Aquaculture imports from Asia: an analysis of U.S. consumer demand for select food quality attributes

The increasing share of imported food in the United States, coupled with highly publicized incidents of food contamination and adulteration in Asia, particularly China, is posing new challenges for consumers and food safety regulators. In this study, we focus on imported shrimp and tilapia, to evaluate consumer willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) for enhanced food safety, use of antibiotics, and eco‐friendly environmental practices. Results show that U.S. consumers were willing‐to‐pay more for enhanced food safety, followed by the use of no antibiotics and environmental friendly production practices. American consumers in our sample were found to have a higher WTP for domestic products and placed more trust on U.S. government verification of product attributes followed by third‐party certification.     

Managing the Managers: Japanese Management Strategies in the USA

One of the greatest difficulties Japanese multinationals have had is managing American managers in their US subsidiaries. The reason for this is fundamental and profound: Americans and Japanese conceive of management very differently and have strikingly different conceptions of themselves as managers and of correct management practice.
We do two things in this paper. First, borrowing from social psychology, we explore the idea of the 'management self'. Second, we report our research on management self-conception and style in Japanese-owned factories or 'transplants' in the USA.
The research reports the results of 34 interviews conducted with 19 US and Japanese managers in three electronics transplants. Each factory had adopted different combinations or 'hybridizations' of the management styles of the two countries. The three factories had very different characters. One was dominated by Japanese management practice, another by American practice, and the third was a hybrid of the two styles. We found four factors critical determinants of management style: the nationality of the general manager, a stated preference (or lack thereof) for bicultural management, control over the budget-setting process, and the strength of the Japanese assignees     

Inf-convolution of risk measures and optimal risk transfer

We develop a methodology for optimal design of financial instruments aimed to hedge some forms of risk that is not traded on financial markets. The idea is to minimize the risk of the issuer under the constraint imposed by a buyer who enters the transaction if and only if her risk level remains below a given threshold. Both agents have also the opportunity to invest all their residual wealth on financial markets, but with different access to financial investments. The problem is reduced to a unique inf-convolution problem involving a transformation of the initial risk measures.Received: December 2004, Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 60G35, 91B28, 91B30, 46N10JEL Classification: C61, D81, G13, G22     

Data-mining: Improvement of university library services

Delft University Press has been contacted by the International Water History Association (client) in order to study the relevancy of starting a new journal on a particular topic of interest to its members. This periodical would publish most of the articles relating to this field. Before starting, the client and the publisher want to know if such a journal would find enough authors for the articles and a sufficient audience. How many potential authors exist? What amount of articles in that field exists in other journals? In order to get an answer, the Delft University of Technology Library performed basic bibliometric analyses.A study of all articles published in 6 relevant existing periodicals, selected by the client, shows that most of the authors were unknown to the client. An analysis of the publications of the members of the association revealed that only one-third has published in the past 10 years, and very few publications were in the client's field of interest. This would imply that a future periodical could not be supported only by contributions of the members. These preliminary analyses allowed the publisher and the client to get a clearer idea of the possible contribution of its members for a future periodical. The main contributors will have to be recruited from a larger population.     

Recent Trends in the Skill Composition of Legal U.S. Immigrants

We examine fluctuations in the predicted educational attainment of newly arrived legal U.S. immigrants between 1972 and 1999 by combining data from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service with the Current Population Survey. A mid-1980s decline gave way to a noticeable improvement in the skill base of the immigrant population between 1987 and 1993. A short decline in the quality of immigrant skills—less severe than that of the mid-1980s—took place in the mid-1990s. In 1998, the trend reverses once more: The labor market quality of new legal U.S. immigrants improves. The primary sources of the fluctuations include changes in the quality and quantity of immigrants obtaining an adjustment and variations in the distribution of source regions and entry class types among new legal U.S. immigrants.     

Introducing ‘Journeys Home’

Homelessness, despite being a major social policy issue in Australia, is an area that is not well served by data. Most sorely lacking is any large‐scale panel study that follows a broad sample of persons with recent experience of homelessness and unstable housing histories. In 2010, the Australian Government set about rectifying this deficiency when it commissioned the Melbourne Institute to undertake a new panel study, now known as ‘Journeys Home’. This study draws its sample from the population of Centrelink income‐support recipients, targeting persons identified in the administrative data as having recent experience of homelessness, as well as others with similar characteristics who may be vulnerable to housing difficulties in the future. This article summarises the design of this new study and reports on fieldwork outcomes from the first two waves of data collection.