Efficiency of Hedging Against Fluctuating Prices of Dairy Products

This paper investigates hedging and cross-hedging internationally traded milk derivative products with internationally traded commodities, recently launched New Zealand dairy futures, New Zealand agricultural products, and mature United States dairy market futures. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, we show that international dairy commodities are a distinct commodities subgroup, as changes in prices of dairy products are uncorrelated with other worldwide traded commodities. Second, we show that New Zealand Stock Exchange dairy futures are an effective tool for hedging exposure to smaller size trades and may not necessarily be of large positions as required by cooperatives and multinational

Impact of digestive and oropharyngeal decontamination on the intestinal microbiota in ICU patients

Selective digestive microbial decontamination (SDD) is hypothesized to benefit patients in intensive care (ICU) by suppressing Gram-negative potential pathogens from the colon without affecting the anaerobic intestinal microbiota. The purpose of this study was to provide more insight to the effects of digestive tract and oropharyngeal decontamination on the intestinal microbiota by means of a prospective clinical trial in which faecal samples were collected from ICU patients for intestinal microbiota analysis. The faecal samples were collected from ICU patients enrolled in a multicentre trial to study the outcome of SDD and selective oral decontamination (SOD) in comparison with standard care (SC). Fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) was used to analyze the faecal microbiota. The numbers of bacteria from different bacterial groups were compared between the three regimens. The total counts of bacteria per gram faeces did not differ between regimens. The F. prausnitzii group of bacteria, representing an important group among intestinal microbiota, was significantly reduced in the SDD regimen compared to the SC and SOD. The Enterobacteriaceae were significantly suppressed during SDD compared to both SOD and SC; enterococci increased in SDD compared to both other regimens. The composition of the intestinal microbiota is importantly affected by SDD. The F. prausnitzii group was significantly suppressed during SDD. This group of microbiota is a predominant producer of butyrate, the main energy source for colonocytes. Reduction of this microbiota is an important trade-off while reducing gram-negative bacteria by SDD

Essays on commodity markets

Agricultural Commodities are a large portion of the New Zealand Economy, and a better understanding of commodity markets is useful for New Zealand market participants, especially in the dairy sector. This thesis studies two of the main functions of commodity markets, price discovery and hedging. The first chapter reports the effectiveness of hedging as a function of spot market design. The second chapter illustrates the reduced explanatory power of the Theory of Storage in recent time as contrasted with the early 1960’s. The third chapter demonstrates that cutting edge machine learning techniques are promising alternatives for learning features of commodity markets

'Should I stay or should I go?' : Exploring the determinants of player cessation in MOBA games

While digital game consumption has moved away from bricks-and-mortar retail to application stores and online platforms like Steam, an increasingly competitive world-wide marketplace with new marketing and business models has developed. The revenues of these new models (such as subscription-based and freemium models, free to play models, etc.) rather depend on the player's desire to continue to play, than on a single purchase. Yet, retaining players in an environment where (free) games are at the fingertips of every player is difficult. Having a clear understanding of why players start, continue or cease to play has therefore become of vital importance to the game industry. Beyond the commercial value, the academic study of player retention and cessation within digital games has a broader, social relevance as well. For instance, digital game-based learning is increasingly being implemented in a variety of sectors including education, workplace training and health. Understanding why an interactive training is stopped and predicting dropout would help to improve existing training programs or cater to the needs of specific subgroups with high risk for dropout. A better understanding of player cessation, with improved techniques for measuring and predicting dropout, will also support efforts to prevent excessive game use and promote responsible video game behavior. While motivations to start playing digital games have been studied across different genres and within different theoretical frameworks, persistent and especially cessation behavior is rarely studied in digital games research. Based on the Social Cognitive Theory and the Model of Media Attendance this study starts to fill this research gap by examining possible determinants for digital game play cessation. We focus on a specific genre, namely Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games or MOBA's, a popular though rarely studied genre. A qualitative research design has been adopted to explore player cessation in detail, with an emphasis on digital game motivations, flow, and both parental and peer mediation. We conducted in-depth interviews (N=15) with adolescents and young adults between the ages of twelve and twenty-two. The results indicate that the discontinuation of starting motivations (e.g., no more challenge or competition), contextual elements (e.g., parents rules of game time, following friends to other games), game-related elements (e.g., availability of another or better game, no more new content in the game, bugs and faults), negative experiences (e.g., saturation, frustration), and physiological reasons (e.g., tiredness and being hungry) are important determinants of player cessation. Future research should further look into player cessation for a better understanding of this understudied behavioral aspect of digital game play, from an integrated perspective to pin-point the predictive power of gamer, content and contextual factors alike. In our discussion we propose a research agenda for both quantitative and qualitative follow-up research