Seasonality Effects on Consumers Preferences Over Quality Attributes of Different Beef Products

Using discrete choice modelling, the study investigates 946 American consumers willingness-to-pay and preferences for diverse beef products. A novel experiment was used to elicit the number of beef products that each consumer would purchase. The range of products explored in this study included ground, diced, roast, and six cuts of steaks (sirloin, tenderloin, flank, flap, New York and cowboy or rib-eye). The outcome of the study suggests that US consumers vary in their preferences for beef products by season. The presence of a USDA certification logo is by far the most important factor affecting consumers willingness to pay for all beef cuts, which is also heavily dependent on season. In relation to packaging, US consumers have mixed preference for different beef products by season. The results from a scaled adjusted ordered logit model showed that after price, safety-related attributes such as certification logos, types of packaging, and antibiotic free and organic products are a stronger influence on American consumers choice. Furthermore, US consumers on average purchase diced and roast products more often in winter slow cooking season, than in summer, whereas New York strip and flank steak are more popular in the summer grilling season. This study provides valuable insights for businesses as well as policymakers to make inform decisions while considering how consumers relatively value among different labelling and product attributes by season and better address any ethical, safety and aesthetic concerns that consumers might have

Evaluating urban services using economic valuation techniques :towards better urban environmental quality and promotion of sustainable development

PhD ThesisThis PhD thesis examines and evaluates the importance of urban services in environmental quality using economic evaluation techniques. It is a consensus that one of the features of countries that are under development is the rapid growth of urbanization. Rapid urbanization is followed by an intense demand for qualitative and quantitative development in physical dimensions and urban systems. An efficient urban management system is required to tackle and solve the problems of urbanization, using appropriate policies, methods and data to ensure that not only has the urban population got access to the labour market, housing and urban services, but also urban environments are organized to enhance the quality of life for its citizens. Consequently, this research seeks to assess and define a method to help local authorities and policy makers in affective decision making and efficient city management. Thus, the main objective of this thesis is to establish a non-market benefits valuation models for use in current and future policy applications with the aim of better built environment quality and promoting sustainable development. This research shows that allocating appropriate urban services plays a key role in promoting urban environmental quality, and fostering essential amenities such as comfort, safety, aesthetic, attractiveness etc. to citizens. Distribution and accessibility of urban services plays an important role in people’s movements, forming the city size, shape, and density, and importantly living quality in the city. This research reveals how economic valuation techniques can be used to define the market and the value of the urban services and assesses public preferences by determining willingness to pay for better access to preferred urban services. By employing the perspective of welfare economics to identify the structure of public preferences, including preference differences between socioeconomic groups, this study provides valuable information which should help to inform public policy deliberations over city management and land use planning objectives of promoting sustainable development and increasing quality of life and environment

Hybrid Microfluidic Devices For On-Demand Manipulation and Screening of Neurons and Organs of Small Model Organisms

Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster are widely used model organisms for neurological and cardiac studies due to their simple neuronal and cardiac systems, genome similarity to humans, and ease of maintenance in laboratories. However, their 50m-1mm sizes and continuous mobility impede their precise spatiotemporal manipulation, thereby, reducing the throughput of biological assays. By integrating glass capillaries into microfluidic devices and using 3D-printed fixtures for precise control, we have developed hybrid lab-on-a-chip devices to facilitate the processes of animal manipulation and stimuli control, using modules for single-organism selection, orientation, imaging and chemical stimulation. These microdevices enabled us to manipulate organisms individually and to orient them at any desired direction for imaging purposes. The applications of these hybrid microdevices were demonstrated in the optical and fluorescent imaging of C. elegans cells as well as cardiac screening of Drosophila larvae. This technique can be applied in fundamental biology, toxicology, and drug discovery

Robust Inference for State-Space Models with Skewed Measurement Noise

Filtering and smoothing algorithms for linear discrete-time state-space models with skewed and heavy-tailed measurement noise are presented. The algorithms use a variational Bayes approximation of the posterior distribution of models that have normal prior and skew-t-distributed measurement noise. The proposed filter and smoother are compared with conventional low-complexity alternatives in a simulated pseudorange positioning scenario. In the simulations the proposed methods achieve better accuracy than the alternative methods, the computational complexity of the filter being roughly 5 to 10 times that of the Kalman filter.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in IEEE Signal Processing Letter

Preserve or retreat? Willingness-to-pay for Coastline Protection in New South Wales

Coastal erosion is a global and pervasive phenomenon that predicates a need for a strategic approach to the future management of coastal values and assets (both built and natural), should we invest in protective structures like seawalls that aim to preserve specific coastal features, or allow natural coastline retreat to preserve sandy beaches and other coastal ecosystems. Determining the most suitable management approach in a specific context requires a better understanding of the full suite of economic values the populations holds for coastal assets, including non-market values. In this study, we characterise New South Wales residents willingness to pay to maintain sandy beaches (width and length). We use an innovative application of a Latent Class Binary Logit model to deal with Yea-sayers and Nay-sayers, as well as revealing the latent heterogeneity among sample members. We find that 65% of the population would be willing to pay some amount of levy, dependent on the policy setting. In most cases, there is no effect of degree of beach deterioration characterised as loss of width and length of sandy beaches of between 5% and 100% on respondents willingness to pay for a management levy. This suggests that respondents who agreed to pay a management levy were motivated to preserve sandy beaches in their current state irrespective of the severity of sand loss likely to occur as a result of coastal erosion. Willingness to pay also varies according to beach type (amongst Iconic, Main, Bay and Surf beaches) a finding that can assist with spatial prioritisation of coastal management. Not recognizing the presence of nay-sayers in the data or recognizing them but eliminating them from the estimation will result in biased WTP results and, consequently, biased policy propositions by coastal managers.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1902.0241

Motivational style for the project team

One of the greatest challenges facing projects in the world is the manpower management. In all the projects whether small or large, man is considered one of the important factors in the advancement of the project goal. Making most of them interested in and satisfied with their duties to meet the goals of the project enjoys special importance, since when man is satisfied with his job, he unconsciously performs his duty with greater care and consequently will be happy. In order to achieve more and better efficiency, the motivational factors are identified and then we embark on the enhancement of the efficiency to satisfy these needs. By studying the content theories of motivation and the specifications of the project in this paper, the motivational factors are determined for the project staff. The most important presupposition of the existing motivational theories formed in the bed of organizations and communities, is the presence of a rather stable group like an organization. Therefore, for a project whose most important specification is being temporal, the above-mentioned theories are not applicable and the project fails to have a fixed group of personnel. Therefore, the personnel is not permanently present over the whole period of the project. Therefore, with regard to this fact, the content theories of motivational factors are specially studied for the personnel of a project and at the end, the motivational factors for the personnel of a project are introduced and an appropriate processing theory which is more suitable for the employed managers is presented