This paper describes a multi-agent system (MAS) model, Desktop MAS, designed for New Zealand‟s pastoral industries. Desktop MAS models the strategic decisions and behaviours of individual farmers in response to changes in their operating environment. Farmer responses determine production,...

With current concerns about climate change and the general status of the environment, there is an increasing expectation that products have sustainability credentials, and that these can be verified. Labelling is a common method of communicating certain product attributes to consumers that may...

The Agriculture Research Group on Sustainability (ARGOS) monitors a wide ange of environmental, social, economic and management parameters on matched cohorts of organic, conventional and integrated farms in the sheep/beef and kiwifruit sectors. Over six years significant differences have been...

Multi-Agent Simulation (MAS) models are intended to capture emergent properties of complex systems that are not amenable to equilibrium analysis. They are beginning to see some use for analysing agricultural systems. The paper reports on work in progress to create a MAS for specific sectors in...

Agri-environmental indicators (AEIs) developed by the OECD have been used to assess the environmental performance of the agricultural sector in developed countries. The Agricultural Research Group on Sustainability (ARGOS) in New Zealand has investigated using these AEIs to assess the...

Replaced with revised version of poster 8/13/08.

One debate in economics centres on consumers’ decision-making strategies and whether they should be explicitly considered. The default assumption for choice modelling has been that all the attributes presented to respondents somehow influence their choices. More recently, choice modelling...

The recent rise of food cost in world markets has accelerated the research examining the underlying factors for this rise. The present research investigated the separate and combined impacts of three factors thought to contribute to the price rise: adverse weather events, strong and sustained...

The results of a nationwide New Zealand survey into willingness to pay (WTP) for six different genetically modified (GM) food products were used to estimate market-level demand curves for the products. The raw results clearly indicate that different New Zealanders have different WTP for GM food....

The impact of biotechnology is an important consideration for New Zealand. The country depends significantly on agricultural production and exports (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, 2004), and has relied in part on modern biotechnology for productivity increases over the last 20 years...