Analyses of the political economy of exchange-rate policy posit that firms and individuals in different sectors of the economy have distinct policy attitudes toward the level and the stability of the exchange rate. Most such approaches hypothesize that internationally exposed firms prefer more stable currencies, and that tradables producers prefer a relatively depreciated real exchange rate. Se...

We develop an equilibrium business cycle model in which the producers of final goods pursue generalized (S,s) inventory policies with respect to intermediate goods, a consequence of nonconvex factor adjustment costs. Calibrating our model to reproduce the average inventory-to-sales ratio in postwar U.S. data, we find that it explains over half of the cyclical variability of inventory investment...

Participants in a supply chain of agricultural value-added products face significant challenges. Many of the costly distinctive traits desired by consumers are difficult (if not impossible) to observe even after consumption. A complicating factor, addressed here, is that in some circumstances delivered quality can only be imperfectly learned and/or affected stochastically by producers. Hence, b...

The maintenance of cooperation in populations where public goods are equally accessible to all but inflict a fitness cost on individual producers is a long-standing puzzle of evolutionary biology. An example of such a scenario is the secretion of siderophores by bacteria into their environment to fetch soluble iron. In a planktonic culture, these molecules diffuse rapidly, such that the same co...

Quality control and monitoring of perishable goods during transportation and delivery services is an increasing concern for producers, suppliers, transport decision makers and consumers. The major challenge is to ensure a continuous 'cold chain' from producer to consumer in order to guaranty prime condition of goods. In this framework, the suitability of ZigBee protocol for monitoring refrigera...

credence goods market is one of the markets that the asymmetric information has transformed it to a missing market. those goods and services that the applicant cannot determine the exact amount of their expenses due to the asymmetric information are called credence goods. from the economists' perspective, transaction in a market where participants are ignorant about each other is a game wi...

Multi-national enterprises (MNEs) operate in developing countries for many reasons: to take advantage of the availability of specific raw materials, natural resources, labour pools, skills-sets, or processing facilities, or to serve growing customer markets. In many cases, it is their supply chains that matter most in shaping their contribution to enterprise development and local earnings in de...

This paper examines the importance of market institutions in the transition from communism to a market economy. Blanchard and Kremer’s (1997) developed a partial equilibrium model explaining how, in the presence of imperfect information and incomplete contracts, liberalization causes the “disorganization” of traditional producer-supplier relationships in post-socialist economies and contributes...

Externalities and their costs are incurred when negative social and economic activities of some party have an impact on others and this impact is not offset by expenditures to liquidate it. For example, in the electric power industry, external costs are generated when electricity producers do not incur expenditures required to liquidate adverse effects of their actions that are borne by another...