Organizational Issues in the Agrifood Sector: Toward a Comparative Approach

This paper outlines a research program comparing the economic organization of agriculture in the United States and European Union. Both have highly developed agricultural sectors but their organizational arrangements vary widely. Comparative analysis not only provides a broad set of firms and industries to compare, but also highlights the interaction between the institutional environment and the arrangements established to govern agricultural transactions. We first assess the common trend toward consolidation and vertical integration, turning next to the economic organization of formal and informal networks. While history and path dependence explain some of the variety among U.S. and European practices, other local conditions are important as well. We conclude by assessing the policy implications of recent changes in economic organization.

Relying on the Information of Others: Debt Rescheduling with Multiple Lenders

Can inertia in terminating unsuccessful loans (creditor passivity) be due to the multiplicity of lenders in loan arrangements? Can a lender reschedule, betting against his odds? Private information in the form of bad but coarse news, that would prompt foreclosure on its own, will instead lead to rescheduling. The gamble is that other lenders may have sharper information. At equilibrium, rescheduling occurs even if all lenders received bad news. This is ine¢ cient (increasing the cost of capital) compared to perfect information sharing. However, barren information sharing, at equilibrium there is no excess reliance on the information of others from a social point of view. The paper also contains an extension dealing with \"�financial scandals\".Debt contracts, asymmetric information, rescheduling, in- solvency, Bayesian games.

Relying on the Information of Others: Debt Rescheduling with Multiple Lenders

Can inertia in terminating unsuccessful loans be due to the multiplicity of lenders in loan arrangements? Can a lender reschedule, betting against his odds? We show that fear of being last in a liquidation run prevents the aggregation of the lenders' information about the value of continuation. Private information in the form of bad but coarse news, that would prompt foreclosure on its own, will instead lead to rescheduling. The gamble is that other lenders may have sharper information. At equilibrium, rescheduling occurs even if all lenders received bad news. This is inefficient (increasing the cost of capital) compared to perfect information sharing. However, from a social point of view, barren information sharing, the equilibrium does not exhibit excessive reliance on the information of others.Debt contracts, asymmetric information, rescheduling, bankruptcy, Bayesian games

Document Retrieval on Repetitive Collections

Document retrieval aims at finding the most important documents where a pattern appears in a collection of strings. Traditional pattern-matching techniques yield brute-force document retrieval solutions, which has motivated the research on tailored indexes that offer near-optimal performance. However, an experimental study establishing which alternatives are actually better than brute force, and which perform best depending on the collection characteristics, has not been carried out. In this paper we address this shortcoming by exploring the relationship between the nature of the underlying collection and the performance of current methods. Via extensive experiments we show that established solutions are often beaten in practice by brute-force alternatives. We also design new methods that offer superior time/space trade-offs, particularly on repetitive collections.Comment: Accepted to ESA 2014. Implementation and experiments at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/suds/rlcsa

Online Self-Indexed Grammar Compression

Although several grammar-based self-indexes have been proposed thus far, their applicability is limited to offline settings where whole input texts are prepared, thus requiring to rebuild index structures for given additional inputs, which is often the case in the big data era. In this paper, we present the first online self-indexed grammar compression named OESP-index that can gradually build the index structure by reading input characters one-by-one. Such a property is another advantage which enables saving a working space for construction, because we do not need to store input texts in memory. We experimentally test OESP-index on the ability to build index structures and search query texts, and we show OESP-index's efficiency, especially space-efficiency for building index structures.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 22nd edition of the International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE2015

Analysis of the Workforce and Workplace for Rheumatology, and the Research Activities of Rheumatologists Early in Their Careers

[Excerpt] The scope and scale of clinical research is unknown for any medical or surgical specialty beyond snapshots of the broad aims and expenditures of research programs sponsored by federal agencies or the pharmaceutical industry. As a consequence, the workforce and workplace for clinical investigation is enigmatic and unexamined even after explicit warnings that an essential arm for advancing clinical practice has been disabled. The present study was designed to assess the workforce and workplace for rheumatology, and the extent and type of research prevailing among rheumatologists early in their careers. Our findings provide fresh insights about the workforce and the workplace for rheumatology, and justify interventions to address gaps in both the scope and scale of clinical research in arthritis and rheumatism