List of suggested topics for thesis

Students can propose topics of their choice to the supervisor. However, some of the Professors are available to supervise students on the following topics:

Manuela Presutti - Tourism Management:

1. Entrepreneurship and start-ups in the tourism industry
2. Digital marketing
3. Event tourism
4. Destination management
5. Business planning activities for tourism

Paolo Figini - Tourism Macroeconomics

1. How to use Big Data in economic research: a critical review of the recent literature.
2. Should we talk about the weather? How tourists and residents discuss hot waves and extreme weather events in social media. This topic could be divided into two or more theses, each one analysing specific media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TripAdvisor) and / or specific territories (Sardinia, Sicily, other territories of interest).
3.  The use of GPS, mobile and Wi-Fi data to learn about tourists movements: analysis of a case-study.
4. Eliciting the preferences of tourists for climate change. An analysis of price movements in the accommodation sector.
5. Competition between tourism destinations in a framework of monopolistic competition.

Lorenzo Zirulia - Tourism Microeconomics

1. Pricing strategies by tourism firms: direct and indirect price discrimination, intertemporal price discrimination, behaviour-based price discrimination, bundling, refund policies etc.

References:

• Shy, O. (2008) How to price. Cambridge University Press.

2. Behavioural economics and tourism markets: bounded rationality , heuristics and cognitive biases on the firms’ side; bounded rationality, heuristics and cognitive biases on the consumers’ side; how “rational” firms can exploit boundedly rational consumers.

References:

• Armstrong, M. and Huck, S. (2010) Behavioral Economics as Applied to Firms: A Primer. Competition Policy International 6: 3-45 (http://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_2937.html)

• Ellison G. (2006) Bounded Rationality in Industrial Organization. In Blundell, Newey and Persson (eds.), Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Theory and Applications, Ninth World Congress, Cambridge University Press, 2006 (http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/gellison/papers)

• Kahneman (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Fabio Zagonari - Enviromental Economics

1. Assessement in tourism planning and management
2. Decision-making in tourism planning and management

Maria Letizia Guerra - Mathematics for Social Sciences

1. Risk management through financial derivatives in tourism sector

References:

• Beyazit, M.F., Koc, E. (2010) An analysis of snow options for ski resort establishments. Tourism Management, 31, 676-683.

• Bank, M., Wiesner, R., (2011) Determinants of weather derivatives usage in the Austrian winter tourism industry, Tourism Management, 32, 1, 62-68.

• Chun-Hung Tang, Soo Cheong Jang (2011) Weather risk management in ski resorts: Financial hedging and geographical diversification, International Journal of Hospitality Management, 30, 301-311.

• J. Svec, M. Stevenson, (2007) Modelling and forecasting temperature based weather derivatives, Global Finance Journal, 18, 2, 2007, 185-204.

2. Fuzzy numbers for uncertainty modelling in tourism

References:

• José M. Merigó, Anna M. Gil-Lafuente, Onofre Martorell, (2012) Uncertain induced aggregation operators and its application in tourism management, Expert Systems with Applications, 39, 1, 869-880.

• Chao-Hung Wang, (2004) Predicting tourism demand using fuzzy time series and hybrid grey theory, Tourism Management, 25, 3, 367-374.

3. Investment appraisal in tourism by real options

References:

• Anastasios Michailidis, (2006) Managing tourism investment opportunities under uncertainty: a real options approach, International Journal of Tourism Research, 8, 5, 381–390.

Students willing to undertake research on one of these topics are kindly requested to write to the above mentioned professors.