Safety and loss prevention concerns for engineers in polymer facilities

Safety related problems encountered in the production and handling of materials using monomers in water based polymerization reactions are covered. It must be noted that the author's experience is specifically in acrylic monomers.     

Multilevel marketing: optimizing marketing effectiveness for high-involvement goods in the automotive industry

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - With a surge in communication channels increasing the complexity of today’s media landscape, companies face new challenges concerning...     

The effects of fuel prices and vehicle sales on fuel‐saving technology adoption in passenger vehicles

Although economic theory suggests that both sales and fuel costs affect technology adoption by vehicle manufacturers, there is very little empirical evidence on either effect. We document a strong connection between a vehicle's sales and its energy efficiency. Using a demographics‐driven demand shifter to isolate demand‐side changes in sales, we find that a one standard deviation increase in sales raises efficiency by 0.2%, compared with a mean improvement rate of 1.4% per year between 1997 and 2013. Higher fuel prices also increase technology adoption directly by increasing willingness to pay for fuel cost savings. The results have two implications: manufacturers will continue to focus technological improvements on top selling vehicles; and fuel taxes will have larger effects on technology adoption than fuel economy standards and feebates.     

Long-Term Productivity and Factor Demand in the Canadian Pulp and Paper Industry

The long-term structure of production, factor demand and factor productivity in the Canadian pulp and paper industry was studied for the period 1956 to 1982. A four input (labor, capital, material and energy) nonhomothetic translog cost function was used for the purpose. Least-cost combinations of the four factors were obtained by imbedding an interrelated dynamic adjustment process. These least-cost paths, from which the cyclical fluctuations due to business turns were filtered out, were then used to derive the long-term productivity of each input. Long-term elasticities of substitution and demand were also computed. Long-term and short-term results were compared. Important findings of the study were: (i) the long-term structure of production of the industry can be represented by the nomothetic version of the translog cost function, (ii) the long-term technological progress in the industry is slow despite evidence of some economies of scale in production, (iii) all factors of production in the industry are long-run substitutes despite short-run complementarities between some factors of production, (iv) each input was observed to be misallocated during the period of study as compared to the least-cost allocations, (v) observed productivity growth of capital, labor and energy declined during the seventies and early eighties, as compared to growth in the sixties, but growth in their long-run productivities did not, (vi) though both observed and long-run productivities of raw material declined the rate of decline was lower on the long-run path, and (vii) price increases in the pulp and paper industry after 1971 could have been lower than what was actually experienced if the industry could change with economic circumstances more rapidly. La structure à long terme de production, de facteur de demande et de facteur de productivité dans l'industrie canadienne de putpe et de papier est étudiée pour la période de 1956 à 1982. Une fonction de coût “nonhomothetic translog” avec quatre entrées (la main-d'oeuvre, le capital, le matériel et l‘énergie) est utilisée pour cette étude. Les combinaisons les moins chères des quatre facteurs sont obtenues en incluant un ajustement dynamique du processus d'interaction. Ces chemins les moins chers, desquels les fluctuations conjoncturelles dues aux changements d'affaires sont enlevées, sont utilisés pour dériver la productivité à long terme de chaque entrée. Les élasticités à long terme de substitution et de demande sont aussi calculées. Les résultats à long terme et ceux à court terme sont comparés. Les découvertes importantes de cette étude sont: (i) la structure à long terme de production de l’-industrie peut être représentée par la version “homothetic” de la fonction de coût “translog,” (ii) le progrès technologique à long terme dans l'industrie est lent malgré l‘évidence de certaines économies par la production à grande échelle, (iii) tous les facteurs de production dans l'industrie sont des substituts à long terme malgré les complémentarités à court terme parmi les facteurs de production, (iv) chaque entrée était allouée au mauvais endroit pendant la période d’étude à comparaison des allocations les moins chères, (v) la croissance de productivité observée de capital, de main-d'oeuvre et d‘énergie a diminué pendant les années soixante-dix et au début des années quatre-vingts, à comparaison de la croissance dans les années soixante, mais la croissance de leurs productivités à long terme n'a pas diminué, (vi) bien que les productivités observées et à long terme de matières premières ont diminué, les taux de diminution sont plus bas sur le chemin à long terme, et (vii) les augmentations de prix dans l'industrie de pulpe et de papier après 1971 auraient pu être plus bas qu'on n'a expérimenté si l'industrie était capable de changer plus rapidement selon les circonstances économiques.     

On Price Competition with Market Share Delegation Contracts

We identify a mistake in the specification of the demand system used in the strategic delegation model based on market shares by Jansen, van Lier and van Witteloostuijn, whereby the price remains above marginal cost when goods are homogeneous. After amending this aspect, we perform a profit comparison with the alternative delegation scheme à la Fershtman and Judd (1987). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Socio‐Psychological Perspective on Team Ambidexterity: The Contingency Role of Supportive Leadership Behaviours

In addressing the notion of team ambidexterity, we propose that socio‐psychological factors (i.e., team cohesion and team efficacy) may help team members to resolve paradoxical challenges and to combine exploratory and exploitative learning efforts. In addition, we theorize that senior executives may play an important role in facilitating the emergence of ambidexterity at lower hierarchical levels. In doing so, we develop a multilevel contingency framework and propose that the effectiveness of teams to achieve ambidexterity is contingent upon supportive leadership behaviours at the organizational‐level. Using multilevel, multisource, and temporally separated data on 87 teams within 37 high‐tech and pharmaceutical firms, we not only reveal how team cohesion and efficacy may matter for the emergence of team ambidexterity but also show that the effectiveness of supportive leadership behaviours from senior executives varies across cohesive and efficacious teams.     

On a family of data-based transformed models useful in forecasting technological substitutions

This paper examines, via real data, some well known models for technology substitution analysis. We propose a family of data-based transformed models that will include the models under examination as special cases. The basic thrust of the paper is the recognition that for technology substitution analysis, the observations are time series data and hence are not independent. Also, the functional form of the model should be determined by both theoretical considerations as well as the data on hand. This suggests that the traditional ordinary least squares procedure used in estimating the parameters and the resulting forecasting procedures are not adequate. The existing models examined here are Fisher–Pry, Gompertz, Weibull, and Normal. We stress the statistical aspects of the models and their relative merits in terms of predictive power. The criteria used for the purpose of comparison are the mean squared deviation and the mean absolute deviation of the predicted values compared with the actual observations.     

Would adopting the Australian dollar provide superior monetary policy in New Zealand?

Counterfactual experiments with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's core model provide some insight into the implications for New Zealand's economic performance over the 1990s, had it credibly fixed its currency to the Australian dollar. If New Zealand had faced the relatively more stimulatory Australian monetary conditions prevailing over the 1990s, then output growth may have been temporarily boosted. However, demand pressures would have probably been greater and inflation higher. In particular, results suggest that over the latter part of the 1990s annual inflation would have been approximately 1% point higher on average. Stochastic simulation experiments provide a vehicle to analyse what the implications of currency union might be more generally. Results suggest that if New Zealand were to lose its ability to set monetary policy independent of that set in Australia, then the variability of inflation and output would increase over the business cycle.