As perishable products are worthless at end-of-life, for a given supply prices are often dynamically adjusted to ensure inventory is exhausted at end-of-life. When consumers expect such price reductions, they may strategically time their purchases. These two conditions pose a complex problem for pricing. Given inventory, cost of production is sunk. Thus, the dynamic path for prices must be set to maximize revenues with an eye on inventory take-down as well as to discourage strategic behavior. This problem is further challenged when prices and the extent of consumer strategic behavior are uncertain. This paper presents an approach for pricing a set of perishable products that are highly substitutable, yet differentiated to target a set of consumer segments. We propose and analyze a price assurance scheme as a solution to the strategic behavior of consumers and price uncertainty. We present and evaluate our price assurance approach by comparing two price assurance schemes: i) ex-post price assurance, and ii) ex-ante price assurance to risk neutral dynamic pricing without regard for consumer strategic behavior. These approaches have not to our knowledge been previously considered in our setting of perishables, uncertain consumer strategic behavior, and price uncertainty. Our numerical experiments show that our robust optimization model prevents loss when a firm encounters the worst-case demand and outperforms a risk neutral pricing model. Comparison across our different pricing schemes provides conditions under which particular schemes may dominate others.

Closed-loop production systems encompass all processes for returning, remanufacturing, recycling, discarding, and repackaging products. These elements form the core of sustainable manufacturing by managing what otherwise would be waste to enable reuse and by controlling its associated pollution. This paper presents the general management model of sustainable remanufacturing within a dynamic closed-loop supply chain. Our specification encompasses agents positioned at key stages in the supply chain, e.g., manufacturers, retailers, and customers, and considers both profitability and environmental performance of their decentralized decisions. We cast the problem to allow for interdependence of agents through a Nash game. These salient features simultaneously render the mathematical model more realistic and computationally challenging. To proceed, our model is formalized by using variational inequalities, which in turn are converted to a fixed point problem that we solve using a computationally tractable algorithm. Decision rules for strategic remanufacturing and recycling are provided to complement the numerical solution in an illustrative example.

The value of flexibility in operations for hydroelectric power plants is apparent from their investment in multiple generators to allow variable intensity of operation. This flexibility supports rapid response to outside factors that impact their performance. It follows that hydroelectricity generation often competes for water flow with downstream water demands including irrigation, urban water use, or ecosystem services. Each of these follows stochastic process that implies asynchronous demand for water flow. The associated management problem is of interest encompassing multiple switching and motivating other extensions. This paper considers the dynamic stochastic problem of water allocation for hydroelectric generation and downstream use. Our main contribution is to present a novel numerical solution to this problem. Moreover, the method allows generalization not previously possible including: (i) multiple dynamic stochastic processes with jump diffusions, (ii) the number of contingent decisions with reversibility, and (iii) characterization of risk and uncertainty including dynamic constraints.

Significant socio-economic shifts, such as the emergence of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ have transformed the transition from adolescence to adulthood, as youth are expected to garner a considerable amount of personal, cognitive, social, and educational skills in order to successfully enter adult society and prosper within the market economy. An additional determinant of the successful transition of youth into adult society is the availability of social capital through relationships and networks that can provide access to valuable resources and information and contribute to the development of a social identity. Employment programs are a mechanism for providing youth with workforce exposure and skill development in the absence of market opportunities. These programs are also a potential source of social capital, through the exposure to new environments and the development of relationships and networks that can provide resources that youth may not have access to through traditional means. Using a qualitative approach, we explored the perspectives of youth participants in a summer employment program in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. We propose that the opportunity to develop social capital is an under-recognized benefit of employment programs, and may be a particularly important aspect for disadvantaged youth.

Within the marketing window for perishables such as food products, demand uncertainty is complicated by price sensitivity and propensity to postpone purchase that is heterogeneous across consumers. These features pose substantial challenges to retailers when pricing multiple products over time and across consumer segments. Getting the dynamic profile of prices right has implications for performance of vertical food chains ranging from revenues to food waste. This paper proposes an approach to dynamic pricing that is demonstrated to improve performance within this setting.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to estimate and compare the across-time individual and contextual factors influencing the participation of Canadian residents in adult education and training during the 1990s and the early twenty-first century. This era is characterized by the social investment state (SIS), a policy paradigm adopted by various developed nations throughout the world, including Canada, during the latter part of the twentieth century. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyzed data obtained from the 1994, 1998, and 2003 versions of the Adult Education and Training Survey, which is administered by Statistics Canada. They employed binomial logit regression so as to predict the likelihood of the respondents participating in training. Findings Participants whose level of education was below the post-secondary level were less likely to participate in training, as were adult residents of households in which pre-school children also lived. These findings occurred across all three periods of data collection. Furthermore, urban residents exhibited an increasingly greater likelihood to participate in training across-time. Research limitations/implications Future studies should consider the funding source for training, be it from the public or private sector, and how this may affect participation. The impact that various types of training have on employment and earning patterns in developed nations should also be further assessed. Originality/value This study, with its use of the most recent available data to analyze across-time changes in the determinants of participating in training in Canada, has contributed to the knowledge base regarding the SIS in Canada and how it compares to its European counterparts.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe the volume and quality of information and communication channel use at various stages of the malt barley value chain (MBVC) in Ethiopia and to investigate how metrics of these variables influence the extent of integration of the chain.Design/methodology/approach - The study is based on survey data collected from 320 farmers and 100 traders and interview responses compiled from 76 respondents. Descriptive statistics and ordered logistic regression were used for data analysis.Findings - The descriptive statistics show a lower volume and poor quality of information is being shared at farmer- trader interface and that value chain integration (VCI) is weak at all studied interfaces. Results of ordered logistic regression show that information volume and quality positively influence VCI, whereas a positive relationship between channel use and VCI was found only at farm level interfaces. Evidences found suggested that inconsistent information systems, lack of information sharing plans, low level of members' awareness about the value of information, and lack of trust to share information were factors that inhibited information sharing in the MBVC.Originality/value - The study offers pioneering evidence of the relative role of information volume and quality and channel use as factors that influence the extent of integration of the value chain.

This research is an application of the econometric price series to the analysis of dairy chain efficiency in Italy. At a theoretic level, the price transmission and asymmetry in the speed of adjustment to positive and negative price changes is supported by the Industrial Organization, multi market equilibrium, food chain theories. However this does not provide a clear signal of competitiveness as many conditions may induce stickiness (curvature of demand, local cost and externalities, long term contracts,. While evidences from past EU studies about the dairy sector are mixed, several studies have demonstrated the evidence of price asymmetries in different market contests. The aim of this research is to examine the price dynamics along the dairy chain and offer some empirical evidences about the cointegration and asymmetric price transmission at different market levels. The parametric test of asymmetry in a multivariate VECM (vector error correction term), suggests symmetry in co-movement. To explore in deeper whether these results are robust with respect to nonlinearity it is estimated the threshold VECM model; the results suggest to reject the hypothesis of asymmetry with exception for the raw milk and wholesale butter. While market competitiveness can not be inferred only from evidence of asymmetry, these findings support the hypothesis that the market structure and policy in the Italian dairy chain didn’t affect greatly the price asymmetry. However, for the butter market, the public intervention seems to have generated speculative behavior among the operators and generated asymmetric price responses to positive/negative price changes.

The EU dairy industry is facing an unprecedented change since the removal of milk quotas has exposes the sector to the world competition with strongly organized multinational traders. The basic question of this paper is if the milk quota expiration will have any impact on market equilibria and decisions of agents operating at various market levels. This paper has been preceded by two other papers discussing various issues about dairy market in Italy: market asymmetries and consequences for price transmission and presence of oligopoly competition and consequences for price setting. The present analysis uses the time series analysis of weekly dairy prices to test the market behavior before and after quota regime. Volatility was tested with simple CV, SD indexes and more complexes Arch-Garch models including the breaks and changes in market regime correlated to policy adjustments. Results suggest a moderate change in volatility; our explanation is the Italian dairy sector was for long time protected from world market competition and a consistent amount of raw milk processed for cheese production was managed by the coop organization that transferred to the dairy farms the margins realized at other market levels. The future scenario is more pessimistic in absence of any protection: some structural changes needed to face the world competition could have been postponed in this protected market with the OCM. The expected growth of milk supply after quota will determine a decline in the raw milk price becoming closer to the marginal costs of the most efficient dairy farms in the world. This will cause the exit of a great number of dairy farms, the restructuring of the dairy industry and more concentration at retail level.

Across many sectors, the locus of innovation has shifted from the individual firm to networks of collaboration. Networking is one way for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the food sector to cope with the many challenges they face with regards to innovation. In this article, we investigate the influence of different types of networking on the innovation capacity of chain networks in the traditional food sector. Our results highlight that networking among the vertical network members contributes most to the enhancement of the innovation capacity of all members. We also find that, horizontal or third-party networking can enhance the innovation capacity of each member of a vertical network. Managerial implications include a prescription for network engagement through a set of joint activities and effort.

The variation of energy prices has been a traditional source of shocks to the real economy. In many cases, this variation has manifested in jumps in energy prices that were characterized by some persistence. From another perspective, energy price volatility has historically been noted and its effects on real economy debated. Historically, the importance of the shocks to the real economy has led them to be labeled as energy crises, as they were argued to have resulted in substantial changes in real prices that induced changes in behavior on the demand and supply sides of the many markets. However, empirical studies of transmission of energy prices into the real economy have produced no consensus and have been challenged by a number of significant specification issues that have resulted in substantial variation in inference drawn from results. Among these issues is the question of completeness of model specification. This paper examines the question of whether such models need to incorporate macroeconomic indicators. Clearly, macroeconomic factors such as interest rates and exchange rates play a role in the determination of energy and commodity prices, however, considerable specification uncertainty characterizes the question of which macro metrics to incorporate. This paper examines this issue from the perspective of weak exogeneity and finds evidence that the parameter estimates associated with time series models that exclude consideration of macro indicators are not compromised by their exclusion. We examine this issue using Italian, U.S. grain, and Brent crude oil prices.

At a theoretic level, price transmission does not provide a clear signal of competitiveness as many conditions may induce stickiness and even asymmetry in the speed of adjustment to positive and negative changes. While evidence from past EU studies for the dairy sector is mixed, several studies have found evidence of asymmetry in particular countries. However, none to our knowledge have considered evidence for Italy. We examine price dynamics within the chain and test for presence of asymmetry in the transmission of price changes along the chain. Using a parametric test of asymmetry in a multivariate VECM, we find strong evidence of symmetry in co-movement. To explore whether these results are robust with respect to nonlinearity we estimate threshold VECM models and also find strong evidence to reject asymmetry except for the transmission between raw milk and wholesale butter prices. While inference with respect to competitiveness of markets cannot be inferred from evidence of asymmetry, findings of symmetry confirm that the market organization and performance is not controlling price change to be asymmetric.

The dairy chain in Italy experienced substantial structural changes during the past years. Since the introduction of milk quotas in 1984, structural changes caused by consistent reduction of dairy farms, growing brand concentration at wholesale level, and diffusion of private labels at retail level may have altered the competitive market conditions, with increasing price asymmetry and inefficiencies in price transmission. We tested this hypothesis using the McCorriston and Sheldon’s successive oligopoly model, and we gave evidences of altered price transmission and consumer’s surplus distribution along the vertical chain in the examined period.

We consider a dynamic Nash game among firms harvesting a renewable resource (e.g., in a fishery) and propose a differential variational inequality (DVI) framework for modeling and solving such a game. We suppose the firms compete over demand as well as over regulated harvest effort that we interpret as a sustainability constraint on the fleet's aggregate harvest effort. We suppose each firm is based in a home market that is not protected by trade barriers implying that each firm can sell its catch in any of the markets. Within this setting, we consider how harvest effort, catch, and sustainability of the resource are affected by the length of the planning horizon of the firms. We show results that contrast myopic planning versus long-term perspectives. To derive solutions for this game, we propose a DVI framework that is converted to a fixed-point problem. This allows us to employ a computationally efficient algorithm for the solution of the game.

In this study we analyze data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey, a cross-sectional and nationally representative survey of Canada’s population, to assess the impact of three dimensions of social capital on self-rated health. We measure these dimensions, which consist of social networks and social support, civic participation and social participation, with a comprehensive set of 5 indicators. To avoid reverse causality due to the cross-sectional nature of the data, we employ an instrumental variable simultaneous equations bivariate probit regression model. Our findings indicate that all of the tested dimensions of social capital have a positive and significant impact on self-rated health. These findings suggest that social capital plays an important role in enhancing the health of Canada’s population. Endogeneity was detected in all of our estimations. Consequently, this study also has important methodological implications in that we demonstrate that relying solely on naive estimations leads to biased results.

Purpose of this article it to get some evidences of market interaction between United States and Italy using the time series analysis of spot prices spanning from January 1999 to May 2012 for crude oil and three ag-commodities: wheat, corn and soybean. These crops have been selected for their relevance in ag-commodity exchanges between US and Italy markets. The integration between US and Italy agricultural markets is hypothesized for the consistent volume of crop traded between these two countries while the price transmission is related to the leading price signals of the CBT (Chicago Board of Trade). The integration between oil and ag-commodity markets is suggested both by the large use of energy intensive inputs, (fertilizer, seed, machinery) in production of these ag-commodities, and their use in biofuel production. The results suggest: a) for US market the evidence of market integration between crude oil and US ag-commodities; b) for Italy the integration with US ag-commodity markets and less evidence of integration with the oil market. These results are valuable information both for the agents and policy makers contributing to improve the information accuracy to predict the price movements used by marketing operators for their strategies and policy makers to set up policies to re-establish conditions of market efficiency and allocate these ag-commodities in alternative market channels.

Objectives: A meta-analysis was conducted in order to generate more understanding regarding the efficacy of aftercare programs in reducing the recidivism rates of juvenile offenders reentering their communities following a period of custody. Method: 30 eligible primary studies were obtained through a systematic literature review and were coded. Recidivism was the outcome variable and 11 moderating variables were grouped according to either a sample, treatment, methodological, or study characteristic. A summary effect size was computed while moderator analyses and meta-regression were also conducted. Results: The summary effect size of aftercare programs was non-significant but subgroup univariate and multivariate analyses yielded significant treatment effects for samples of youth who averaged over 16.5 years of age and whose predominant index offense was violent. Well-implemented aftercare programs also yielded substantial treatment effects. Conclusion: The findings suggest that under specific conditions aftercare can reduce recidivism rates for youth involved in the juvenile justice system.

This paper presents a model of the strategic behavior of firms operating in a spatial supply chain network. The manufacturing and retailing firms engage in an oligopolistic, noncooperative game by sharing customer demand such that a firm’s decisions impact the product prices, which in turn result in changes in all other firms’ decisions. Each firm’s payoff is to maximize its own profit and we show that, in response to such changes in prices and to exogenous environmental taxes, the manufacturing firms may strategically alter a variety of choices such as ’make-buy’ decisions with respect to intermediate inputs, spatial distribution of production, product shipment patterns and inventory management, environmental tax payment vs recycling decisions, and timing of all such choices to sustainably manage the profit and the environmental regulations. An important implication is that effects of a tax depends on the oligopolistic game structure. With respect to methods, we show that this dynamic game can be represented as a set of differential variational inequalities (DVIs) that motivate a computationally efficient nonlinear complementarity (NCP) approach that enables the full exploitation of above-mentioned salient features. We also provide a numerical example that confirms the utility of our proposed framework and shows substantial strategic reaction can be expected to a tax on pollution stocks.

The increasing co-movements between world oil and food prices in the 2000s has prompted interest in the transmission mechanism among markets. This research investigates integration and price transmission of some important agricultural commodities traded in market area that includes United States and Italy for a period spanning from January 1999 to May 2012. The hypothesis of market integration is verified for crude oil and three agri-commodities wheat, corn and soybean in Italy and US. They are selected for their market relevance due to growingly demand diversified in food, feed and fuel; wheat for its higher accounting for much of the world food consumption. It is hypothesized that US and Italy agricultural markets are integrated by a consistent volume of trading and by the recognized role of the CBT price signals transmitted to the Italian agri-commodity markets. This study extends the knowledge about the oil–agricultural commodity price transmission dynamics from international (US) to domestic market (Italy).The time series analysis is used to test the structural breaks, the co-integration and price transmission and the causality. Results suggest: i)t for the US markets the evidence of market integration between crude oil and US agri-commodity prices with non linear causality direction going from oil to agri-commodity prices; ii) the integration between US and Italian agricultural markets, with no clear evidence of causality between oil and Italian agricommodities, while there is the evidence of linear causality going from US to Italian agricultural markets. The conclusion is a presence of causality going from Oil to US agri-markets and from US agri-markets to the Italian ones These information can be useful both for investors and policy makers interested in the knowledge about the nature of price movement in the international arena the close market integration and price transmissions with consequence for co-movement ,inherent dynamic market relationship, speed of adjustment, consequences of t price support policies. The agricultural policies in different countries may be organized to countervail the destabilizing effect of the oil price movement in disrupting the world market equilibrium by arbitraging the market condition to return to a situation of competitive pricing behaviour.