Impact of the Pick and Tick food information program on the salt content of food in New Zealand

The Pick the Tick programme of the National Heart Foundation of New Zealand aims to provide a framework for cooperation with the food industry to improve nutrition labelling and to develop a healthy food supply. Food manufacturers, whose products meet defined nutritional criteria, are able to display the Pick the Tick logo on food labels. The tick is used by 59% of shoppers in assisting them make healthy food choices. Food companies are encouraged to reformulate product composition if they fail to meet criteria and develop new products to specifically meet the Pick the Tick criteria. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of the programme on food formulation. The main outcome measure was the amount of salt not added to food products. Changes to sodium levels were multiplied by the volume of sales and then converted to salt in tonnes to provide a tangible measure of the impact of the programme. In a 1-year period, July 1998 to June 1999, Pick the Tick influenced food companies to exclude ~33 tonnes of salt through the reformulation and formulation of 23 breads, breakfast cereals and margarine. Breakfast cereals showed the largest reduction in sodium content by an average of 378 mg sodium per 100 g product (61%). Bread was reduced by an average of 123 mg per 100 g product (26%) and margarine by 53 mg per 100 g (11%). Pick the Tick appeals to the food industry as a tool for marketing food products and has provided an incentive to improve the nutritional value of foods. The tick on approved products not only acts as a ‘nutrition signpost’ for consumers but can also significantly influence the formulation of products without sacrificing taste or quality.

Jazz cats unmasked : revealing tales/tails of jazz education, musicians and teachers

New Zealand jazz education has come of age in the last 30 years.  The presence of a jazz curriculum in schools and universities has reflected students' desire to study this vernacular music and an adherence to international shifts in music education.  Yet, the Jazz genre commands the least market share in terms of record sales and concert attendance worldwide.  Now often described as America's true 'classical music', the cogent questions would seem to be 'why jazz', 'why now' and 'why here'?  This book explores these questions through the narrative of two New Zealand-born jazz educators who have made considerable contributions in post-secondary settigns.  It takes a critical look at their musical lives, and the influence that experience, context  and self-perception has ontheir teaching philosophies.  Stripping back the layers created by predominant binaries of musician/educator, glocal/global, history/genealogy, formal/informal and generalist/specialist, thsi book makes liberal use of a range of  arts-informed methodologies to unmask the main actors in jazz education adding to the ongoing broader international discussion of future directions of the art.

Personal acquaintances and salespeople in financial services: Differences between customers and friends

The existence, benefit and management of customer–salesperson relationships in the marketing of financial services are topics of increasing interest. Much of the sales and marketing literature implies that because of time spent together, salespeople and some of their customers develop close relationships that are akin to friendships. Evidence from social psychology confirms that strong relationships are founded in deep knowledge of others gained over long periods after sharing personal information. This paper reports on the results of a study of salespeople's assessments of their personal acquaintance with customers and friends in a financial services setting. The results indicate that salespeople do not classify customers as friends on all the dimensions of personal acquaintance. Furthermore, the nature of personal acquaintance differs between ‘good’ customers (those salespeople enjoy serving), and ‘bad’ (those they do not), with the exception of the personal acquaintance dimensions of interaction frequency and personal disclosure. We discuss the implications for practice and make recommendations for future research.

Corporate culture and greed: the case of the Australian Wheat Board

Between 1999 and 2002, the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) was involved in an elaborate bribery, or 'kickback', scheme involving the illicit payment of A$300 million to the Iraq government for supposed 'transportation fees' that were funnelled to the Saddam Hussein regime. This was clearly in breach of the United Nations trade sanctions and was apparently perpetrated by the AWB to secure continued sales with the lucrative Iraqi market. This paper aims to gain further insight into how a corporate culture can lead to greed, corruption and deception. Specifically, this study aims to add to the literature by analysing, using Schein's (1997, 2004) theoretical framework, a case on the development of a corrupt corporate culture. Content analysis of official investigative reports and other published documents is used to determine the extent to which the AWB's corporate culture and leadership may have influenced the behaviour of senior managers. The findings indicate that the culture within the AWB fostered an environment in which senior managers placed sales and profits above the sanctions clearly enunciated by the United Nations.

Prediction interval estimation for electricity price and demand using support vector machines

Uncertainty is known to be a concomitant factor of almost all the real world commodities such as oil prices, stock prices, sales and demand of products. As a consequence, forecasting problems are becoming more and more challenging and ridden with uncertainty. Such uncertainties are generally quantified by statistical tools such as prediction intervals (Pis). Pis quantify the uncertainty related to forecasts by estimating the ranges of the targeted quantities. Pis generated by traditional neural network based approaches are limited by high computational burden and impractical assumptions about the distribution of the data. A novel technique for constructing high quality Pis using support vector machines (SVMs) is being proposed in this paper. The proposed technique directly estimates the upper and lower bounds of the PI in a short time and without any assumptions about the data distribution. The SVM parameters are tuned using particle swarm optimization technique by minimization of a modified Pi-based objective function. Electricity price and demand data of the Ontario electricity market is used to validate the performance of the proposed technique. Several case studies for different months indicate the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of high quality PI generation and shorter computational times.

A stakeholder approach to corporate social responsibility, reputation and business performance

Purpose - This paper aims to investigate business managers' assessment of stakeholders' influence on corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. The key stakeholders included "employees" and "unions" as internal and "public", the "media" and the "government" as external stakeholders. The purpose was to estimate the influence of stakeholders that managers perceive as important. Moreover, the study sought to identify association between the CSR construct and corporate reputation and in turn whether this influences business performance. Design/methodology/approach - This study uses a mail survey with a random sampling of senior managers sourced from Dun & Bradstreet's Australian business database, focusing on large organizations (i.e. minimum $10 million p.a. reported sales and minimum 100 employees) as the selection criteria. A conceptual model was developed and tested using structural equation modeling. Findings - The results identified that "employees" and the "public" are perceived to be the influential stakeholder groups in CSR decision-making. There was evidence of a positive relationship between the CSR construct and reputation, which in turn influenced market share, but not profitability. Research limitations/implications - This study examined a cross-section of organizations using Dun & Bradstreet's database of Australian businesses and may not fully represent the Australian business mix. The effective response rate of 7.2 per cent appears to be low, even though it is comparable with other research in the CSR area. There may have been some self-selection by the respondents, although there were no statistically significant differences identified in the corporate characteristics of those invited to participate and those responding with usable questionnaires. Practical implications - Managers can adopt a stakeholder-influenced CSR strategy to generate strong corporate reputation to improve business performance. It is important to ensure that the interests of "employees" and "public" stakeholders are addressed within organizational strategy. Respondents were less concerned about government stakeholders and thus government involvement in organizational CSR may need to be revisited. Social implications - The major concern that emerges from these findings is the absence of the perceived importance of regulatory stakeholders on firms' CSR activities. Regulatory controls of CSR messages could reduce or eliminate inaccurate and misleading information to the public. Originality/value - The analysis explains the perceived relative influence of stakeholders on CSR decisions. It also provides an understanding of the link between organizational CSR reputation and organization's performance.

The behavior of temporary sales in a macroeconomic context

Nós investigamos promoções temporárias usando uma base de dados detalhada de 13 anos sobre preços ao consumidor no Brasil, com cotações de preços coletadas decendialmente. Nós encontramos forte evidências da existência de relação entre a frequência e tamanho de promoções e as variáveis macroeconômicas. A crença comum na literatura de que promoções não reagem a mudanças nas variáveis macroeconômicas pode ser devido a baixa volatilidade do cenário macro- econômico nos países analisados até o presente momento.

Price setting and macroeconomic variables: evidence from Brazilian CPI

Esta tese investiga as estratégias de precificação em ambientes macroeconômicos distintos, utilizando uma base de dados única para o IPC da Fundação Getulio Vargas. A base de dados primária consiste em um painel de dados individuais para bens e serviços representando 100% do IPC para o período de 1996 a 2008. Durante este período, diversos eventos produziram uma variabilidade macroeconômica substancial no Brasil: duas crises em países emergentes, uma mudança de regime cambial e monetário, racionamento de energia, uma crise de expectativas eleitorais e um processo de desinflação. Como consequência, a inflação, a incerteza macroeconômica, a taxa de câmbio e o produto exibiram uma variação considerável no período. No primeiro capítulo, nós descrevemos a base de dados e apresentamos as principais estatísticas de price-setting para o Brasil. Em seguida, nos capítulos 2 e 3, nos construímos as séries de tempo destas estatísticas e das estatísticas de promoções, e as relacionamos com as variáveis macroeconômicas utilizando análises de regressões. Os resultados indicam que há uma relação substancial entre as estatísticas de price-setting e o ambiente macroeconômico para a economia brasileira.

Location and contract pricing of distributed generation using a genetic algorithm

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Energy efficiency potential in Jamaica: challenges, opportunities and strategies for implementation

Incluye Bibliografía

Operations strategy and supply chain management: A Brazilian case study

The objective of this study is to understand how an assembly company, that is considered a focal company in the chain of Brazilian white goods sector, can influence the supply chain management established with its first tier suppliers. This is an exploratory qualitative study in which the information was gathered through direct observations, documents' retention, and data from interviews held with management-level employees of the sales and product development areas of the focal company and of the production area of the suppliers' companies. This study indicates that the operations strategy of the focal company influences the supply chain management and that the common business processes shared by its suppliers are a way to verify the truth of such statement. The suppliers cooperate closely with the focal company when complementing their business processes and consequently supporting the company to pursue its operations strategy. A set of mechanisms to aid the comprehension of how the operations strategy can affect the business processes and therefore to achieve the result of this research were adopted. © EuroJournals Publishing, Inc. 2012.

Growth and concentration among the leading business groups in Mexico

Includes bibliography

Reputation Formation and the Evolution of Cooperation in Anonymous Online Markets

Theoretical propositions stressing the importance of trust, reciprocity, and reputation for cooperation in social exchange relations are deeply rooted in classical sociological thought. Today’s online markets provide a unique opportunity to test these theories using unobtrusive data. Our study investigates the mechanisms promoting cooperation in an online-auction market where most transactions can be conceived as one-time-only exchanges. We first give a systematic account of the theoretical arguments explaining the process of cooperative transactions. Then, using a large dataset comprising 14,627 mobile phone auctions and 339,517 DVD auctions, we test key hypotheses about the effects of traders’ reputations on auction outcomes and traders’ motives for leaving feedback. Our statistical analyses show that sellers with better reputations have higher sales and obtain higher prices. Furthermore, we observe a high rate of participation in the feedback system, which is largely consistent with strong reciprocity—a predisposition to unconditionally reward (or punish) one’s interaction partner’s cooperation (or defection)—and altruism—a predisposition to increase one’s own utility by elevating an interaction partner’s utility. Our study demonstrates how strong reciprocity and altruism can mitigate the free-rider problem in the feedback system to create reputational incentives for mutually beneficial online trade.

The Technology Gap and the Growth of the Firm: A Case Study of China's Mobile-phone Handset Industry

We have examined the way in which local Chinese firms confronted with a technology gap have achieved growth, using the Chinese handset industry as a case study. Chinese local firms have lacked technology, and have therefore turned to outside firms for development, design, and manufacturing, while they themselves have focused on sales and marketing, using their advantage of familiarity with the Chinese market. Consequently, by establishing a growth condition in which their selection of boundaries counterbalances the technology gap they have been able to expand their market share in comparison with foreign firms.

The determinants of offshore production by Multinational Corporations (MNCs) : a comparison of Japanese and US MNCs

This study employs confidential affiliate-level panel data to improve measures of foreign affiliate activities of Japanese firms in manufacturing sectors. Combining existing data on U.S. MNCs with the Japanese data, we illustrate the pattern and determinant of their foreign affiliate sales by destination market across countries and industries for the period 1989-2005. Among our results, Japanese and U.S. MNCs are similar in the substantial growth of their foreign affiliate sales and the importance of sales to local markets. However, Japanese MNCs are distinctive from U.S. MNCs in that Japanese affiliate sales in Asia were prominently higher in host markets with lower educational attainment.