Paper removed by author 02/04/09.

The maintained hypotheses embodied in structural general equilibrium models calibrated to data have tended to make economists and policy makers insecure regarding their empirical foundation. Advances in dynamic general equilibrium (DGE) theory and its empirical application have exacerbated this...

The objective of this project is to design a decision support system for soybean rust management using gaming software that incorporates farmer’'s decision making in the face of risks from soybean rust. Learning from past actions and neighbor’'s actions are also incorporated. Farmers observe...

Many times economists are asked to estimate the demand for new consumer goods or services for which no market data exists. Typically market researchers and economists answer this challenge using surveys that ask about intended purchases (Louviere, et al. 2000) or what has become known as stated...

The functional specification of mean-standard deviation approach is examined under location and scale parameter condition. Firstly, the full set of restrictions imposed on the mean-standard deviation function under the location and scale parameter condition are made clear. Secondly, the...

The contingent valuation method for estimating willingness to pay for public goods typically adopts a single referendum question format which is statistically inefficient. As an alternative, Cooper, Hanemann and Signorello (2002) propose the ‘'one-and-one-half bound’' (OOHB) format allowing...

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/26/06.

This paper explores the economics of input decision by a firm facing production uncertainty. It relies on a state-contingent approach to production uncertainty. First, the paper develops a methodology to specify and estimate cost-minimizing input decisions under a state-contingent technology....

This paper demonstrates a robust method for achieving disaggregation in the estimation of flexible-form farm-level multi-input production functions using minimally-specified data sets. Since our ultimate goal is to address important questions related to the distributional effects of policy...

In this paper we propose a game-theoretic model of a rank-order tournament with private information and characterize its equilibrium solution. The model captures many important features of the production contracts once observed in the poultry industry. We use the contract settlement data from a...