Screening, competition and (de)centralization

Competition;Organizational Structure;Decentralization;Centralization;organization and management

Organizational Change and Vested Interest

The nature of organizational change and the value of headquarters is derived from a model with costs of delay, vested interests and costs of organizational change.The value of headquarters is derived from imposed organizational change. It is viewed as an institution which is able to prevent surplus reducing endogenous commitment.Imposed organizational change is predicted in circumstances where the desired change is not urgent, the loss of accepting lower offers than in the past is above a certain level, and the costs of imposed change are lower than the costs of delay.Delay occurs and change will be voluntary in these circumstances when the situation is not perceived as urgent and costs of imposed change are high.Voluntary organizational change occurs immediately when the desired change is perceived to be urgent.Case studies are presented along these lines of thought.organizational change

A Comparison of Hand-Geometry Recognition Methods Based on Low- and High-Level Features

This paper compares the performance of hand-geometry recognition based on high-level features and on low-level features. The difference between high- and low-level features is that the former are based on interpreting the biometric data, e.g. by locating a finger and measuring its dimensions, whereas the latter are not. The low-level features used here are landmarks on the contour of the hand. The high-level features are a standard set of geometrical features such as widths and lengths of fingers and angles, measured at preselected locations

Governance of Chains and Networks: A Research Agenda

Governance concerns the organisation of transactions. Four research themes regarding the governance of chains and networks are identified: decision rights, income rights, alignment, and cognition.chains;cognition;networks;incentives;coordination

Grower Heterogeneity and Governance: Authority, Access, and Countervailing Power

The increasing differentiation on the supply side of agricultural and horticultural markets has resulted in many governance structure changes between growers and wholesalers. For example, marketing cooperatives are restructured, heterogeneous associations split up in various one-product associations, growers integrate forward into wholesaling, and so on. These developments are analysed with an incomplete contracting model addressing horizontal as well as vertical relationships in a multilateral setting. The interactions between authority, access, and countervailing power in the choice of governance structure are highlighted.Industrial Organization,

Co-operatives in chains: institutional restructuring in the Dutch fruit and vegetables industry

Co-operatives play a major role in the agricultural and food industry. Co-operatives, by the very nature, are producer-oriented firms. As market conditions for food products have changed in recent decades, the question is raised whether co-operatives are still efficient organisations for carrying transaction with agrifood products? Bijman (2002) has addressed this question for the fresh produce industry in The Netherlands. Traditionally, fruits and vegetables were sold through auctions, organised by grower-owned co-operatives. In the 1990s several auction co-operatives merged, transformed into marketing co-operatives, and vertically integrated into wholesale. In addition, growers have set up many new bargaining associations and marketing co-operatives. These new co-operatives have started crop and variety specific marketing programmes. For reasons of asymmetric information and investment-related transaction costs several of the new co-operative firms have also included the wholesale function.transaction cost;asset specificity;asymmetric information;auction;co-operatives;fresh produce

On The Future of Co-operatives

Two extensions are formulated of the analysis of the allocation ofdecision rights in Hendrikse and Veerman (2001). First, the incompletecontracts in their article can be viewed as simple long-termcontracts, i.e. it is not allowed to make the allocation of authoritycontingent on the circumstances. Contingent long-term contracts arenow considered. Second, another aspect of decision rights is thefrequency of meetings between the owners and managers of enterprises.This aspect will be addressed from a long-term contract perspective aswell as a loss aversion perspective.contingent control rights;frequency of board meetings

A drift free nernstian iridium oxide PH sensor

A novel way of eliminating drift problems in metal oxide pH sensors is presented. The method employs a FET-structure under the electrode that uses the metal oxide as a gate contact. In addition to the enhanced drift properties, the new sensor has an almost ideal nernstian response. First a theoretical explanation is given, which is then confirmed by measurement

Ownership Structure in Agrifood Chains

This article analyses the impact of ownership structure on investments in a three-party supply chain from an incomplete contracting perspective. Circumstances are determined in which a marketing cooperative is the unique first-best ownership structure.chains;incomplete contracts;marketing cooperatives

Verification Under Increasing Dimensionality

Verification decisions are often based on second order statistics estimated from a set of samples. Ongoing growth of computational resources allows for considering more and more features, increasing the dimensionality of the samples. If the dimensionality is of the same order as the number of samples used in the estimation or even higher, then the accuracy of the estimate decreases significantly. In particular, the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix are estimated with a bias and the estimate of the eigenvectors differ considerably from the real eigenvectors. We show how a classical approach of verification in high dimensions is severely affected by these problems, and we show how bias correction methods can reduce these problems