THE HOUSE THAT NBS BUILT *

In a suburban house in Maryland researchers at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) are studying the behaviour of people in a residential setting. This house, on the NBS campus outside Washington, has been turned into a laboratory equipped with 12 T.V. cameras, three observation booths, two kitchens, a computer and several miles of communications wiring.     

Strategic bargaining for the control of a dynamic system in state-space form

The partition of a pie model is integrated into a two-player difference game in state-space form with a finite horizon, in order to derive strategic bargaining outcomes in the framework of difference games. It is assumed that agreements are binding. In contrast to the model for the partition of a pie, the outcomes are not necessarily Pareto-efficient. For one-dimensional, linear-quadratic difference games, the subgame perfect bargaining outcome is unique, Paretoefficient, and analytically tractable. However, for higher dimensions the linear-quadratic structure breaks down and one has to resort to numerical methods.The authors thank Joseph Plasmans, Jacob Engwerda, and Herbert Hamers for valuable suggestions. A large part of this research is financed by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, grant 450-228-018.     

Technical Development and the Innovation Process

Independent and small-business inventors face enormous difficulties as they attempt to commercialize new technologies. Harold Livesay, Marcia Rorke and David Lux share a number of their useful insights based on their experience. They find that many inventors wish to focus only on certain aspects of their emerging programs. In fact, these inventors resist the need to develop a balanced program involving not only technical development but also marketing and the creation of sustaining business structures. This article provides a systematic elaboration of these difficulties, suggests a more balanced approach and thus describes a process of education and communication that may increase overall effectiveness.     

How limiting is finance for Dutch dairy farms? A dynamic profit analysis

Accessibility to financial resources is considered a prevalent problem in the agricultural sector. We develop an approach to quantify the long-term opportunity costs of financial constraints in relation to peers who do not face any financial constraints. Using data on past financial performance, we assess creditworthiness and the size of an additional accessible bank loan to farmers. Combining this with data on reported expenditure, we determine the accessible finance. We quantify the opportunity cost as the forgone dynamic profit (intertemporal profit in current-value terms) from financial constraints. Using data envelopment analysis, we apply our approach to 264 specialised Dutch dairy farms for the years 2006–2017 and explore the potential impact of changes in finance provision for several scenarios. Our results show an increasing gap between frontrunners and other farmers, as the latter generate progressively less dynamic profit in comparison to their best peers. The gap between the dynamic profit of the average farm and that of its best peers from their production and investment decisions made over the span of 1 year grew from €40,040 in 2009 to €114,548 in 2017. However, the growth is not driven by insufficient access to finance. Financial constraints can only explain 6% of the forgone dynamic profit in 2009 and as little as 1% for 2017. The number of farms classified as financially constrained in comparison to their peers decreases in our sample from 44% in 2009 to 8% in 2017. This suggests that non-financial factors are driving the growing gap.     

Millennials and Boomers: increasing alumni affinity and intent to give by target market segmentation

This paper reports on research that seeks to improve our understanding of issues that impact upon the philanthropic gifts of university alumni. Prior research has examined such alumni characteristics as wealth and affinity to the alma mater. Such findings have guided development professionals to conduct different kinds of research that can reveal aspects of affluence (e.g., real estate holdings and professional positions) and institutional engagement (e.g., membership in alumni associations and season tickets to sporting events). This information is housed in databases that can be accessed by the fundraisers. The current research seeks to extend our understanding by examining the potential differences between generations. This article examines survey responses from university alumni in two age cohorts from two large comprehensive universities in the USA. Respondents were asked questions that inquired about their affinity toward their alma mater, intentions to give as well as alumni interest in participating in or attending different events at the university. Significant differences between younger and older alumni were found within each topic. From these results, the importance of market research and applications of alumni segmentation specifically are discussed for administrators and advancement professionals. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On continuous-time Markov processes in bargaining

For bilateral stochastic bargaining procedures embedded in stable homogeneous continuous-time Markov processes, we show unusual limit results when time between rounds vanish. Standard convergence results require that some states are instantaneous.