Marco Guerzoni

The Emerging Crowdfunding Market in Italy: Are “the Crowd” Friends of Mine?

Emerging literature on crowdfunding, until now, is missing detailed empirical analyses on profiles of “crowdfunders”. Our paper aims to address this shortage, analyzing geographical and socio-economic characteristics of crowdfunders, looking at how crowdfunding influences the nature of geography and social contacts in new ventures. Our analysis concentrates on Italy, a country suffering for a huge economic crisis but that, at the same time, is showing a strong dynamism in crowdfunding. We collect data on donors of about 350 projects, estimating with a micro-econometric model not only which donors’ characteristics increase the likelihood of an investment, but also the role played by social media in the crowdfunding process. Our results give some remarkable indications about crowdfunding in different countries and cultural contexts.

Variety in the Automobile Industry

The automobile manufacturing industry, along with its dealers and suppliers, is one of the industry that most contributes to the American economic growth: it generates about 3.7 % of American GDP by producing and selling new light vehicles, a level of output higher than any other industry of comparable aggregation.

HPC4AI: an AI-on-demand federated platform endeavour

In April 2018, under the auspices of the POR-FESR 2014-2020 program of Italian Piedmont Region, the Turins Centre on High-Performance Computing for Artificial Intelligence (HPC4AI) was funded with a capital investment of 4.5M€ and it began its deployment. HPC4AI aims to facilitate scientific research and engineering in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics. HPC4AI will specifically focus on methods for the on-demand provisioning of AI and BDA Cloud services to the regional and national industrial community, which includes the large regional ecosystem of Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) active in many different sectors such as automotive, aerospace, mechatronics, manufacturing, health and agrifood.

Beyond Class Stratification: The Rise of the Eclectic Music Consumer in the Modern Age

This article contributes to the literature on the association between class position and cultural tastes by analyzing a unique historical data set and asking whether there were significant class differences in the consumption of music in the 19th century. Archival data from a publisher in Milan are used to analyze the characteristics of customers who purchased sheet music between 1814 and 1823. To avoid contemporary depictions of cultural hierarchies (e.g. ‘highbrow’, ‘lowbrow’ and ‘omnivorous’ tastes), we offer a new method for considering both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of music consumption. Considering both the aggregate level of music consumption and the evolution of individual patterns over time, we find little evidence that musical tastes were aligned with class position. This finding calls for more research on the origins of the strong link between social structure and cultural preferences in general, or between class position and musical tastes in particular, which we witness today.

The Economics of Variety

In this chapter, I review the theoretical basis for the economic analysis of variety. The goal of this chapter is twofold: I want to position critically my work and developed few useful concepts. In particular, I will describe two approaches to the issue of variety and point out their different conclusions on the nature of variety generation and its limits.