Farming development problems

Until the middle of 1972, general optimism in assessing food supplies for the world was widespread. But since then, a more conservative view and a certain uncertainty in forecasting prospects have replaced the former high hopes. One of the crucial reasons for this change have been developments in India.     

Supply Chain Pricing in B-to-B Markets – A Case Study Application

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate an effective coordination process in the B-to-B section of a supply chain. In particular the paper focuses on the interactions between a supplier of raw materials and a buyer processing them into end products in the food industry. These interactions are governed by a delivery contract. Under the terms of the current contract a season's entire crop is purchased at time of planting at an unit price per pound regardless of volume and quality delivered. This simplicity of the contract is an attractive feature of the interaction in the B-to-B section. It is shown that the supply chain's optimum cannot be realized with a single price. From several alternatives a pricing scheme is proposed in which prices are related to quality. The goal is to determine prices which facilitate the supply chain's maximum performance assuming rational behaviour of the supplier and the buyer. Conditions for realizing the supply chain's maximum are formulated and an approach is presented which generates a significant improvement in performance. The authors thank an anonymous referee for his/her constructive suggestions.     

Avoiding Nash inflation: Bayesian and robust responses to model uncertainty

We examine learning, model misspecification, and robust policy responses to misspecification in a quasi-real-time environment. The laboratory for the analysis is the Sargent [The Conquest of American Inflation, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999] explanation for the origins of inflation in the 1970s and the subsequent disinflation. Three robust policy rules are derived that differ according to the extent that misspecification is taken as a parametric phenomenon. These responses to drifting estimated parameters and apparent misspecification are compared to the certainty-equivalent case studied by Sargent. We find gains from utilizing robust approaches to monetary policy design, but only when the approach to robustness is carefully tailored to the problem at hand. In the least parametric approach, the medicine of robust control turns out to be too potent for the disease of misspecification. In the most parametric approach, the response to misspecification is too weak and too misdirected to be of help. But when the robust approach to policy is narrowly directed in the correct location, it can avoid Nash inflation and improve social welfare. It follows that agnosticism regarding the sources of misspecification has its pitfalls. We also find that Sargent's story for the rise of inflation of the 1970s and its subsequent decline in the 1980s is robust to most ways of relaxing a strong assumption in the original work.     

Kulturelle Heterogenität — Leitlinien der Teamführung im interkulturellen Kontext

In Zeiten einer wachsenden globalwirtschaftlichen Verflechtung und gleichzeitig zunehmend fragmentierten Wissens arbeiten immer h?ufiger hoch spezialisierte Arbeitskr?fte in multikulturell zusammengesetzten Teams zusammen. Dies geschieht entweder im pers?nlichen Kontakt oder virtuell, sowohl grenzüberschreitend als auch national. Kulturell heterogene Arbeitsgruppen dürfen aufgrund ihrer besonderen Charakteristik aber nicht sich selbst überlassen bleiben, sondern ben?tigen ein aktives, kultursensibles Management. Dieser Beitrag er?rtert zun?chst, welche Faktoren die Teamleistung beeinflussen. Anschlie?end geht es deskriptiv um die Frage, wie der Zusammenhang zwischen Führung und (Arbeits-)Kultur im internationalen Kontext gesehen wird und inwiefern Unternehmens- und Teamkultur überhaupt beeinflussbar sind. Abgeleitet werden sodann normative Leitlinien des Managements multikultureller Arbeitsteams, die die St?rken betrieblicher Diversit?t zur Geltung bringen. Die Herausbildung einer synergetischen Teamkultur spielt dabei eine besondere Rolle.