In this paper, a new approach to risk minimizing vehicle routing and scheduling problem is presented. Forwarding agents or companies have two main concerns for the collection of high-risk commodities like cash or valuable commodities between the central depot and the customers: one; because of the high value of the commodities transported, the risk of ambush and robbery are very high. Two; the ...

How should a seller price her goods in a market where each buyer prefers a single good among his desired goods, and will buy the cheapest such good, as long as it is within his budget? We provide efficient algorithms that compute near-optimal prices for this problem, focusing on a commodity market, where the range of buyer budgets is small. We also show that our LP rounding based technique easi...

One of the important socioeconomic tasks of governments is regulation. Regulation literature focuses on government intervention in the market for regulating the amount of production and distribution of a commodity, which can lead to the determination of the structure and rules governing the market. A commodities exchange is one of the most important regulatory agencies, which, by providing a co...

Commodities are back in the news. The early twenty-first century seems to have witnessed an upsurge in the old conflict over valuable resources, leading to a global scramble for commodities, and bringing in its wake renewed international tension, war, dispossession, and environmental degradation. The Cold War clash of ideologies, it has been argued, has been replaced by global competition betwe...

Focusing on coca, coffee, gold, soy, sugar, and tea, articles in a special issue of the Austrian Journal Historical Studies 30/3 (2019) Global Commodities aim at tracing emergence commodity chains through expansion contraction frontiers. Frontier shifts imply complex – potentially conflicting interactions shaped by as well shaping socio-natural systems. Thus, contributions reveal their frontier...

Abstract The development of vitrification techniques has increased the use donor ova by allowing for their cryopreservation, storage, and international transportation. However, implications egg banking valuation eggs remain little studied. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a Ukrainian bank, this article I examine different mechanisms calculations that allow bank to transform vitrified ova—p...