Economics, Management and Sustainable Consumption

Director: prof.ssa Roberta Raffaelli

Members

 

Research Fellows

 

PhD Students

 

Mission statement of the research group

The EMaSus group involves researchers from different fields (management, agricultural and environmental economics, statistics, economic history) and address sustainability through multidisciplinary approaches. The presence of both public and private bodies and the complexity of the subject requires the development of models and complementary methods able to guarantee coherence between the geographical area and the sustainable management of economic activities (tourism, agricultural, commerce and industrial). The behaviour of both individual and collective agents is studied with an interdisciplinary approach, integrating the economic, managerial and historical economic prospective, using qualitative, quantitative and experimental methods.

Research fields

The main areas of research refer to:

  • Management for sustainability: this research is divided into three focus areas. The first one concerns models of territorial development and models of active governance in community-type tourist destinations. The second one considers service companies and the managerial strategies for their sustainable management. The third one focuses on demand issues with reference to sustainable consumption.
  • Agro-food and Environmental economics: this research focuses on two areas. The first one concentrates on the economic assessment of positive external effects of the agro-forest alpine environment, of environmental tourist assets and on the impact of climatic changes. The second one studies the preference of consumers for sustainable agri-food, by means of stated preference methods (contingent assessment and choice experiments) and of experimental economics.

  • Economic history of sustainability: this research focuses on two main areas, linked by a long-term perspective and by the constant comparison with on-going international research.  The first focus is the analysis of the role of institutions in defining formal and informal economic processes in alpine areas and the study of alpine and transalpine commerce in medieval and modern times.  The second focus is on work, business types and banking facilities in the Tirol-Trento area from modern to contemporary times, pinpointing also the role of the different types of business involved in tourism.
  • Theoretical models and indicators supporting business activities: through an approach based on a combination of multivariate statistics and big-data, the research focuses on developing techniques to assess the impact of sustainable actions implemented by tourist businesses (with particular attention to those aimed at satisfying demand for ecotourism) and on creating suitable sustainability and performance indicators, in order to assess the economic-environmental pressures generated by tourism flows. The combination of these assessments and indicators, can also support authorities, on different territorial and institutional levels, to direct and sustain their decisions and systematically assess the resulting effects.

Network of the most relevant national and international connections

  • Gunda BARTH-Scalmani, Universität Innsbruck
  • Ian BATEMAN, University of Exeter, UK
  • Pietro BERITELLI, Università del San Gallo, Svizzera
  • Giuseppe DE LUCA, Università degli Studi di Milano
  • Edoardo DEMO, Università di Verona
  • Markus DENZEL, Universität Leipzig
  • Frederic DIMANCHE, Ryerson University, Toronto (CA)
  • Giovanni SIGNORELLO, Università di Catania
  • Silvia FERRINI, Università di Siena e University of Exeter, UK
  • Barbara FASOLO, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, UK
  • Andreas GOTTSMAN, Istituto storico austriaco Roma
  • Gianluca GRILLI, Economic and Social Research Institute e Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
  • Henryk GZYL (Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración – Caracas, Venezuela)
  • John HULL, Thompson Rivers University, Canada - British Columbia
  • Margareth LANZINGER, Universität Wien
  • Shu, LI, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
  • Luigi LORENZETTI, Università della Svizzera italiana Mendrisio
  • Michael MANFREDO, Colorado State University, USA
  • Luisa MENAPACE, Center of Life and Food Sciences, Technische Universität München, Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany
  • Jürgen MEYERHOFF, Technische Universität Berlin
  • Mariyan MILEV, University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria
  • Simon MILNE, New Zealand Tourism Research Institute, School of Hospitality and Tourism, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
  • Massimo MORELLATO, School of Hospitality and Tourism, AUT University, New Zealand
  • Rodolfo M. NAYGA, University of Arkansas
  • Katia OCCHI, Istituto storico Italo-germanico della FBK
  • Alessandro PALETTO Forest Monitoring and Planning, Research Unit, Agricultural Research Council
  • Aleksander PANJEK, University of Primorska, Koper
  • Harald PECHLANER, Università Cattolica di Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germania
  • John PAYNE, Duke Business School, USA
  • Mike PETERS, University of Innsbruck, Austria
  • Ilana RITOV, Hebrew University, Israel
  • Andrew SEIDL, Colorado State University, USA
  • W. Douglass Shaw, Hazards Reduction and Recovery Center, Texas A&M University, USA
  • Barbara SUMMERS, Fabio DEL MISSIER, Rob RANYARD, Leeds Business School, UK
  • Shu, SUN, Wharton Business School, USA
  • Francesca TRIVELLATO, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
  • Oswald ÜBEREGGER, Università di BolzanoCaroline YOON, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, USA
  • Rete CUEIM (Consorzio Universitario di Economia Industriale e Manageriale) – Cluster Nazionale di Management del Turismo e del Territorio