CAPTIVE SUPPLIES AND THE CASH MARKET PRICE: A SPATIAL MARKETS APPROACH

Exclusive contracts (often called “"captive supplies”") between processors and farmers are in increasingly important feature of modern agriculture. We study an interesting empirical regulatory occurring in markets that feature both contract and spot exchange: the spot price is inversely related to the incidence of contract use in the market. We use a spatial model and a noncooperative game approach to show that processors can use exclusive contracts to manipulate the spot price in certain situations. Captive supplies in these settings represent geographic buffers that reduce competition among processors. However, in markets where the spatial dimension is less important, captive supplies are ineffective as barriers to competition because firms have incentive to “"jump"” across a captive supply region to procure the farm product.Agribusiness,

OPTIMAL COMMODITY PROMOTION IN IMPERFECTLY COMPETITIVE MARKETS

We investigate the optimal collection and expenditure of funds for agricultural commodity promotion in markets where the processing and distribution sectors may exhibit oligopoly and/or oligopsony power. The conditions that characterize optimal advertising intensity under perfect competition for funds generated from either per-unit or lump-sum taxes do not, in general, hold when marketing is imperfectly competitive. Simulation analyses show that imperfect competition always reduces farmers' optimal advertising expenditure and that an imperfectly competitive marketing sector may capture half or more of the benefits from the funds that are expended.Marketing,

Graph-Based Decoding Model for Functional Alignment of Unaligned fMRI Data

Aggregating multi-subject functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is indispensable for generating valid and general inferences from patterns distributed across human brains. The disparities in anatomical structures and functional topographies of human brains warrant aligning fMRI data across subjects. However, the existing functional alignment methods cannot handle well various kinds of fMRI datasets today, especially when they are not temporally-aligned, i.e., some of the subjects probably lack the responses to some stimuli, or different subjects might follow different sequences of stimuli. In this paper, a cross-subject graph that depicts the (dis)similarities between samples across subjects is used as a priori for developing a more flexible framework that suits an assortment of fMRI datasets. However, the high dimension of fMRI data and the use of multiple subjects makes the crude framework time-consuming or unpractical. To address this issue, we further regularize the framework, so that a novel feasible kernel-based optimization, which permits nonlinear feature extraction, could be theoretically developed. Specifically, a low-dimension assumption is imposed on each new feature space to avoid overfitting caused by the highspatial-low-temporal resolution of fMRI data. Experimental results on five datasets suggest that the proposed method is not only superior to several state-of-the-art methods on temporally-aligned fMRI data, but also suitable for dealing `with temporally-unaligned fMRI data.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20

DOES BRANDED FOOD PRODUCT ADVERTISING HELP OR HURT FARMERS?

A two-stage model is developed to study food processing firms' brand advertising and its welfare effects on farmers in a duopsony/duoploy setting. In stage 1 firms compete to differentiate their products through brand advertising, and in stage 2 firms engage in quality competition. Farmers may benefit or lose form brand advertising under alternative market conditions.Marketing,

How do short videos influence users’ behavioral intentions?

Short videos have become an essential tool for marketing tourism destinations. However, the impact of the characteristics of characters appearing in short videos on viewers\u27 travel intentions has not been adequately explored. To address this research gap, this study uses narrative transportation theory, self-congruity theory, and place attachment theory to investigate the impact of short tourism videos on tourist behavioral intentions. The study employs the SEM method to analyze the influence paths empirically. The results indicate that the vlogger-self congruity and role-self congruity significantly impact the destination image at the person-person relationship construction level. At the human-place relationship construction level, destination image-self congruity directly influences the behavioral intentions of potential tourists. Furthermore, place attachment mediates this effect and creates two influence paths. This study provides a new framework for understanding short-video intention research and enriches studying the human-place relationship in the new media era

VLOG-BASED EFL TEACHING MODEL FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: IMPACT ON SPEAKING SKILLS AND ENGAGEMENT

This study aims to investigate the efficacy of a vlog-based teaching model in enhancing oral speaking skills and engagement among university students in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting. With the digital technologies reshaping educational methodologies, this research integrates vlogs (video blog) into EFL teaching to build a more engaging learning path. The study was conducted over a semester with 30 university EFL learners in China, employing a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the impact of vlog-based learning. Pre-and-post oral speaking tests were administered to assess improvements in students' language proficiency, while questionnaires measured levels of engagement and motivation. Initial findings suggest that the vlog-based teaching model significantly improved students' speaking skills and heightened their engagement in learning English, indicating a promising avenue for digital media integration in language education. This paper contributes to the evolving field of digital media in EFL teaching, offering insights into the potential of vlogs to enrich language learning experiences and outcomes

VLOG-BASED EFL TEACHING MODEL FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: IMPACT ON SPEAKING SKILLS AND ENGAGEMENT

This study aims to investigate the efficacy of a vlog-based teaching model in enhancing oral speaking skills and engagement among university students in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting. With the digital technologies reshaping educational methodologies, this research integrates vlogs (video blog) into EFL teaching to build a more engaging learning path. The study was conducted over a semester with 30 university EFL learners in China, employing a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the impact of vlog-based learning. Pre-and-post oral speaking tests were administered to assess improvements in students' language proficiency, while questionnaires measured levels of engagement and motivation. Initial findings suggest that the vlog-based teaching model significantly improved students' speaking skills and heightened their engagement in learning English, indicating a promising avenue for digital media integration in language education. This paper contributes to the evolving field of digital media in EFL teaching, offering insights into the potential of vlogs to enrich language learning experiences and outcomes