economy. While firms certainly play a significant role in the development of specific innovation, the environment that nur-tures innovative firms and di ...

EPFL2020