Fiat Group Research Articles

The Italian Automotive Industry and Economies of Scale

This article investigates scale economies in the Italian automobile industry as well as substitution possibilities between inputs and direct and cross‐price elasticities of factor demand, utilizing a cost function with capital, labor, domestic, and imported intermediate goods inputs. Continuing European integration makes economies of scale an important issue. The study results are consistent with economies of scale in the Italian motor vehicle industry, a particularly interesting finding because the Italian automotive industry consists primarily of one firm, Fiat. The estimated direct price elasticities suggest that capital is most responsive to own price changes, and estimated cross elasticities imply that all inputs are substitutes. (JEL D2, L6, O1)

Tecnomatix receives orders worth $1 million from Fiat Group

Tecnomatix receives orders worth $1 million from Fiat Group

Performance-based management incentives at the Fiat Group: a field study

This paper describes the findings of a field study of the performance-based management incentives used at the Fiat Group, the large Italian company primarily engaged in the manufacture and sale of vehicles. The purpose of the study was exploratory because knowledge of how Italian firms use management incentives is almost non-existent. The findings show that Fiat's incentive programme is quite similar to those used in most divisionalized U.S. corporations in that, for example, rewards are based heavily on short-term accounting measures of performance; highly achievable budget targets are one of the most important standards to which actual performance is compared; and few adjustments are made for the effects of uncontrollable factors. The paper suggests several questions worthy of further study, including why Fiat's system is so similar to those used in U.S. firms, whether incentive systems can be implemented successfully only when the firm's prospects are bright, what makes for a successful corporate restructuring, when it is desirable to limit managers’ bonus potentials, and whether concern about longer-term perspectives is a sign of a maturing incentive system in growing businesses.

Robotics developments and industrial applications

comau, a Fiat Group Company, designs and builds machining systems and integrated, automatic metalworking assembly, welding, storage and handling installations. In this paper we describe the robots manufactured by comau: smart and mast families. The smart is a six axis, all-electric industrial robot. The smart applications are in spotwelding (the largest) and automatic unloading and loading. The mast is a family robot whose oustanding characteristic is modularity: the number and type of arms in the system can be tailored to the application. smart and mast family robots have the same Control System and the same high level language. As a special application a smart Laser has been developed by comau, which includes inside the mechanical parts the beam delivery system.

Research in the Automotive Industry

Industrial research as a source of technological innovation has acquired a central role in companies in the 1980s. Large manufacturing companies have been developing research systems made of structures co-ordinated with and complementary to one another, in an effort to achieve a rapid and proper flow of innovation. This paper discusses the research system of the Fiat Group, with special attention being paid to the inter-disciplinary, integrated research project developed by the Fiat Research Centre in co-operation with the ‘Progetto Finalizzato Trasporti’ drawn up by Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche (CNR). Such a project implies the design and development of a research car aimed at becoming a reference for future projects for the energy saving cars to be produced in the 1990s.

The Flat Cohomology of Group Schemes of Rank p

The intent of this paper is to determine the first flat cohomology groups of certain finite fiat group schemes which are defined over the spectrum of the ring of integers in a local number field. We discover that the first cohomology groups are isomorphic to certain subgroups of the group of units in the ring modulo p-th powers. Our main result, Theorem 1, was announced in [M-R, Prop. 9.3]. I would like to express my thanks to Professor Barry Mazur for his generous interest and encouragement in this work. Throughout we will consistently use the following notation: K is a local number field with ring of integers R; U is the group of units in R, ord is the additive valuation which takes R surjectively to Z; U(M { u C U: ord (1 - u) ? i}, the residue field k of R is assumed to have characteristic p, and we shall regard P. = Z/pZ as being a subfield of k; the number of elements in kc is q =- pf; e = e(K/Qp) will denote the absolute ramification index of K over Q,. We will always assume that K contains the p-th roots of unity; among other things this implies that -p is a p - 1-st power in R and that m = e/ (p -11 is an integer. Ks will denote a fixed separable closure of K. All our group schemes will be flat over Spec (R) and will be considered as inducing sheaves for the (fppf)- or (fpqf)-site over Spec(R) [SGA 3, IV 6.3].