PRICING CRB FUTURES CONTRACTS

This study provides a valuation model to price Commodity Research Bureau Index futures contracts, now traded at the New York Futures Exchange. An empirical analysis suggests that substantial mispricing was exhibited during the early months of trading in an unseasoned Commodity Research Bureau Index futures market.     

Physician practice style variations

This article studies the variation in physician practice style among geographic regions and across time. A physician practice profile is defined and a simple model for profile variation is developed. Ratios are calculated for the components of the profile—ambulatory visit rate, hospitalization rate and length of hospitalization—and studied in terms of adaptation to resource constraint and nonspecific style. The methods are applied to hospital use in the Census Metropolitan Areas of Canada.     

Social power-based print advertising: Theoretical and practical considerations

A laboratory experiment explored the impact of various power-based copy approaches upon readers' responses to print advertising messages. The treatments employed were derived from French and Raven's bases of social power at two levels of information content. Response measures included copy-and brand-related variables and recall. Results indicate that there are significant differences in responses owing to both the base of social power and the information level used.     

An assessment of railway capacity

In this paper, we review the main concepts and methods to perform capacity analyses, and we present an automated tool that is able to perform several capacity analyses. Capacity is extremely dependent on infrastructure, traffic, and operating parameters. Therefore, an in-depth study of the main factors that influence railway capacity is performed on several Spanish railway infrastructures. The results show how the capacity varies according to factors such as train speed, commercial stops, train heterogeneity, distance between railway signals, and timetable robustness.     

均匀圆阵的测向模糊研究

在高分辨阵列测向系统中,均匀圆阵(UCA)是一种广泛使用的阵列结构。利用均匀圆阵的阵列流形的微分几何作为分析工具,对实际中常用的几种均匀圆阵的测向模糊进行了大量的计算机仿真试验,定量地给出了这些阵列的测向模糊方向和相应的秩,揭示了均匀圆阵的测向模糊性能与其阵元数和孔径之间的关系,得出了一些有实际意义的结论。这对工程应用时均匀圆阵的选择和构造具有很强的参考价值和指导意义,可以避免系统设计的盲目性和随意性。     

Regional sustainability: How useful are current tools of sustainability assessment at the regional scale?

Sustainability assessment methods are primarily aimed at global, national or state scales. However, modelling sustainability at finer spatial scales, such as the region, is essential for understanding and achieving sustainability. Regions are emerging as an essential focus for sustainability researchers, natural resource managers and strategic planners working to develop and implement sustainability goals. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of current sustainability assessment methods - ecological footprint, wellbeing assessment, ecosystem health assessment, quality of life and natural resource availability - at the regional scale. Each of these assessment methods are tested using South East Queensland (SEQ) as a case study. It was selected because of its ecological and demographic diversity, its combination of coastal and land management issues, and its urban metropolitan and rural farm and non-farm communities. The applicability of each of these methods to regional assessment was examined using an evaluation criteria matrix, which describes the attributes of an effective method and the characteristics that make these methods useful for regional management and building community capacity to progress sustainability. We found that the methods tested failed to effectively measure progress toward sustainability at the regional scale, demonstrating the need for a new method for assessing regional sustainability.     

Ideological maps of consumer education

The case is made for the merit of discovering and owning the ideological and paradigmatic underpinnings of consumer‐related education initiatives. After briefly profiling two camps of dominant and contending/emergent world views (ideologies and attendant paradigms), two ideological maps of consumer education are developed and applied, providing a scaffold for future deliberations about the import of world views in consumer education.     

Estimating elasticities with frontier and other regressions in evaluating two advertising strategies for US Army recruiting

To help resolve a long-standing debate in the US Government on advertising strategies for military recruitment, this study applies ordinary least squares (OLS), which here includes (1) stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and (2) frontierized least squares (FLS), to evaluate two distinct advertising strategies: Service Specific vs. Joint. Thus, in contrast to the customary use of a single central tendency method, such as OLS, on different models, we here use multiple methods on a single model to cross check and validate results. In addition to serving as cross checks, the methods can be used to identify classic problems, including biases in the data and shortcomings in one or more of the methodologies employed. To avoid dealing with problems on identifying motives underlying various patterns in advertising expenditure, data are drawn from a statistically designed experiment where the expenditures were controlled as part of the experiment to resolve the issue of a choice between the two advertising strategies of interest. In contrast to earlier studies, the current paper finds that all methods used lead to the same conclusion: Service Specific is more efficient than Joint, at least for the US Army—which is, by far, the largest military advertiser. Finally, the paper introduces a new method for reallocating advertising budgets between the Uniformed Services which (a) is simpler than the customary use of cross partial derivatives, (b) avoids the need for the ceteris paribus assumptions for each such allocation, as in customary reallocation methods and (c) simplifies matters so that, for instance, it is not necessary to introduce an entirely new organization to administer the desired coordinating activities.