This paper develops a stochastic model for estimating the probability density function of the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE), a revenue-based commodity support payment that is offered under the 2008 Farm Act as an alternative to the traditional suite of price-based commodity payments, that...

In many regression applications, users are often faced with difficulties due to nonlinear relationships, heterogeneous subjects, or time series which are best represented by splines. In such applications, two or more regression functions are often necessary to best summarize the underlying...

This dissertation considers three topics in professional advising and forecasting. Chapter 1 examines a principal's optimal contracting with experts. In an environment where experts have heterogeneous private signal distributions and type dependent reservation utilities, we show that the...

Nitrate pollution from agriculture is an important environmental problem, caused bythe excessive use of inorganic fertilizers. The internalization of this externality, via a tax onmineral nitrogen, could lead to a second best solution, reducing nitrate emissions. Severalauthors suggest that a...

We analyze the current state and future requirements of an agricultural income stabilization mechanism in a transition country – namely, the crop insurance system in Kazakhstan. Three objectives will be pursued: First, factors influencing the development of the crop insurance market will be...

A mathematical programming model is developed and associated to a spatial pattern index (Ripley L function) to analyse the optimal reserve design and implementation for the Little Bustard conservation in Plaine de Niort. The model structure corresponds to three spatial levels, fields, farm and...

The biological nature of agricultural production processes induce a higher degree ofuncertainty surrounding the economic performance of farm enterprises. This has contributedto the development and acceptance of forms of public intervention aimed at reducing incomevariability that have no...

Recently, Branzei, Dimitrov, and Tijs (2003) introduced cooperative interval-valued games. Among other insights, the notion of an interval core has been coined and proposed as a solution concept for interval-valued games. In this paper we will present a general mathematical programming algorithm...

As networks improve and new services emerge, questions arise that affect service deployments and network choices. The Internet is arguably a successful example of a network shared by many services. However, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not always be the right answer,...