Technology innovation has become one of the most important factors for cooperatives to gain competitive advantage and to improve farmers' income. However, cooperatives must face huge risks of technology innovation. This paper discusses the risk paradigm of cooperatives' technology innovation...

We use Sperber's intermediairies and the firm theory to analyze the rural socialized service organizations. By studying the case of the melon association in Beihe Village of Uqiao Township in Beijing, we find that the basic existing objective of this association is to save transaction cost. The...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the key influential factors and their impacts on the value for money (VFM) of projects developed through public-private partnerships (PPPs) with an objective to improve the VFM assessment of PPP projects. Design/methodology/approach – This...

Fluid contamination is one of the main reasons for the wear failure and the related downtime in a hydraulic power system. Filters play an important role in controlling the contamination effectively, increasing the reliability of the system, and maintaining the system economically. Due to the...

Reliability is an important element in the performance of hydrokinetic turbines. It is also a driving factor of the system lifetime cost. In this paper, we perform time-dependent reliability analysis for the blades of a river-based horizontal-axis hydrokinetic turbine. Based on the stochastic...