Commodity and energy prices have exhibited an unprecedented increase between October 2006 and July 2008, only to fall sharply during the last months of 2008. Many explanations have been offered to this phenomenon, including steadily increasing demand from China and India, large mandated...

This paper explains the proliferation of consulting activities in nonprofit organizations, and illustrates it by a study of the external consultancies commissioned by one religious/charitable organization (RCO) within a twelve-month period. The qualitative study, conducted over one year,...

Strategic communications planning is a vital part of numerous successful and efficient organizations, yet it is often times an avoided topic of discussion in other organizations. It is common for businesses to see communication planning as a task that will only be touched upon once immediate,...

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...