Economics of Change in Market Structure, Conduct, and Performance The Baking Industry 1947-1958

Baking is one of the largest industries in the United States. Its sales, which exceed $4 billion annually, rank it third among the food processing industries, and thirteenth among all manufacturing industries. Bakery products account for nearly$1 out of every $10 spent by American consumers for food. Almost half of the domestic consumption of wheat flour is in the form of bread, rolls, cake, pie, doughnuts, sweet goods, and other perishable bakery products. While this study encompasses the perishable bakery products industry as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, it focuses primarily on wholesale markets for white bread. Since World War II, important changes have occurred in the bread baking industry. A decline in the per capita demand for bread products coupled with changes in technology and costs has affected the relationships between baking companies, their market behavior, and the resulting level of efficiency and price performance. In an industrial economy, the farming, milling, baking, retailing, and consuming functions are integrally related. Changes in the organization and practices in one may induce changes in others. The baking industry occupies a strategic position in this process, and as a result, consumers, farmers, millers, and retailers, as well as bakers themselves, have a vital interest in the way the baking industry performs. Changes in market structure and firm behavior in the baking industry have been the subject of study and concern by several interested individuals and groups. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has followed with increased concern the widening of the market margin and the declining farmer share of consumer bread prices. The Senate Agricultural Committee has completed a study of average cost and returns of bakery operations.The Federal Trade Commission has followed the pricing practices of many baking companies with frequent cease and desist orders. I\u3e The Justice Department, through periodic prosecutions, has kept baking firms aware of the limitation imposed by the antitrust laws. The Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly has studied the impact of discriminatory pricing by large baking companies on small independent bakers.7 The industry has encouraged economic study of the historic development of baking and changes in market organization and practices.s Most recently, the F.T.C. studied buyer concentration and the integration of retail grocery organizations into baking and other food processing industries

ISSUES IN NONMARKET VALUATION AND POLICY APPLICATION: A RETROSPECTIVE GLANCE

While issues in estimating nonmarket values continue to cause concern, resource economists have more reason now than ever before to be optimistic. More progress toward improved measurement has been made in the past six years than in the previous quarter century since development of the contingent valuation and travel cost methods. The new challenge is to learn how to adjust past studies to estimate nonmarket values for future policy analysis. The process involves developing an understanding of the important variables that explain the observed difference in estimates. This paper illustrates how the results thus far could be adjusted to develop some tentative estimates of the recreation-use value of Forest Service resources.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)

Based on a survey questionnaire administered to 1478 R&D labs in the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1994, we find that firms typically protect the profits due to invention with a range of mechanisms, including patents, secrecy, lead time advantages and the use of complementary marketing and manufacturing capabilities. Of these mechanisms, however, patents tend to be the least emphasized by firms in the majority of manufacturing industries, and secrecy and lead time tend to be emphasized most heavily. A comparison of our results with the earlier survey findings of Levin et al. [1987] suggest that patents may be relied upon somewhat more heavily by larger firms now than in the early 1980s. For the protection of product innovations, secrecy now appears to be much more heavily employed across most industries than previously. Our results on the motives to patent indicate that firms patent for reasons that often extend beyond directly profiting from a patented innovation through either its commercialization or licensing. In addition to the prevention of copying, the most prominent motives for patenting include the prevention of rivals from patenting related inventions (i.e., patent blocking'), the use of patents in negotiations and the prevention of suits. We find that firms commonly patent for different reasons in discrete' product industries, such as chemicals, versus complex' product industries, such as telecommunications equipment or semiconductors. In the former, firms appear to use their patents commonly to block the development of substitutes by rivals, and in the latter, firms are much more likely to use patents to force rivals into negotiations.

Economics of Change in Market Structure, Conduct, and Performance The Baking Industry 1947-1958

Baking is one of the largest industries in the United States. Its sales, which exceed $4 billion annually, rank it third among the food processing industries, and thirteenth among all manufacturing industries. Bakery products account for nearly$1 out of every $10 spent by American consumers for food. Almost half of the domestic consumption of wheat flour is in the form of bread, rolls, cake, pie, doughnuts, sweet goods, and other perishable bakery products. While this study encompasses the perishable bakery products industry as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, it focuses primarily on wholesale markets for white bread. Since World War II, important changes have occurred in the bread baking industry. A decline in the per capita demand for bread products coupled with changes in technology and costs has affected the relationships between baking companies, their market behavior, and the resulting level of efficiency and price performance. In an industrial economy, the farming, milling, baking, retailing, and consuming functions are integrally related. Changes in the organization and practices in one may induce changes in others. The baking industry occupies a strategic position in this process, and as a result, consumers, farmers, millers, and retailers, as well as bakers themselves, have a vital interest in the way the baking industry performs. Changes in market structure and firm behavior in the baking industry have been the subject of study and concern by several interested individuals and groups. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has followed with increased concern the widening of the market margin and the declining farmer share of consumer bread prices. The Senate Agricultural Committee has completed a study of average cost and returns of bakery operations.The Federal Trade Commission has followed the pricing practices of many baking companies with frequent cease and desist orders. I\u3e The Justice Department, through periodic prosecutions, has kept baking firms aware of the limitation imposed by the antitrust laws. The Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly has studied the impact of discriminatory pricing by large baking companies on small independent bakers.7 The industry has encouraged economic study of the historic development of baking and changes in market organization and practices.s Most recently, the F.T.C. studied buyer concentration and the integration of retail grocery organizations into baking and other food processing industries

The Compositional Structure of the Asteroid Belt

The past decade has brought major improvements in large-scale asteroid discovery and characterization with over half a million known asteroids and over 100,000 with some measurement of physical characterization. This explosion of data has allowed us to create a new global picture of the Main Asteroid Belt. Put in context with meteorite measurements and dynamical models, a new and more complete picture of Solar System evolution has emerged. The question has changed from "What was the original compositional gradient of the Asteroid Belt?" to "What was the original compositional gradient of small bodies across the entire Solar System?" No longer is the leading theory that two belts of planetesimals are primordial, but instead those belts were formed and sculpted through evolutionary processes after Solar System formation. This article reviews the advancements on the fronts of asteroid compositional characterization, meteorite measurements, and dynamical theories in the context of the heliocentric distribution of asteroid compositions seen in the Main Belt today. This chapter also reviews the major outstanding questions relating to asteroid compositions and distributions and summarizes the progress and current state of understanding of these questions to form the big picture of the formation and evolution of asteroids in the Main Belt. Finally, we briefly review the relevance of asteroids and their compositions in their greater context within our Solar System and beyond.Comment: Accepted chapter in Asteroids IV in the Space Science Series to be published Fall 201

Nonholonomic control systems: from steering to stabilization with sinusoids

The authors present a control law for globally asymptotically stabilizing a class of controllable nonlinear systems without drift. The control law combines earlier work in steering nonholonomic systems using sinusoids at integrally related frequencies, with the ideas in recent results on globally stabilizing linear and nonlinear systems through the use of saturation functions. Simulation results for stabilizing a simple kinematic model of an automobile are included