Browsing by Subject "Economics"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Access to Knowledge in Brazil: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development
    (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010) Shaver, Lea
    Access to knowledge is a demand for democratic participation, for global inclusion and for economic justice. It is a reaction to the excessively restrictive international IP regime put in place over the last two decades, which seeks to reassert the public interest in a more balanced information policy. With sponsorship from the Ford Foundation, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School has embarked on a new series of access to knowledge research, in partnership with colleagues in Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Russia and South Africa. The first book in this series, Access to Knowledge in Brazil, focuses on current issues in intellectual property, innovation and development policy from a Brazilian perspective. Each chapter is authored by scholars from the Fundação Getulio Vargas law schools in São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro and examines a policy area that significantly impacts access to knowledge in the country. These include: exceptions and limitations to copyright, free software and open business models, patent reform and access to medicines, and open innovation in the biotechnology sector.
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    Access to Knowledge in Egypt: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development
    (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010) Shaver, Lea; Rizk, Nagla
    The conventional wisdom in Egypt examines the issue of intellectual property solely as a question of policing and enforcement. The high levels of protection indicated by the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights are unquestioningly assumed to be desirable. Policy debates - and all too often academic ones as well - focus only on the questions of how to more efficiently tighten IP protection and crack down on piracy. Yet a more critical examination is urgently needed, whereby IP law, policy, and practice are viewed from a development perspective, rather than from an enforcement perspective. This volume takes on this endeavor. It offers the first examination of IP issues in Egypt adopting a multidisciplinary bottom-up approach that aims at maximizing access and contribution to knowledge, and in turn, promoting development. Bringing rigorous empirical research to bear on unquestioned ideologies, the collaborating authors question the conventional wisdom that more IP protection is necessarily better for innovation and development.
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    An economic model of a genetic resistance commons: Effects of market structure applied to biotechnology in agriculture
    (Resources for the Future, 2003) Noonan, Douglas S.
    Genetic resistance resources represent an emerging class of environmental resources. These resources are the subject of increasing public interest, especially for resistance in agriculture and antibiotic use. This paper models genetic resistance resources as common-pool resources. The static model applies directly to the case of Bt corn, whose seeds are bioengineered to contain a pesticide. Firms produce an agricultural output, corn, using two inputs: Bt corn seeds and refuge areas. Production also depends on the common stock of environmental resistance. Seed use contributes to greater resistance, while refuge areas abate resistance. This costly form of abatement represents another (positive) externality, which allows for the optimal seed use to be greater than the competitive level. The use of seeds and refuge areas by other firms can be shown to be substitutes and compliments in production, respectively, for each firm. This simple model of externalities is complicated by introducing another important feature common to genetic resistance resources: monopoly supply in the biotechnology factor market. Monopoly provision of seeds, with imperfect price discrimination, leads the monopoly to act as a gatekeeper of the commons who tries to maximize its own rents rather than the rents from the resource. This divergence in interests leads to a deadweight loss as seed use is curtailed through higher monopoly prices. This equilibrium is compared to the competitive and the optimal cases. The way in which the resistance externality operates, through damaging others’ output or through affecting their marginal productivities, suggests whether the monopoly improves the efficiency of the seed market. Further consideration is given to the possibility that the monopoly determines the firms’ level of abatement. Assuming some enforcement mechanism, the monopoly chooses higher abatement levels to increase factor demand for seeds and increase its rents. The Under some plausible conditions, a monopoly supplier of the input that accesses the genetic resistance commons can be shown to actually improve welfare by mandating a higher level of care that also maximizes its profits. The distributional consequences of the different market structures are shown, noting how gains for the monopoly come at the expense of firms. In 2000, the EPA and Monsanto required purchasers of Bt corn to plant specific refuge areas in order to forestall resistance. This approach is readily extended to other cases, such as pesticides more generally or antibiotic use in the production of health services by households.
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    Evaluation and Performance Measurement
    (Routledge, 2020) Benjamin, Lehn M.; Campbell, David A.
    This chapter addresses the state of knowledge of evaluation practice in nonprofit organizations. It summarizes management research on this topic, identifying unanswered questions and suggesting future lines of inquiry to advance understanding. The chapter starts with a review, a brief history of evaluation’s emergence as a distinct field of knowledge before turning to its adoption by nonprofit organizations. Research on evaluation practice in nonprofit organizations shows a consistent set of challenges that affect nonprofits’ ability to do evaluation well, including lack of expertise, limited time and funding to support evaluation, and funding reporting requirements that are not aligned with organizations’ evaluation needs. Research also reveals a constant tension facing nonprofit organizations between using evaluation to learn and inform decision making versus using evaluation to prove to funders and other stakeholders that the organization is worth supporting. Despite the progress that has been made to advance our understanding of evaluation practice in nonprofit organizations, deepening our knowledge in this area will require more comparative and longitudinal research as well as qualitative research that examines how the same evaluation practices and tools are interpreted and understood in different contexts.
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    Implementation of re-usable, configurable systems engineering model using product lifecycle management platform
    (2015-08) Zhang, Weijie; El-Mounayri, Hazim; Chen, Jie; Surber, Dan Clifford; Li, Shuning
    Industry is facing the challenge of increasing product complexity while at the same time reducing cost and time in a highly competitive global market. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Systems Engineering have the potential to help companies avoid costly product development and launching, as well as failure during use; these two concepts not only share many common characteristics, but also complement each other. PLM provides an information management system that can seamlessly integrate enterprise data, business processes, business systems and, ultimately, people throughout all phases of the product lifecycle. Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to designing, implementing, evaluating, and managing the complex human-made systems over their life cycle. The same underlying methods that improve management of products and services can be used to organize the framework in which PLM systems are implemented, integrated, and evolved. Though several studies have indicated that adopting Systems Engineering with PLM brings many benefits for industries, implementation of PLM based Systems Engineering with PLM has rarely been conducted. Pattern-Based Systems Engineering (PBSE), a form of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) based on the use of Systematic Metamodel (S* Metamodel), represents a family of manufacturing system, and is used in the life cycle processes of ISO 15288, was implemented here using TEAMCENTER® PLM software as the platform. More specifically, we have implemented the key portion of the General Production Pattern based on S* Metamodel, and demonstrated the benefit through the manufacturing of oil filter case study. The above implementation have resulted in a powerful systems engineering model in PLM that leverages the capabilities of Teamcenter, to enable an enhanced systems engineering approach. Benefits brought to systems engineering practice include: the ability to capture and reflect stakeholders' requirements and changes in product design process promptly and accurately; the ability of systems engineers to create models quickly and prevent mistakes during modeling; the ability of systems engineers to do their job much easily by using reusable and reconfigurable models; the ability to re-use of previous designs in a new process.
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    The Library's Role in a Market-Based Economy
    (H.W. Wilson Company, 1998) Marks, Sidney
    Politically speaking, the formerly agreed upon need to support libraries is becoming problematic. We library trustees will increasing be unsuccessful in finding support for traditional library roles. Businesses or new types of centralized governmental agencies will more efficiently and more effectively deliver many traditional library services. The economic theory that supports and predicts the re-allocation of the library's resources to the private sector is known as "free-market" or "market-based". Politically smart libraries are now redefining their roles in response to market forces to ensure continuing public support.
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    Privacy-Aware Data Trading
    (IEEE Xplore, 2021-07) Wang, Shengling; Shi, Lina; Hu, Qin; Zhang, Junshan; Cheng, Xiuzhen; Yu, Jiguo; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    The growing threat of personal data breach in data trading pinpoints an urgent need to develop countermeasures for preserving individual privacy. The state-of-the-art work either endows the data collector with the responsibility of data privacy or reports only a privacy-preserving version of the data. The basic assumption of the former approach that the data collector is trustworthy does not always hold true in reality, whereas the latter approach reduces the value of data. In this paper, we investigate the privacy leakage issue from the root source. Specifically, we take a fresh look to reverse the inferior position of the data provider by making her dominate the game with the collector to solve the dilemma in data trading. To that aim, we propose the noisy-sequentially zero-determinant (NSZD) strategies by tailoring the classical zero-determinant strategies, originally designed for the simultaneous-move game, to adapt to the noisy sequential game. NSZD strategies can empower the data provider to unilaterally set the expected payoff of the data collector or enforce a positive relationship between her and the data collector's expected payoffs. Both strategies can stimulate a rational data collector to behave honestly, boosting a healthy data trading market. Numerical simulations are used to examine the impacts of key parameters and the feasible region where the data provider can be an NSZD player. Finally, we prove that the data collector cannot employ NSZD to further dominate the data market for deteriorating privacy leakage.
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    Use of impact fees to incentivize low-impact development and promote compact growth
    (2013-07-15) Lu, Zhongming; Noonan, Douglas S.; Crittenden, John C.; Jeong, Hyunju; Wang, Dali
    Low-impact development (LID) is an innovative stormwater management strategy that restores the predevelopment hydrology to prevent increased stormwater runoff from land development. Integrating LID into residential subdivisions and increasing population density by building more compact living spaces (e.g., apartment homes) can result in a more sustainable city by reducing stormwater runoff, saving infrastructural cost, increasing the number of affordable homes, and supporting public transportation. We develop an agent-based model (ABM) that describes the interactions between several decision-makers (i.e., local government, a developer, and homebuyers) and fiscal drivers (e.g., property taxes, impact fees). The model simulates the development of nine square miles of greenfield land. A more sustainable development (MSD) scenario introduces an impact fee that developers must pay if they choose not to use LID to build houses or apartment homes. Model simulations show homeowners selecting apartment homes 60% or 35% of the time after 30 years of development in MSD or business as usual (BAU) scenarios, respectively. The increased adoption of apartment homes results from the lower cost of using LID and improved quality of life for apartment homes relative to single-family homes. The MSD scenario generates more tax revenue and water savings than does BAU. A time-dependent global sensitivity analysis quantifies the importance of socioeconomic variables on the adoption rate of apartment homes. The top influential factors are the annual pay rates (or capital recovery factor) for single-family houses and apartment homes. The ABM can be used by city managers and policymakers for scenario exploration in accordance with local conditions to evaluate the effectiveness of impact fees and other policies in promoting LID and compact growth.
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    The value of information and the ethics of personal-genomic screening.
    (The American Journal of Bioethics: AJOB, 2009-04) Schwartz, Peter H.
    Personal genomic screening, especially when marketed direct-to-consumers, threatens to worsen the inefficient use of healthcare resources that Burger and Kass discuss in the case of unproven screening tests. The information that genomic and other screening tests can provide may well have value for many patients, but its effective use in healthcare depends on careful thought about the ethics of testing and the proper regulation of unproven interventions.