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...

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...

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...

Over the last several decades, changes to production technologies have significantly increased output from the primary sector. The contribution of improved genetics has been variously estimated, and the impacts of genetic engineering have received much attention. The present research estimated...

The rise in oil prices has spurred interest in biofuels. Policies in the United States like the renewable fuel standard (RFS) have led to an expansion of ethanol production, while the New Zealand government has mandated a minimum level of biofuel sales. The research used a partial equilibrium...