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The purpose of this paper is to assess, from an organisational perspective, the internal efficacy of public policies designed to stimulate voluntary inter‐municipal partnerships. In particular, it sets out to assess the capacity of such incentive‐based policies to push the councils in the direction desired by the legislator, i.e. service sharing and joint policymaking.

A qualitative approach (exploratory case study) has been adopted. Primary data from semi‐structured interviews with administrators and public managers were collected and analysed along with secondary data on the inter‐municipal partnerships established in the important Italian region of Lombardy. The critical contingencies and conditions that shape local voluntary collaborations are compared with the assumptions of a model developed by Montjoy and O'Toole.

The paper questions the assumption that access to additional resources is enough to induce the councils to collaborate in service sharing and joint policymaking. While, on the one side, the councils' organisational and managerial limitations condition their willingness and capacity to forge long‐term relationships, on the other, the pressure on councils tasked with partnership implementation (especially the aggregation leaders) and the effort to ensure the orchestration of the activities and joint decision making lead them to opt for the less structured forms of cooperation (e.g. bilateral agreements). The most binding and ambitious collaborative forms are also those exposed to risks, including stagnation and goal displacement.

Unlike the mainstream studies on local partnerships, this paper addresses the policies that incentivise the setting up and development of such initiatives. The paper further develops the use of a model that policymakers will find a valuable aid in predicting agency responses to external mandates and in identifying the different types of potential implementation pitfalls.

The purpose of this paper is to assess, from an organisational perspective, the internal efficacy of public policies designed to stimulate voluntary inter‐municipal partnerships. In particular, it sets out to assess the capacity of such incentive‐based policies to push the councils in the direction desired by the legislator, i.e. service sharing and joint policymaking.

A qualitative approach (exploratory case study) has been adopted. Primary data from semi‐structured interviews with administrators and public managers were collected and analysed along with secondary data on the inter‐municipal partnerships established in the important Italian region of Lombardy. The critical contingencies and conditions that shape local voluntary collaborations are compared with the assumptions of a model developed by Montjoy and O'Toole.

The paper questions the assumption that access to additional resources is enough to induce the councils to collaborate in service sharing and joint policymaking. While, on the one side, the councils' organisational and managerial limitations condition their willingness and capacity to forge long‐term relationships, on the other, the pressure on councils tasked with partnership implementation (especially the aggregation leaders) and the effort to ensure the orchestration of the activities and joint decision making lead them to opt for the less structured forms of cooperation (e.g. bilateral agreements). The most binding and ambitious collaborative forms are also those exposed to risks, including stagnation and goal displacement.

Unlike the mainstream studies on local partnerships, the paper addresses the policies that incentivise the setting up and development of such initiatives. The paper further develops the use of a model that policymakers will find a valuable aid in predicting agency responses to external mandates and in identifying the different types of potential implementation pitfalls.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how attention to wine labels related to preference by using quantitative measures of gaze and of the diameter of the eye pupil. We assessed whether eye fixations could predict choices and willingness to pay and whether pupil size could index the aesthetic value of wine labels. More specific goals were to identify which elements of a wine label captured attention the most and to assess whether an authentic label would be preferred by naïve consumers over other alternative labels, also designed by the same studio but excluded from the market.

Infrared eye-tracking was used to measure the amount of time spent on a specific label among four that were simultaneously shown on the computer screen. Participants also made explicit decisions about preferred labels and provided price estimates. Pupillometry was used for labels shown in isolation to obtain a physiological index of their arousing effect and aesthetic appeal. Eye fixations provided an index of what was selected by attention, whereas changes in the pupillary diameter indexed how intensively attention was focused on an item.

A strong positive relationship was found between the dwelling of gaze over a specific label and the degree in which a wine bottle was preferred and (virtually) chosen. The pictorial elements of the labels were fixated the most, whereas verbal information was looked at the least. Attractiveness scores of each bottle collected with one independent group of observers were able to predict the willingness to pay in another group. Moreover, pupil size changed non-linearly in relation to the hedonic values of the wine labels, indicating greater responses to the most as well as least attractive labels (i.e. for the most arousing labels).

A limitation of the present experiments was that only choices and behavior of wine “novices” were probed; hence, the present findings might not be generalized to other segments (e.g. wine connoisseurs). Moreover, the present study could not specify which visual properties of a label affect preference, aesthetic value and estimates of price, as the study of these effects would require a large number and variety of label stimuli.

Eye monitoring methods could assist marketing studies of preferences and decision-making. Both wine label designers and wine producers could benefit from eye-tracking methods to improve label selection and optimize the design process of a wine label.

Although both eye-tracking and pupillometry have been used to the investigate aesthetic preferences for at least the past 50 years, the measurement of pupil diameter and eye movements to study attributes of (authentic) wine labels and their effectiveness is entirely novel. The present study confirms that measures based on eye-tracking combined to explicit choices or ratings provide complementary types of market-relevant information. Both methods provide objective, quantitative, information of the effect of the labels on consumers that is independent but predictive of actual choices and verbally reported preferences. Moreover, they appear to index different processes, pupillometry being a proxy of aesthetic value and gaze a reliable index of choice. Thus, the present findings can be of value to the academic researcher as well as industry and design practitioners.

This paper aims to shed light on how family firms execute open innovation strategies by managing internal and external knowledge flows.

First, through a comprehensive literature review, the paper identifies the barriers to the acquisition and transfer of knowledge in open innovation processes. Second, it presents and discusses the results of an exploratory case study on Loccioni, an Italian family firm providing high-tech measurement solutions, highlighting how this family firm managed to overcome the barriers in executing an open innovation strategy.

The case study shows that Loccioni faced specific challenges in acquiring and transferring knowledge in its open innovation processes and developed two idiosyncratic capabilities – labelled imprinting and fraternization – that helped the firm overcome the barriers to knowledge acquisition and transfer. The analysis shows that these two capabilities are enabled by the distinctive goals and social capital characterizing family firms.

The paper creates a link between open innovation and family business research with an empirically grounded model illustrating how the idiosyncratic capabilities of a family firm help overcome the critical barriers to the acquisition and transfer of knowledge in executing an open innovation strategy.