Does Good Personnel Management Practices give Agribusiness Firms a Competitive Advantage?

Agribusiness firms are often faced with the challenge of strategically managing employees to achieve a favorable position in the market (i.e. sustained competitive advantage). The resource based view (RBV) has been given considerable attention in the strategic management literature as a useful framework to analyze the significance of human resources in achieving sustained competitive advantage. However, there are few labor management studies in agribusiness that have used the RBV to provide evidence of a substantial relationship between any particular personnel management practice and competitive advantage. This paper provides an in-depth review of the RBV as a potential framework to analyze labor management practices in agribusiness. A case study is used to illustrate the application of this framework in the dairy industry and suggestions are made on how the framework can be extended and operationalized to guide future research and management practice in agribusinessHuman Resource Management, Resource-based View, Agribusiness, Sustained Competitive Advantage, Agribusiness,

Measuring Technical Efficiency of Dairy Farms with Imprecise Data: A Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis Approach

This article integrates fuzzy set theory in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) framework to compute technical efficiency scores when input and output data are imprecise. The underlying assumption in convectional DEA is that inputs and outputs data are measured with precision. However, production agriculture takes place in an uncertain environment and, in some situations, input and output data may be imprecise. We present an approach of measuring efficiency when data is known to lie within specified intervals and empirically illustrate this approach using a group of 34 dairy producers in Pennsylvania. Compared to the convectional DEA scores that are point estimates, the computed fuzzy efficiency scores allow the decision maker to trace the performance of a decision-making unit at different possibility levels.fuzzy set theory, Data Envelopment Analysis, membership function, α-cut level, technical efficiency, Farm Management, Production Economics, Productivity Analysis, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Risk and Uncertainty, D24, Q12, C02, C44, C61,

Agricultural Productivity Growth in Africa: Is Efficiency Catching-up or Lagging Behind?

Recent empirical studies on agricultural productivity growth in African countries have produced mixed results; some find that uptake of new technology (technical progress) is the main source of total factor productivity growth while others point to improved use of existing technology (efficiency catch-up). This study tests for efficiency catch-up in the agricultural productivity of 33 African countries from 1966 to 2001. We use recent advances in data envelopment analysis (DEA) to generate standard and bootstrap bias corrected technical efficiency scores. In general, we find no evidence of efficiency catching-up. The standard DEA overestimated the efficiency scores of some countries due to small sample bias.Agriculture, Efficiency Catch-up, Bootstrap DEA, Africa, International Development, Production Economics,

Seeing the Unseen Network: Inferring Hidden Social Ties from Respondent-Driven Sampling

Learning about the social structure of hidden and hard-to-reach populations --- such as drug users and sex workers --- is a major goal of epidemiological and public health research on risk behaviors and disease prevention. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a peer-referral process widely used by many health organizations, where research subjects recruit other subjects from their social network. In such surveys, researchers observe who recruited whom, along with the time of recruitment and the total number of acquaintances (network degree) of respondents. However, due to privacy concerns, the identities of acquaintances are not disclosed. In this work, we show how to reconstruct the underlying network structure through which the subjects are recruited. We formulate the dynamics of RDS as a continuous-time diffusion process over the underlying graph and derive the likelihood for the recruitment time series under an arbitrary recruitment time distribution. We develop an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm called RENDER (REspoNdent-Driven nEtwork Reconstruction) that finds the network that best explains the collected data. We support our analytical results through an exhaustive set of experiments on both synthetic and real data.Comment: A full version with technical proofs. Accepted by AAAI-1

Local Government Efficiency in Western Australia

The State government of Western Australia is currently working through a significant program of local government reform that has as a core objective a reduction in the number of local councils. The perception that there are economies of scale in service delivery is a key reason behind the State government’s desire to see a reduction in the number of councils in Western Australia. The following article uses the technique of Data Envelopment Analysis to measure the technical and scale efficiency of councils in Western Australia. The average pure technical efficiency score for Western Australian councils was found to be 83 per cent, and the average scale efficiency score was found to be 94 per cent. This suggests that pure scale effects are not a major source of inefficiency. Detailed returns to scale analysis for the 73 councils where complete data was available revealed that 17 councils were operating at the optimal scale, 26 were operating below the optimal scale, and 30 were operating above the optimal scale.Data Envelope Analysis, Local Government, Efficiency, Productivity Analysis,

Does Farm Size and Specialization Matter for Productive Efficiency? Results from Kansas

In this article, we used bootstrap data envelopment analysis techniques to examine technical and scale efficiency scores for a balanced panel of 564 farms in Kansas for the period 1993–2007. The production technology is estimated under three different assumptions of returns to scale and the results are compared. Technical and scale efficiency is disaggregated by farm size and specialization. Our results suggest that farms are both scale and technically inefficient. On average, technical efficiency has deteriorated over the sample period. Technical efficiency varies directly by farm size and the differences are significant. Differences across farm specializations are not significant.bootstrap, data envelopment analysis, efficiency, farms, Farm Management, Production Economics, D24, Q12,

LABOR PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH AND CONVERGENCE IN THE KANSAS FARM SECTOR: A TRIPARTITE DECOMPOSITION USING THE DEA APPROACH

The objective of this paper is to analyze sources of labor productivity growth in the Kansas farm sector over the period 1993-2006 for a sample of 668 farms. The nonparametric production frontier method is used to decompose labor productivity growth into three components: (1) technological catch-up, (2) technological change, and (3) capital deepening. Kernel estimation methods are used to analyze the evolution of the entire distribution of labor productivity in the sample period. We find that labor productivity is primarily driven by capital deepening. On average, capital deepening is the main source of convergence in productivity and technical change is a source of divergence. We find little evidence of technological catch-up. The impact of the three components of labor productivity varies by farm size.labor productivity, growth, technological catch-up, technological change, capital deepening, Labor and Human Capital,