Retail Meat Feature Pricing: Enhancing Meat-Case Revenues?

Retail meat managers have many pricing tools to encourage product purchase, including the feature price, syndicate price, and the percent discount. Given seasonal demands and a large, diverse set of meat cuts, meat managers may form strategic pricing groups when choosing the feature-price, syndicate-price, and percent-discount levels. This research inductively determines these groups using a principal-components method and examines the role feature pricing plays in determining the volume sold and syndicate price. Seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) models are used to simultaneously estimate the impacts of featuring strategy decisions among cluster groups.Demand and Price Analysis,

Land titling as women's empowerment: critical observations from Recife Brazil

This thesis critically highlights the promises and shortcomings of women???s formal ownership of land (land titling) as a means towards women???s empowerment. The literature extensively documents the costs and benefits of land titles for poor women and delineates the gendered impacts of property ownership. The literature lacks insight into two important questions. First, how do the cost and benefit of titles interact to (dis)empower women? Second, what role does the titling processes itself play in empowering women? These two gaps are explored in this thesis. I use Lukes??? three-tiered concept of power as a framework for examining how titles and titling shift the relative power of the individual and embedded in interpersonal and institutional relationships. I use Lukes??? to examine the Ponte do Maduro Project, in Recife, Brazil, where a strong landless women???s movement gained legal recognition for the community and is engaged in co-constructing and carrying out their own titling process. Interviews with women in Ponte do Maduro reveal the complexities, contradictions and contingencies of titling. I find that titles are important but are not empowering. However, the titling process can be empowering because it has the potential to address the multiple sites where oppression occurs. Ultimately, it is awareness of the contingencies of (dis)empowerment embedded in the titling processes that can help those involved in conceptualizing and doing gender empowerment work to better serve the women they wish to empower

Animal Disease Economic Impacts: A Survey of Literature and Typology of Research Approaches

Animal diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) are a threat to the animal product marketing sector and the broader economy. Policy makers and industry stakeholders seek a means of assessing a disease threat's economic impacts when evaluating prevention and mitigation measures. But, differences in the focus of the impact analysis (production level, market prices, welfare), level of analysis (geographically, marketing phase) and proposed policy alternatives all influence the analytical approach. This paper surveys previous research, focusing on methodological approaches and results. Drawing from past research and future economic data needs, a typology is developed to guide researchers when defining the scope and policy alternatives of various research approaches.Animal disease economics, Literature review, Marketing channel, Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing,

Consumer Responses to Recent BSE Events

Recent bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, a.k.a. mad cow disease) discoveries in Canadian and U.S. beef cattle have garnered significant media attention, which may have changed consumers’ meat-purchasing behavior. Consumer response is hypothesized and tested within a meat demand system in which response is measured using single-period dummy variables, longer-term dummy variables, and media indices that count positive and negative meat-industry articles. Parameters are estimated using retail scanner data, and cross-species price elasticities are calculated. Results suggest that the BSE events negatively impacted ground beef and chuck roasts, while positively impacting center-cut pork chop demand. Dummy variables explained the variation in meat-budget shares better than did media indices.Consumer/Household Economics,

Sweat gland density and response during high-intensity exercise in athletes with spinal cord injuries

Sweat production is crucial for thermoregulation. However, sweating can be problematic for individuals with spinal cord injuries (SCI), as they display a blunting of sudomotor and vasomotor responses below the level of the injury. Sweat gland density and eccrine gland metabolism in SCI are not well understood. Consequently, this study examined sweat lactate (S-LA) (reflective of sweat gland metabolism), active sweat gland density (SGD), and sweat output per gland (S/G) in 7 SCI athletes and 8 able-bodied (AB) controls matched for arm ergometry VO2peak. A sweat collection device was positioned on the upper scapular and medial calf of each subject just prior to the beginning of the trial, with iodine sweat gland density patches positioned on the upper scapular and medial calf. Participants were tested on a ramp protocol (7 min per stage, 20 W increase per stage) in a common exercise environment (21±1°C, 45-65% relative humidity). An independent t-test revealed lower (p\u3c0.05) SGD (upper scapular) for SCI (22.3 ±14.8 glands · cm-2) vs. AB. (41.0 ± 8.1 glands · cm-2). However, there was no significant difference for S/G between groups. S-LA was significantly greater (p\u3c0.05) during the second exercise stage for SCI (11.5±10.9 mmol · l-1) vs. AB (26.8±11.07 mmol · l-1). These findings suggest that SCI athletes had less active sweat glands compared to the AB group, but the sweat response was similar (SLA, S/G) between AB and SCI athletes. The results suggest similar interglandular metabolic activity irrespective of overall sweat rate