In most environments, information is critical to consumer's decision making. Consumers have prior beliefs about quality and price of goods and services and obtain new information which is used to update these prior beliefs or to form posterior beliefs, i.e., Bayesian learning. New food products...

This paper addressed the puzzling resistance of Presidents of southern African countries to food aid in 2002, given near certain starvation and long-term negative health effects of malnutrition of their constituents. First, I show that NGOs led by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are...

Genetically modified (GM) foods have caused many controversies. One important controversy relates to tolerance?the impurity rate that is tolerated before a commodity must be labeled as genetically modified. Currently, the United States does not have a specific tolerance or threshold level for GM...

Two interested parties dominate the current debate on genetically modified (GM) foods: environmental groups and agribusiness companies. For the average consumer to arrive at an informed decision on these new foods, they must rely on information from interested parties. Unfortunately, information...

Food products containing genetically modified (GM) ingredients have entered themarket over the past decade. The biotech industry and environmental groups have disseminatingconflicting private information about GM foods. This paper develops a unique methodology forvaluing independent third-party...

Malnutrition and food deprivation, which are concentrated in poor countries, have been along-term concern of economists, but as per capita income in developed countries has grown in the20th century, a new problem of over-nutrition leading to obesity has occurred. This paper developsmodels of...

T.W. Schultz (1975) proposed that returns to human capital were highest in economicenvironments where technology, price or production shocks were common and managerial skillsto adapt resource allocations to those shocks were most in need. We hypothesize that variationin returns to human capital...

Sometimes authorities are unable to identify rapidly the origin of a tainted product.In such cases, recalls or warnings often apply to all suppliers, even to those thathad not contributed to the contamination. Traceability enables more targetedrecalls by identifying more specically the product's...

In this paper we fit stochastic frontier production functions to data for Chinese farmsgrouped into each of four regions—North, Northeast, East, and Southwest—over 1995-1999.These frontier production functions are shown to have statistically different structures, and themarginal product...

This paper applies production theory to define a new set of inputs for U.S. households over the post-World War II period and uses newly constructed data on some of these inputs to fit a completehousehold-demand system, including inputs of women’s and men’s housework, and seven other...