Water in the West : the challenge for the next century : report of the Western Water Policy Review Advisory Commission : [final report].

Shipping list no.: 99-0021-P.

The social ethic in management literature.

Bibliography : p. 109-116.

Business systems: a basic college textbook.

Mode of access: Internet.

Bibliography of management literature (up to January, 1931) /

Accompanied by "Supplement to Management bibliography (covering 1931-1935) ..." (3 p. l., 88 p. 27 cm.) Published: New York, N.Y., The American Society of mechanical engineers [c1937]

Best management practices for pork production.

Best Management Practices or BMPs refer to operating techniques and good housekeeping principals for reducing and preventing environmental problems. The overall philosophy behind BMPs is to conduct everyday activities in a more environmentally sound manner. By using BMPs, a facility can help protect the environment, save money, and improve community well-being all at the same time.

Dynamic modeling and monitoring of water, sediment, nutrients, and pesticides in agricultural watersheds during storm events /

"Contract report 655"--Cover.

Business leadership course for American Airlines; program summary,

Ralph N. Campbell, program director.

Organization, correspondence, transportation. Part I: Business organization,

Series title also on t.-p.

Precautionary principles: a jurisdiction-free framework for decision-making under risk

Fundamental principles of precaution are legal maxims that ask for preventive actions, perhaps as contingent interim measures while relevant information about causality and harm remains unavailable, to minimize the societal impact of potentially severe or irreversible outcomes. Such principles do not explain how to make choices or how to identify what is protective when incomplete and inconsistent scientific evidence of causation characterizes the potential hazards. Rather, they entrust lower jurisdictions, such as agencies or authorities, to make current decisions while recognizing that future information can contradict the scientific basis that supported the initial decision. After reviewing and synthesizing national and international legal aspects of precautionary principles, this paper addresses the key question: How can society manage potentially severe, irreversible or serious environmental outcomes when variability, uncertainty, and limited causal knowledge characterize their decision-making? A decision-analytic solution is outlined that focuses on risky decisions and accounts for prior states of information and scientific beliefs that can be updated as subsequent information becomes available. As a practical and established approach to causal reasoning and decision-making under risk, inherent to precautionary decision-making, these (Bayesian) methods help decision-makers and stakeholders because they formally account for probabilistic outcomes, new information, and are consistent and replicable. Rational choice of an action from among various alternatives-defined as a choice that makes preferred consequences more likely-requires accounting for costs, benefits and the change in risks associated with each candidate action. Decisions under any form of the precautionary principle reviewed must account for the contingent nature of scientific information, creating a link to the decision-analytic principle of expected value of information (VOI), to show the relevance of new information, relative to the initial ( and smaller) set of data on which the decision was based. We exemplify this seemingly simple situation using risk management of BSE. As an integral aspect of causal analysis under risk, the methods developed in this paper permit the addition of non-linear, hormetic dose-response models to the current set of regulatory defaults such as the linear, non-threshold models. This increase in the number of defaults is an important improvement because most of the variants of the precautionary principle require cost-benefit balancing. Specifically, increasing the set of causal defaults accounts for beneficial effects at very low doses. We also show and conclude that quantitative risk assessment dominates qualitative risk assessment, supporting the extension of the set of default causal models.

Management motivation for using financial derivatives in Australia

This study takes a direct approach to determine management motivation for the use of financial derivatives. We survey a sample of Australian firms on attitudes to derivative use and financial risk management. Management views are sought on the importance of a series of theoretical reasons for using derivatives. Generally, we find that managers are focused on the broad reduction of risk and volatility of cash flows and earnings in using derivatives. Specific issues such as reducing bankruptcy costs, debt levels and taxation are not considered as important. A further interesting result from this research is that even though firms may use derivatives they may not necessarily hedge all of their annual exposures across different financial risks. This helps explain the inconsistency of results in many empirical studies on the determinants of derivative use.

Business communication in interactions between mainland Chinese and western firms through Hong Kong Chinese intermediaries

Purpose-The paper aims to analyse the nature of business communication and its influence on relationships development between Hong Kong Chinese intermediaries sourcing from Mainland Chinese sellers involved in manufacturing for sale to Western buyer firms. Design/methodology/approach-A case study-driven methodology with purposeful sampling is applied to yield maximum variation in the sampling to elicit underlying tendencies and generative mechanisms that exist within and across the multiple cases of relationships. Findings-The paper finds that Mainland Chinese sellers and Hong Kong Chinese intermediaries tend not to have the close ties that might be expected. Mainland Chinese sellers constrained their use of social information, requiring Hong Kong Chinese intermediaries to use commercial information transfers to evaluate the trustworthiness of their Mainland Chinese partners. An ingroup/outgroup bias exacerbates the modesty bias of the Mainland Chinese and also hinders learning through the transfer of technical information within these Chinese interactions. On the other hand, Western buyers tend not to prefer social information interactions with their Hong Kong Chinese intermediaries, requiring these intermediaries to emphasise commercial information interactions to evaluate the trustworthiness of their Western buyers. Research limitations/implications-This research uses a restricted sample of case study respondents. Representative sampling across multiple contexts will assist in testing the generality of the findings. Practical implications-For the West to source increasingly attractive manufactures from Mainland China, Hong Kong intermediaries will remain fundamentally important even though this creates further interactions. The aggregate of these multiple exchange arrangements is less problematic than would be the case if Western business were to deal directly with the Mainland Chinese. Originality/value-This article sheds light on the nature of business communication interactions in a group of relationships between Hong Kong Chinese intermediaries and Mainland sellers, and buyers from the West. Implications for relationships development among the Chinese and Western actors are identified with propositions framed to guide further investigation.

Using extreme value theory to measure value-at-risk for daily electricity spot prices

The recent deregulation in electricity markets worldwide has heightened the importance of risk management in energy markets. Assessing Value-at-Risk (VaR) in electricity markets is arguably more difficult than in traditional financial markets because the distinctive features of the former result in a highly unusual distribution of returns-electricity returns are highly volatile, display seasonalities in both their mean and volatility, exhibit leverage effects and clustering in volatility, and feature extreme levels of skewness and kurtosis. With electricity applications in mind, this paper proposes a model that accommodates autoregression and weekly seasonals in both the conditional mean and conditional volatility of returns, as well as leverage effects via an EGARCH specification. In addition, extreme value theory (EVT) is adopted to explicitly model the tails of the return distribution. Compared to a number of other parametric models and simple historical simulation based approaches, the proposed EVT-based model performs well in forecasting out-of-sample VaR. In addition, statistical tests show that the proposed model provides appropriate interval coverage in both unconditional and, more importantly, conditional contexts. Overall, the results are encouraging in suggesting that the proposed EVT-based model is a useful technique in forecasting VaR in electricity markets. (c) 2005 International Institute of Forecasters. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Science-policy in environmental and health risk assessment: if we cannot do without, can we do better?

How can empirical evidence of adverse effects from exposure to noxious agents, which is often incomplete and uncertain, be used most appropriately to protect human health? We examine several important questions on the best uses of empirical evidence in regulatory risk management decision-making raised by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s science-policy concerning uncertainty and variability in human health risk assessment. In our view, the US EPA (and other agencies that have adopted similar views of risk management) can often improve decision-making by decreasing reliance on default values and assumptions, particularly when causation is uncertain. This can be achieved by more fully exploiting decision-theoretic methods and criteria that explicitly account for uncertain, possibly conflicting scientific beliefs and that can be fully studied by advocates and adversaries of a policy choice, in administrative decision-making involving risk assessment. The substitution of decision-theoretic frameworks for default assumption-driven policies also allows stakeholder attitudes toward risk to be incorporated into policy debates, so that the public and risk managers can more explicitly identify the roles of risk-aversion or other attitudes toward risk and uncertainty in policy recommendations. Decision theory provides a sound scientific way explicitly to account for new knowledge and its effects on eventual policy choices. Although these improvements can complicate regulatory analyses, simplifying default assumptions can create substantial costs to society and can prematurely cut off consideration of new scientific insights (e.g., possible beneficial health effects from exposure to sufficiently low 'hormetic' doses of some agents). In many cases, the administrative burden of applying decision-analytic methods is likely to be more than offset by improved effectiveness of regulations in achieving desired goals. Because many foreign jurisdictions adopt US EPA reasoning and methods of risk analysis, it may be especially valuable to incorporate decision-theoretic principles that transcend local differences among jurisdictions.