Entrepreneurship means making discrete changes in livelihood activities that involve substantial risks to income. While the rewards may be substantial, transactions costs may make decisions irreversible. This paper draws a comparison between entrepreneurship and technology adoption. Adopting a...

Farmers continue to be interested in opportunities for value added production through further processing. New Generation Cooperatives (NGCs) offer member commitment through up-front capital contributions on the part of members. For a potential start-up NGC, one of new and novel issues that face...

This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation concerning the approaches adopted by Italian companies in dealing with information security issues. Such results are compared to an ideal, integrated information system planning approach where information needs and risk management are...

This study offers an alternative to the traditional Transaction Cost Economics view of the treatment of information by viewing co-ordinated supply chains as a series of Principal-Agent relationships, and draws on Perceived Risk Theory to explain both consumer and organisational behaviour. Using...

The curvature properties of the indirect utility function imply a set of refutable implications in the form of comparative static results and symmetric relations for the competitive firm operating under uncertainty. These hypotheses, first derived and empirically tested under output price...

The paper considers the benefit to agricultural producers from commodity price insurance that provides in every year, but in advance of the resolution of production and price uncertainty, a minimum price for a fixed or variable portion of production. Under the assumption that producers do not...

Insuring against crop yield risk is an important task in rural microfinance because such an insurance may improve access to capital for smallholders by substituting for collaterals. However, agricultural crop yield risk is even hard to mitigate in developed countries due to problems of...

In this paper we price a precipitation option based on empirical weather data from Germany using different pricing methods, among them Burn Analysis, Index Value Simulation and Daily Simulation. For that purpose we develop a daily precipitation model. Moreover, a decorrelation analysis is...

Recent academic discussion regarding crop insurance in developing and transition countries has focused on weather index insurance. But empirical analyses of such schemes based on farm level data cannot be found in the literature, though this insurance type shows clear advantages compared to...

By altering the probability distribution of farm income, crop insurance programs affect farmer's input use decision. Ramaswami's (1993) one-shock model analyzed the effect of the crop insurance on single input use by allowing the randomness of yield while keeping price constant in revenue...