Together with the emphasis on the technical skills acquisition, higher education institutions have been making an effort on developing and updating undergraduate transferable competences in order to diminish the gap between academic training and working world entrance. In other words, to...

This paper analyses the provision of auxiliary clinical services that are typically carried out within the hospital. We estimate a flexible cost function for the three most important (cost- wise) diagnostic techniques and therapeutic services in Portuguese hospitals: Clinical Pathology, Medical...

This article takes the metaphor of myopia to explain the most limited vision of brand, understood as the identifying sign of a product. As brand is a sign, we turn to semiotics, the science of signs, in order to apply a model which broadens the concept of brand to three dimensions: that of the...

The influence of internationalisation processes in the domestic activities of firms’ has not been considered as an important issue in existing models, because they tend to focus on a partial and restricted view of the firm. The purpose of this paper is to challenge that view by attempting a...

This research addresses the question of how mascots design characteristics affect children recognition and affective response of this type of brand sign. Regarding the literature, it was clear for us the important contribution in studying the short and long term recognition. It is found that the...

The paper explores theoretically and empirically the brand concept among children. Group interviews were conducted to examine the children’s associations to this concept. The data analysis was organized according to a circular frame (the circept frame), which allowed a content analysis based...

A new class of linear discrimination rules, designed for problems with many correlated variables, is proposed. This proposal tries to incorporate the most important patterns revealed by the empirical correlations and accurately approximate the optimal Bayes rule as the number of variables...