1,369 research outputs found
Supermarkets Price Competition in Dallas - Fort Worth Fluid Milk Market
Demand and Price Analysis,
Duopoly Competition in Supermarket Industry: The Case of Seattle-Tacoma Milk Market
The Seattle-Tacoma consumers have been paying higher prices for fresh milk than consumers in other Western states of United States. For instance, the retail price for whole milk averaged 2.86/gallon in most of the large metropolitan areas in Western U.S, during the same period (Carman and Sexton, 2006). In addition, retail prices in Seattle-Tacoma do not respond similarly to farm price increases and decreases. Supermarkets are prompt to pass on to consumers any increase in farm price, while they do not pass or lag behind when farm price decreases. The present study attempts to analyze the pricing conduct of supermarket chains in a duopoly setting using a structural model of consumers and firms behavior. In this paper, we examine the pricing conduct of two supermarket chains using retail supermarket-level data on sales and prices from Seattle-Tacoma market area.Agribusiness, Demand and Price Analysis,
On a Kelvin-Voigt Viscoelastic Wave Equation with Strong Delay
An initial-boundary value problem for a viscoelastic wave equation subject to
a strong time-localized delay in a Kelvin & Voigt-type material law is
considered. Transforming the equation to an abstract Cauchy problem on the
extended phase space, a global well-posedness theory is established using the
operator semigroup theory both in Sobolev-valued - and BV-spaces. Under
appropriate assumptions on the coefficients, a global exponential decay rate is
obtained and the stability region in the parameter space is further explored
using the Lyapunov's indirect method. The singular limit is
further studied with the aid of the energy method. Finally, a numerical example
from a real-world application in biomechanics is presented.Comment: 34 pages, 4 figures, 1 set of Matlab code
Dynamics of Price-Cost Margins in the U.S. Meat Industry
This study analyses the stochastic behavior of price-cost margins (PCMs) in the U.S. meat industry. It, first, develops and estimates a vertical relationship economic model to derive PCMs in the U.S. meat industry (Beef, Pork, and Poultry). Second it analyzes the behavior of PCMs by decomposing them into their seasonal, cyclical, and trend components using the state-space and the Kalman filtering methods. Price-cost margins in the U.S. meat industry are governed by two common trends and two common cycles. The study also found cyclical variability of PCMs is the highest with chicken, secular variability of PCMs is the highest with pork, while seasonal variability of PCMs is the highest with beef.Price-cost margins, market channel, meat industry, state-space Kalman filter, Demand and Price Analysis, Livestock Production/Industries,
Analyzing the Impact of Food Safety Information on Food Demand in China
This study analyzed the impact of food safety information on food demand in urban China. The LA/AIDS model was estimated by using national province level food consumption data and quantities of articles about food safety event on public media from 2000 to 2008. The results of the study show that urban Chinese consumer food demand was influenced by food safety information from daily newspapers and GM labeling policy. This paper also indicates food price elasticities, expenditure elasticities by categories and the effect of food safety information.food safety, food demand, Linear Approximated Almost Ideal Demand System( LA/AIDS), Genetically modified( GM), food consumption, price elasticity, expenditure elasticity, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, D12, Q11,
Polly's Polyhedral Scheduling in the Presence of Reductions
The polyhedral model provides a powerful mathematical abstraction to enable
effective optimization of loop nests with respect to a given optimization goal,
e.g., exploiting parallelism. Unexploited reduction properties are a frequent
reason for polyhedral optimizers to assume parallelism prohibiting dependences.
To our knowledge, no polyhedral loop optimizer available in any production
compiler provides support for reductions. In this paper, we show that
leveraging the parallelism of reductions can lead to a significant performance
increase. We give a precise, dependence based, definition of reductions and
discuss ways to extend polyhedral optimization to exploit the associativity and
commutativity of reduction computations. We have implemented a
reduction-enabled scheduling approach in the Polly polyhedral optimizer and
evaluate it on the standard Polybench 3.2 benchmark suite. We were able to
detect and model all 52 arithmetic reductions and achieve speedups up to
2.21 on a quad core machine by exploiting the multidimensional
reduction in the BiCG benchmark.Comment: Presented at the IMPACT15 worksho
Apport de la prospection électrique à l'étude d'un glissement de terrain dans la ville de Constantine (Algérie). Electrical survey contribution to a landslide study in the City of Constantine (Algeria).
International audienceCet article présente les résultats d'une prospection électrique réalisée sur le glissement de terrain (février 1997) du Ciloc, situé à l'extension ouest de la ville de Constantine. Les sondages électriques (basés sur le dispositif de Schlumberger) montrent un ensemble argilo-marneux, renfermant des niveaux perméables. Ces niveaux favorisent l'alimentation en eau et les surpressions interstitielles déstabilisatrices. Les coupes géoélectriques obtenues traduisent un ensemble de mouvements emboßtés dont l'enveloppe inférieure est assimilable à un plan. Ce dernier se localise à une profondeur de 8 à 10 m. Les sondages électriques pluridirectionnels, permettant d'étudier l'évolution de la fissuration en profondeur, semblent confirmer cette profondeur du glissement. This paper presents the results of an electrical survey carried out on the Ciloc landslide (February 1997) in the west suburb of the City of Constantine. Vertical electrical soundings (measured after the Schlumberger pattern) show a marl-clay mass with permeable layers. These layers favour the flow of water and the destabilising interstitial overpressure in this soil mass. The obtained geo-electrical sections show a series of channelised movements with a lower limit which can be considered as a plane. The latter is situated about 8 or 10 m deep. The multi-directional electrical soundings allow the study of the development of fracturing at depth and seem to confirm this depth
Effect of Leading Edge Protuberance on Thrust Production of a Dynamically Pitching Aerofoil
The paper presents a computational analysis of the characteristics of a NACA 634-021 aerofoil modified by incorporating sinusoidal leading-edge protuberances at Re = 14,000. The protuberances are from the tubercles of the humpback whale flipper with leading edge acting as passive-flow control devices that improve performance and manoeuvrability of the flipper. They are characterized by an amplitude and wavelength of 12% and 50% of the aerofoil chord length respectively. Three-dimensional CFD on the modified aerofoil oscillating about a point located on the centreline at quarter-chord has been performed with the frequency and amplitude of oscillation being 4Hz and 10 deg respectively. In addition to the lift and thrust coefficients, near wall flow visualisations and the shedding of vortices during oscillations are presented to illustrate the unsteady flow features on the performance of the oscillating flipper. The results show an improvement in the thrust production when compared to previous studies on similar symmetric aerofoil without the leading edge modifications
BLOG.GOV: winning digital hearts and minds?: professionalization, personalization and ideology in foreign policy communication
Discussions of blogging as a form of political communication have mainly
centred on the context of election campaigns, national domestic issues, citizen
political blogging and mainstream media blogs. The rise of government
blogging as an alternative news source in the aftermath of the 2003 war in
Iraq, however, is much less addressed by scholars.
This thesis examines the case of the US State Department blog Dipnote in
order to study the dynamics of blogging as foreign policy communication and
public diplomacy. The focus of the analysis is on posts relating to the Middle
East, towards which US foreign policy attention was primarily geared after
9/11. The broader research question of this thesis attempts to determine the
relative importance of professionalization, personalization and ideology in
influencing the content on the official foreign policy blog of the U.S.
government, in order to advance the theoretical understanding of blogging in
the context of foreign policy communication and public diplomacy.
A content analysis of blog posts was conducted between the period of
September 2007, when the blog was launched, and March 2010. In addition
to this, several interviews were conducted with the management of the blog
at the State Department. Furthermore, by comparing the blog content under
the Bush and Obama administrations, this study was able to trace patterns of
continuities and discontinuities over time. The analytical framework is
adapted from Farrell and Webbâs (2002) professionalization framework, and
as such it breaks down the blogâs elements into technical, resource, and
thematic developments.
First, it is argued that the utilization of the blog as a cultural space is a new
interpretation for foreign policy communication not previously considered
in studies of government blogging in political communication or public
diplomacy research. Second, blogging enables a new form of official yet
casual communication which serves to legitimize American activities and
presence in the Middle East through personalization and de-ideologization of
content that make the blog a source of soft power. Third, the blog is a
âprotected spaceâ (adapted from Gumbrecht, 2004) where the government
maintains editorial control, low immediacy, low interactivity and low
engagement.
Overall, the findings point to the classic contradictions that the government
faces both offline and online in the digital era; between openness and
control, as well as secrecy and transparency, especially in the foreign policy
context. In conclusion, the analysis suggests that blogging is part of an
evolution and does not amount to a revolution in political communication
and public diplomacy. I thus argue that in their adoption of new technology,
the government moves from a new technology experimental phase to a new
technology consolidation phase
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