A Case of Mistaken Identity? Measuring Rates of Improved Seed Adoption in Tanzania Using DNA Fingerprinting

Studies of improved seed adoption in developing countries are almost always based on household surveys and are premised on the assumption that farmers can accurately self-report their use of improved seed varieties. However, recent studies suggest that farmers’ reports of seed varieties planted, or even whether the seed is local or improved, are sometimes inconsistent with the DNA fingerprinting results of those crops. We use household survey data from Tanzania to test the alignment between farmer-reported and DNA-identified maize seed types planted. In the sample, 70% of maize seed observations are correctly reported as local or improved, while 16% are type I errors (falsely reported as improved) and 14% are type II errors (falsely reported as local). Type I errors are more likely to have been sourced from other farmers, rather than formal channels. An analysis of input use, including seed, fertiliser, and labour allocations, reveals that farmers tend to treat improved maize differently, depending on whether they correctly perceive it as improved. This suggests that errors in farmers’ seed type awareness may translate into suboptimal management practices. The average yield of seed that is correctly identified as improved is almost 700 kg per hectare greater than that of type I errors. This indicates that investments in farmers’ access to information, seed labelling, and seed system oversight are needed to complement investments in seed variety development.     

The importance of understanding the exchange context when developing a decision support tool to target prospective customers of business insurance

Companies use decision support tools that enable them to efficiently manage their customers. When targeting new prospective customers, companies need to be able to select those customers who are not only more likely to respond to their marketing activities but are also going to buy their products. There is a lot of research about customer relationship Management and the analytical models that can be used to effectively select and manage customers. There is however less attention that is given to the actual process of developing and building a marketing decision support tool. In this paper, we pay particular attention to the construction process of a marketing decision support tool. A key contribution of the paper is that we propose that companies should pay more attention to studying their exchange context and its unique features when they are developing analytical models to support marketing decisions. We illustrate the research contribution through the story of a company that is involved in the direct marketing of business insurance and faces the need to implement a better targeting model.     

Is partial privatization of universities a solution for higher education?

This paper accounts simply for the link between higher education and the productive economy through educated workers. We study a model of vertical successive monopolies where students/workers acquire qualification from a University then “sell” skilled labor to a monopoly which itself sells its final product to consumers, linking through quality the education sector to the labor and output markets. We determine the optimal share the State should keep in the University to compensate for the market imperfections, while taking into account the inefficiencies of public management. The resulting partially privatized University fixes the tuition fees so as to maximize a weighted sum of profits and social welfare. We derive the optimal public share under the hypothesis that the State may subsidize the tuition fees/University losses, then under the constraint that the University should make a nonnegative profit. We prove that in both cases, the State should keep a substantial share (higher under the first hypothesis) in the University, unless public management is too inefficient in which case the University's management should be completely private.     

Natural oligopolies with exogenous sunk costs: A non-Suttonian result

In a spatial competition model with exogenous fixed costs and divisible goods, we obtain non-Suttonian results. When the economy is infinitely replicated, the number of firms does go to infinity but, as consumers’ income goes to infinity, the equilibrium number of firms tends toward a finite value. This occurs because the global demand to each firm becomes in the limit infinitely sensitive to price differentials since they give then rise to infinitely large differences in purchase expenditure.     

How well do classical credit risk pricing models fit swap transaction data?

Currency and interest rate swaps are subject to a complex, two-sided default risk. Several theoretical papers have recently addressed the problem of pricing this swap credit risk. We implement a recent credit risk pricing model in an attempt to evaluate one of the main lines of research in theoretical credit risk analysis. We compare the model's analytical results to actual transaction data thanks to a unique academic database on swap transaction data.     

Strategy convergence

In fast-changing industries like communications, having the right strategy is critical to success. Didier Bonnet and George Yip explain why business models and strategic planning must converge into strategic formulation.     

The impact of recycling on the long‐run forestry

Abstract Interest in recycling of forest products has grown in recent years, one of the goals being to conserve trees or possibly increase their number to compensate for positive externalities generated by the forest and neglected by the market. This paper explores the issue as to whether recycling is an appropriate measure to attain such a goal. We do this by considering the problem of the private owner of an area of land, who, acting as a price taker, decides how to allocate his land over time between forestry and some other use, and at what age to harvest the forest area chosen. Once the forest is cut, he makes a new land allocation decision and replants. He does so indefinitely, in a Faustmann‐like framework. The wood from the harvest is transformed into a final product that is partly recycled into a substitute for the virgin wood, so that past output affects the current price. We show that in such a context, increasing the rate of recycling will result in less area being devoted to forestry. It will also have the effect of increasing the harvest age of the forest, as long as the planting cost is positive. The net effect on the flow of virgin wood being harvested to supply the market will as a result be ambiguous. An important point, however, is that recycling will result in fewer trees in the long run, not more. It would therefore be best to resort to other means if the goal is to conserve the area devoted to forestry.     

Inefficiency and predictability in the Brexit Pound market: a natural experiment

Exploiting the near-experimental conditions provided by the GBPUSD exchange rate during the Brexit vote of 2016, we quantify a significant delay of the market price in reflecting the increasing probability of a Brexit outcome over the vote counting period. We claim that the Brexit outcome could realistically have been predicted hours before the market adjusted to the outcome. This inefficiency is identified by comparing the market-implied probability of a Brexit outcome with a separate probability, estimated by a standard Monte-Carlo algorithm based on a simple linear regression model, representative of what should have been easily possible in real time. The core of the method is the real-time re-calibration of ex-ante ‘pollster’ predictions for the voting district outcomes by regressing the observed voting results onto them. For comparative purposes, a study of the MXNUSD exchange rate in the 2016 US Presidential Election was done, finding that the market-implied and model-estimated probabilities moved more consistently toward the Trump outcome. Put together, this identifies a somewhat anomalous breakdown in market efficiency in the case of the Brexit vote, which we attribute to its novelty as well as a kind of political bubble and subsequent crash, generated by confirmation bias and social herding.     

Nature of the R&D/Marketing co-operation in the design of technologically advanced new industrial products

Many studies have consistently reported that success in industrial new product innovation is linked with the degree of interfacing between R&D and Marketing in the early stages of the product development process. However, very little evidence of such an interface has been reported in advanced technology firms and the relevant literature provides little empirical material on the matter.
Based on a pilot study of 23 new product projects in ten firms in the U.K. it is argued that, in many instances, firms are missing a fundamental issue in the R&D/Marketing cooperation. Too often, the interface is limited to the identification of general market need for a particular new product idea.
The paper emphasises the fact that the interface should provide the means for an efficient product design procedure between R&D and Marketing. This design link should, in turn, profit both the engineering design of the product and its future marketability. The paper also outlines the advantages and the problems inherent in the exercise and proposes a framework for implementation.