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Purpose The sustainable mobility is a debated issue in literature as well as collaborative consumption. In this context, the car sharing represents a growing phenomenon, very interesting to be studied by academicians for its possible impact on sustainability. This study is aimed at understanding the main drivers of car sharing usage, unveiling the role of service quality and green attitude. Methodology Based on theoretical assumptions based on literature review analysis, we develop a theoretical framework that aims at understanding the main antecedents of car sharing usage. An empirical investigation involving the city of Rome (Italy) is performed. The study proposes a qualitative and quantitative survey. Our theoretical model has been tested through SEM statistical techniques. Findings Our findings show that Perceived Usefulness positively affect the Intention to use car sharing. Moreover, the Green Attitude and Expected Service Quality indirectly influence the Intention to use car sharing via Perceived Usefulness. The results show that Expected Service Quality has a strong influence on Perceived Usefulness, whereas Green Attitude has a weaker influence on Perceived Usefulness. The intention to use car sharing is directly influenced by the Perceived Usefulness and by the Inhibitors that affect it negatively. Originality The originality of this paper is that our study discloses the main predictor of the intention to use car sharing, emphasizing the role of service quality. Our research can provide fruitful insights to policy and decision-makers to understand how to improve the car sharing usage in the urban transports system of the city of Rome, suggesting to develop a higher level of service quality in the vehicles, suitable technological applications and an effective communication.

Continuous quality improvement (CQI) has emerged as an imperative for businesses’ growth in today’s fiercely competitive environment. CQI is a never-ending process that seeks to achieve defect-free, high quality products or services. Different approaches to quality management, like TQM, Business Excellence models and ISO standards, agree on the critical importance of the “continuous improvement” principle for the success of any strategy focused on quality. Notwithstanding this acknowledgement, a review of the extensive literature on quality management reveals that scarce effort is addressed to develop quantitative methods to analyze the quality improvement (QI) process. In fact, the literature on CQI consists mainly of case studies, anecdotal evidence and the prescriptive measures attributed to the recognized experts in the field of quality. Some popular prescriptions of the quality experts are the “14 points” of Deming (1982), the “10 steps” of Juran (1962) and the “14 steps” of Crosby (1979). There is no consensus as to which prescriptive framework should form the basis for CQI and the result is a lack of a practical model that is useful for the monitoring of a firm’s CQI program (Prybutok and Ramasesh, 2005). Since CQI is an ongoing process, it is imperative that firms monitor the CQI program on a regular basis to ensure that it is working well and to continually identify areas for QI. In order to effectively monitor CQI reliable and valid instruments are necessary. The original approach proposed in this paper aims at providing the organization with diagnostic tools enabling it to understand if it is on the right track to the planned QI and to evaluate the walk already covered as well as the residual distance to go up in its journey for QI. The proposed approach relies on the modelling of the quality growth which is obtained by 1) choosing a proper quality index to monitor over time and 2) identifying the Quality Improvement Curve (QIC) that describes the quality growth due to the CQI process. The QIC analysis can be usefully applied to monitor a single QI process over time or to compare several QI processes by means of a suitable indicator. The methodology is illustrated through a case study concerning the QI process of a teaching course in Probability and Statistics held at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Naples Federico II. Starting from experimental data collected, during the second semester of the academic year 2005-06, by interviewing the attending students about the quality of the course of Probability and Statistics, three QI programs have been hypothesized. The values of the quality index for future semesters (in which QI programs are assumed to be adopted) have been obtained by Monte Carlo simulation.

In most industrialized countries, the costs of compensation for musculoskeletal disorders accounts for more than one half of all workers’ compensation costs (Norman and Wells, 1998). Several reviews have evidenced that a strong work-related component exists for many upper limb and low back pain cases (NIOSH, 1997; Fogleman and Lewis, 2002). In particular, there is a growing recognition that office tasks, especially those associated with Visual Display Terminal (VDT) can lead to musculoskeletal disorders. There are hundreds of ergonomic interventions described in the scientific and lay literature (Park et al., 2000), unfortunately most of them lack formal evaluation. Research on ergonomic interventions is very difficult to do for many reasons that include: a work environment that changes more rapidly than the time it takes to complete a well designed study; the natural change in the work place that inhibits maintenance of proper control groups for the duration of a study; the high costs of studying sufficiently large groups to obtain acceptable statistically significant comparisons between intervention and control groups; inducing companies to get involved in this type of research given inevitable work interruptions. Obviously, it is important to identify ergonomic interventions that are effective in reducing the incidence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSD), their personal costs and the monetary costs associated with them (Norman and Wells, 1998). A current challenge for research is to involve statisticians, experts in the field of ergonomics, designers and project engineers in the formulation of methods and procedures to support the design and the analysis of experiments in virtual environment. In this paper, the Authors present the first results of a research aimed at minimizing discomfort of a new VDT workstation, through the application of parameter design methodology. In order to discriminate among various design solutions, a comfort index based on a loss function is applied. In this way, the optimal VDT workstation design – in terms of minimum discomfort for VDT operator in static posture – can be found. Besides, in order to improve the posture assumed by operators with different anthropometric characteristics, abacuses for adjustment of a working seat to Visual Display Terminal (VDT) are proposed. The proposed approach is based on the use of digital human models and some posture and task analysis toolkits implemented in a software for ergonomic simulations (Classic Jack by UGS).