Impact of the US–EC price war on major wheat exporters' shares of the Chinese market

China is both the world's largest producer and consumer of wheat. In an attempt to gain a larger slice of the important Chinese market, both the European Community and the United States have offered China subsidised wheat. In addition, other exporters have offered attractive credit arrangements to China. The objective of this paper is to measure the overall impact of these policies on each exporter's share of the Chinese market. To that end, an improved version of the constant market shares model is applied to data on Chinese wheat imports in the 1980's. The results indicate that the United States has been outperforming the other exporters since subsidised US wheat sales were authorised for China in 1987. The implications of the analysis for the smaller exporters and international wheat trade are discussed.     

Natur und mathematisches Erkennen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The role of investment banks in acquisitions

We compare acquisitions completed with and without investmentbank advice over the 1981 to 1982 period. We find that the choiceto use an investment bank depends on the complexity of the transaction,the type of transaction (takeovers versus acquisitions of assets),the acquiror's prior acquisition experience, and the degreeof diversification of the target firm. Although acquisitionannouncement returns are lower for firms using investment banks,this difference can be explained by differences in transactioncharacteristics. These results suggest that transaction costsare the main determinant of investment banking choice, followedby contracting costs and asymmetric information costs.     

PLANNING MULTIPLE LOCATION INVENTORIES

Supplying customer demand from comparable alternate inventory locations when an item is out of stock at its primary stocking point creates a virtual inventory for that item. The expectation is that if more inventories can be drawn upon, the inventory for an item would be lower, the fill rate would be higher, or both. While generally true that safety stocks will be lower, regular stocks, on the other hand, may rise with such cross filling of demand. In this study, a methodology is developed that balances the cross filling effects on both regular and safety stocks for determining whether an inventoried item should be cross‐filled. An example and guidelines are given to show how the methodology can be simplified and applied in practice.     

RELATIONSHIP MAGNITUDE AND ITS ROLE IN INTERORGANIZATIONAL RELATIONSHIP STRUCTURE

Close relationships between and among supply chain members are becoming more prevalent. However, there is lack of agreement in the literature and in practice concerning the characteristics of different interorganizational relationships. The resultant confusion is an obstacle to the progression of research and could cause problems among firms in a supply chain. Based on previous research and an exploratory study conducted with company executives responsible for supply chain management activities, this article seeks to introduce the concept of relationship magnitude (i.e., the extent or degree of closeness or strength of the relationship) and differentiate it from relationship type (i.e., classes of relationships that share common traits). Implications for managers and opportunities for future research are provided.     

Use of minimum risk approach in the estimation of regression models with missing observations

This article considers a linear regression model with some missing observations on the response variable and presents two estimators of regression coefficients employing the approach of minimum risk estimation. Small disturbance asymptotic properties of these estimators along with the traditional unbiased estimator are analyzed and conditions, that are easy to check in practice, for the superiority of one estimator over the other are derived. Received May 2001     

TWO READINGS AND AN EPILOGUE: A COMMENTARY ON THE VOICE OF SEDUCTION IN MYNATTET AL.

Two readings are made of Mynatt, Omundson, Schroeder and Stevens (pp. 657–683). The first reading views the paper through a largely “conventional” social science lens, while the second adopts a more critical perspective which raises three issues: abstraction in research; gender and ethnicity; and the rhetoric of research.