Are women disproportionately attracted to work environments where cooperation rather than competition is rewarded? This paper reports the results of a real-effort experiment in which participants choose between an individual compensation scheme and a team-based payment scheme. We find that women are more likely than men to select team-based compensation in our baseline treatment, but women and ...

Indicators to assess sustainable land development often focus on either economic or ecologic aspects of landscape use. The concept of multifunctional land use helps merging those two focuses by emphasising on the rule that economic action is per se accompanied by ecological utility: commodity outputs (CO, e.g., yields) are paid for on the market, but non-commodity outputs (NCO, e.g., landscape ...

This paper represents an approach of using simulation models and genetic algorithms for generating an aggregative production plan to maximize the total profit of the firm. The described methodology provides a tool which assists the company management in decision which of the suitable solutions will become the production plan. The entire system is composed by a business information system a data...

Civil society has responded to the predicament of marginalised producers by the rapid emergence of the FT market both within the UK and internationally (Barratt Brown, 1993; Crane and Matten, 2004; Lowe and Davenport 2005a). The Fairtrade Mark is now recognised by 52% of the population (Fairtrade Foundation 2006) and there are now over 2,500 retail and catering products carrying the Fairtrade M...

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of livestock cooperatives in improving economic status of animal holders in Hamedan province. The study has used a surveying methodology. For gathering data a structured questionnaire was used and its reliability was calculated by Cronbach's Alpha test and it was (α=0.80). The research samples consisted of 300 animal holders (beef cattle breeder...

The use of plant biomass is a sustainable alternative to the reduction of CO₂ emissions. Agricultural residues are interesting bioenergy feedstocks because they do not compete with food and add extra value to the crop, which might help to manage these residues in many regions. Breeding crops for dual production of food and bioenergy has been reported previously, but the ideal plant features are...

In this work, we probe anion production upon electron interaction with Fe(CO)5 clusters using two complementary cluster-beam setups. We have identified two mechanisms that lead to synthesis of complex anions with mixed Fe/CO composition. These two mechanisms are operative in distinct electron energy ranges. It is shown that the elementary decomposition mechanism that has received perhaps the mo...

The goal of microbiome engineering is to manipulate the microbiome toward a certain type of community that will optimize plant functions of interest. For instance, in crop production the goal is to reduce disease susceptibility, increase nutrient availability increase abiotic stress tolerance and increase crop yields. Various approaches can be devised to engineer the plant-microbiome, but one p...