Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale

1. Economics and regulation of network industries
2. Operations management
3. Productivity and efficiency analysis
4. Project Management
5. R&D, Innovation, and public policies
6. Strategic Management
7. Sustainability and environmental management

For each research line, the main research topics are highlighted as follows:

1. Economics and regulation of network industries
   • Competition, regulation, investment incentives, and industrial policy in network industries, with a focus on air transport, rail transport, local public transport and utilities
   • Game-theoretic models to assess the welfare effects of access conditions to enduring economic bottlenecks, depending on the vertical industry structure, with a focus on telecommunications and transportation
   • Allocation and pricing of scarce network resources
   • Sharing economy and peer-to-peer platforms
   • Standard cost assessment of public transport
   • Efficiency and effectiveness analysis regarding local public transport
   • Strategic and business aspects of rolling stock management for public transport (introduction of alternative fuel technologies)
   • Changes on mobility-framework towards more sustainable solutions
   • Economic benchmarking of transport modes
   • Competition in passenger transportation markets
   • Dynamic congestion
2. Operations management
   • Auction mechanism for valuable economic resources allocation with complementarity/substitutability relationships, cost analysis, top-down and bottom-up cost models
   • Operational aspects of environmental sustainability practices at both the company and the network level
3. Productivity and efficiency analysis
   • Theoretical, methodological, and empirical models for the assessment of efficiency, effectiveness and impact.
   • Advanced nonparametric and robust methods for the assessment of public and private services
   • Performance evaluation of academy departments and heterogeneity analysis of European higher education institutions
   • Investigations on the economics, management, and modeling of scientific research and higher education
4. Project Management
   • Business opportunities and social welfare resulting from an effective integration of sustainability principles inside project management practices both at corporate and project manager individual level
   • Managerial implications of project management practices and organizational aspects (e.g., informal social networks, individuals’ and small groups’ behavior, culture) with interest in specific emergent contexts such as industry 4.0, circular economy, and cyber security
5. R&D, Innovation, and public policies
   • Theoretical and empirical models for analyzing the drivers of innovative performance, with a focus on externalities, public policies’ impact on R&D strategies, and welfare effects
   • Analysis of the interplay among competition, regulation, and the incentives to invest in product quality, with a focus on research-intensive industries
   • Economics of privacy regulation, with a focus on the role of consumer data in innovation processes (e.g., for data-driven health innovation)
6. Strategic Management
   • Ownership and corporate governance mechanisms and their interaction with the institutional variety as drivers of firm’s internationalization strategies
7. Sustainability and environmental management
   • Operational and business aspects of circular economy strategies, e.g., industrial symbiosis, renewable energy production, waste management, bioeconomy, industry 4.0
   • Circular business models
   • Operational and managerial aspects linked to relevant strategic transitions of companies, i.e., the servitization of business and the digital transformation of business
   • Consumer behavior towards the adoption of green innovations
   • Antecedents, outcomes, and success factors of the integration of environmental sustainability within firm strategies and innovation development
   • Effects of trade liberalization in environmental goods as a means of helping developed and developing countries alike deal with environmental problems

Finally, the group has established scientific collaborations with national and international public institutions and universities. It is part of the European Network of Indicators Designers (ENID) and of the observatory on Local Public Transport of the Ministry of Infrastructures and Transport (MIT). It has implemented and implements collaborations with several institutions, e.g.,: (1) the National Agency for University and Scientific Research Evaluation (ANVUR), the Ministry of Education, Universities, and Research (MIUR) concerning the evaluation of the impact of public policies for higher education and scientific research; the Ministry of infrastructures and Transport and the European Commission on the themes of the standard cost of local public transport; (3) ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) on the themes related to industrial symbiosis.