4 research outputs found

    Strange bedfellows? : big business meets small farmer

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    Population growth and urbanization cause an increased demand for food distributed through modern food supply chains, dominated by a handful of large international agri-businesses. Primary production, quite contrarily, is dominated by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers in developing countries. Although big business and small-scale farmers might seem to be strange bedfellows, there are numerous situations in which they already form economic relationships. In the doctoral thesis, the focus lies on a peculiar subset of relationships, so-called inclusive business models, which consists of for-profit buying relationships with small-scale farmers in which the firm states to care about the well-being of the farmer. The thesis contains four papers. Two papers analyse the organisational structure of the economic relationship between firms and small-scale farmers. One paper takes a critical look at an often used way to measure the well-being of small-scale farmers: a food security indicator. The final paper is on coffee certification, a well-known example of an inclusive business model, and looks at its impact on the set of activities farmers rely on to make a living

    Online Bargaining as a Form of Dynamic Pricing and the Sellers\u27 Advantage from Information Assymmetry

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    Among the means of implementing dynamic pricing strategies in e-commerce, online bargaining is found to be better than revenue management and online auction, because each deal actually reaches a “win-win” situation for both the buyer and the seller in the sense that the mutually agreed deal price is higher than the seller’s reserved price but lower than the buyer’s reserved price. Such feature brings profit to the seller, as well as savings to the buyer. Meanwhile when bargaining online, there is an information asymmetry between the seller side, i.e. the company side, and the buyer side, which grants a great advantage to the sellers over the buyers. This information asymmetry can be captured and exploited for financial gains through adopting a properly designed online bargaining algorithm
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