Traceability in Meat Supply Chains

Traceability through the agri-food supply chain has become the focus of recent industry initiatives and policy discussions in Canada. Traceability can be part of a strategy to reduce the risk or minimize the impact of a foodborne disease problem. It can also be part of a larger quality assurance strategy, facilitating the verification of specific quality attributes. This paper examines the economic incentives for implementing traceability systems in the meat and livestock sector, including ex post cost reduction, enhanced effectiveness of liability law, and reduced information costs for consumers. Preliminary evidence is presented from experimental auctions in Ontario and Saskatchewan that measured consumer willingness to pay for traceability information, food safety assurances and animal welfare assurances for beef and pork.Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Structure and Transformations of the Environmental Protection System in West Pomerania Region

The environmental protection system of West-Pomerania Region (North-western Voivodeship of Poland) is presented. Especially focused on water resources management and protection. The features of strategy of Voivodship development were specified. The aims of strategy are intented to reach improvement the level of life quality, economy standards and approaching the "philosophy" of sustainable development with engaged institutons were specified. The importance of information technology (IT) solutions for assessments of environment condition and reporting were emphasised. The examples of graphical charts, maps and assessments of water quality of Odra river estuary and selected environment components in West-Pomerania region attached.water quality, Odra estuary, West-Pomernia region, information technology, Environmental Economics and Policy,

"Spatial Competition Between Two Candidates of Different Quality: The Effects of Candidate Ideology and Private Information"

This paper examines competition in a spatial model of two-candidate elections, where one candidate enjoys a quality advantage over the other candidate. The candidates care about winning and also have policy preferences. There is two-dimensional private information. Candidate ideal points as well as their tradeoffs between policy preferences and winning are private information. The distribution of this two-dimensional type is common knowledge. The location of the median voter's ideal point is uncertain, with a distribution that is commonly known by both candidates. Pure strategy equilibria always exist in this model. We characterize the effects of increased uncertainty about the median voter, the effect of candidate policy preferences, and the effects of changes in the distribution of private information. We prove that the distribution of candidate policies approaches the mixed equilibrium of Aragones and Palfrey (2002a), when both candidates' weights on policy preferences go to zero.candidate quality, spatial competition, purification

Measuring and Optimizing Cultural Markets

Social influence has been shown to create significant unpredictability in cultural markets, providing one potential explanation why experts routinely fail at predicting commercial success of cultural products. To counteract the difficulty of making accurate predictions, "measure and react" strategies have been advocated but finding a concrete strategy that scales for very large markets has remained elusive so far. Here we propose a "measure and optimize" strategy based on an optimization policy that uses product quality, appeal, and social influence to maximize expected profits in the market at each decision point. Our computational experiments show that our policy leverages social influence to produce significant performance benefits for the market, while our theoretical analysis proves that our policy outperforms in expectation any policy not displaying social information. Our results contrast with earlier work which focused on showing the unpredictability and inequalities created by social influence. Not only do we show for the first time that dynamically showing consumers positive social information under our policy increases the expected performance of the seller in cultural markets. We also show that, in reasonable settings, our policy does not introduce significant unpredictability and identifies "blockbusters". Overall, these results shed new light on the nature of social influence and how it can be leveraged for the benefits of the market

ELearning and the Lisbon strategy: an analysis of policy streams and policy-making

Under the Lisbon strategy, education and training form an essential element of the social pillar which aims to modernise the European social model through investment in human resources and combating social exclusion. Up to 2004, elearning was promoted as a key element in achieving the strategy especially through the Elearning Action Plan (2004-2006). This paper will analyse the process through which elearning emerged as a policy measure in implementing the Lisbon strategy. Using Kingdon’s policy streams metaphor (Kingdon, 1995), this paper will outline the policy and problem streams which coalesced in the late 1980s, opening a ‘policy window’, and which pushed distance learning onto the EU political agenda in the early 1990s. These included the accretion of ‘soft law’ around the area of vocational education and training since the Treaty of Rome in 1957; the challenges offered by the emerging new information technologies, declining industries and changing demands for skills; the adoption of distance learning systems at national level to redress disadvantage, and to provide flexible, high-quality and cost-effective access to higher education to adults who were unable to attend on-campus; and the role of the Commission, policy entrepreneurs and networks in promoting distance education as a solution to the major social and economic problems facing Europe. The Treaty of Maastricht committed the EU to supporting education and training in the community, and in particular, to ‘encouraging the development of distance education’ (Art 126 changed to Art 149 in Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon Treaties). A series of implementation programmes in the 1990s, including Socrates, Tempus and Phare, funded distance learning initiatives in the EU and accession countries. With the development of the Internet and web technologies, elearning came to replace distance education in the EU discourse. The paper will conclude with some observations on the current role of elearning policy within the Lisbon strategy

The Value of Sample Information for Water Quality Management

There is considerable interest in watershed-based pollution water quality protection but the approach can be highly information intensive (USEPA 2004, NRC 2000). This study examines the value of different types and levels of information for water quality management in the Conestoga watershed. For this estimation, a Monte Carlo procedure is used to construct the posterior expected value. Then, an Evolutionary Optimization Strategy with Covariance Matrix Adaptation (CMA-ES) is used to compute the expected value of optimized resources allocations given posterior information structures for specific sample sizes. This posterior optimization is nested within a second Monte Carlo simulation that computes the preposterior expectation (a nested Monte Carlo procedure). Thus, this paper provides some insight about the relative values of these alternative types of information for controlling water pollution from agriculture, and the gains from more intensive sampling.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Model-based Trajectory Stitching for Improved Offline Reinforcement Learning

In many real-world applications, collecting large and high-quality datasets may be too costly or impractical. Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to infer an optimal decision-making policy from a fixed set of data. Getting the most information from historical data is then vital for good performance once the policy is deployed. We propose a model-based data augmentation strategy, Trajectory Stitching (TS), to improve the quality of sub-optimal historical trajectories. TS introduces unseen actions joining previously disconnected states: using a probabilistic notion of state reachability, it effectively `stitches' together parts of the historical demonstrations to generate new, higher quality ones. A stitching event consists of a transition between a pair of observed states through a synthetic and highly probable action. New actions are introduced only when they are expected to be beneficial, according to an estimated state-value function. We show that using this data augmentation strategy jointly with behavioural cloning (BC) leads to improvements over the behaviour-cloned policy from the original dataset. Improving over the BC policy could then be used as a launchpad for online RL through planning and demonstration-guided RL.Comment: Offline RL Workshop at Neural Information Processing Systems, 202

Information Gathering and Marketing

Consumers have only partial knowledge before making a purchase decision, but can choose to acquire more detailed information. A Örm can make it easier or harder for these consumers to obtain such information. We explore consumersíinformation gathering and the Örmís integrated strategy for marketing, pricing, and investment in quality. In particular, we highlight that when consumers are ex-ante heterogeneous, the Örm might choose an intermediate marketing strategy for two quite di§erent reasons. First, it serves as a non-price means of discriminationó it can make information only partially available, in a way that induces some, but not all, consumers to acquire the information. Second, when the Örm cannot commit to a given investment in quality, it can still convince all consumers of its provision by designing a pricing and marketing policy that induces some consumers to actively gather further information. This mass of consumers, in exchange, is su¢ ciently large to discipline the monopolist to invest in the quality of the product

A case for money in the ECB monetary policy strategy

One major outcome of the review of the ECBs two pillar monetary policy strategy, which was published on 8 May 2003, has been the de facto downgrading of the hitherto prominent role assigned to the stock of money. According to the authors judgement, however, there is a strong theoretical and empirical rationale for the ECB monetary policy to pay close attention to the information content of money in the form of M3. However, the authors argue the ECB should make use of the so-called price gap or real money gap concept rather than the reference value as the latter runs the risk of giving misleading policy recommendations and compromising the indicator quality of the stock of money. Making use of M3 seems all the more rational as currently no better inflation indicator appears to exist in providing inflation forecasts in the euro area. --P-star,real money gap,excess liquidity,ECB

Which future for the Hurunui? Combining choice analysis with stakeholder consultation

The future of the Hurunui River and its catchment has been hotly contested between those who seek to store and/or divert water from the river in order to increase agricultural production and those who would like to see the river undeveloped and the quality of natural resources in the river and catchment improved. The Canterbury Regional Council wished to develop an approach to manage catchment nutrient loads across the region in order to achieve the objectives of its Natural Resources Regional Plan (NRRP) for water quality and aquatic habitats. Our approach, combining stakeholder consultation with choice analysis, was developed and tested in the Hurunui catchment in 2010-2011. The policy objective of the choice experiment was to describe and quantify the preferences of Canterbury Region residents with respect to existing conditions (the status quo) and potential future land use and water quality scenarios for the catchment. It was envisaged that this quantitative information on preferences across the region would be used by policy makers at the same time as they considered the outcomes of the stakeholder deliberative process. At the conclusion of the consultation process there was ‘general acceptance’ of a future development strategy for the Hurunui catchment that would maintain water quality in the main river at 2005-2009 levels while improving the tributaries to 1990-1995 water quality. Results from the choice experiment are broadly supportive of this approach. Canterbury region residents would require substantial compensation (mean $244-$315 per household per year) before they would accept a decline in water quality in the main river or in the tributaries. Willingness to pay for improvements in the main river is lower with a mean of $25-$33 per house hold per year