This paper deals with the following question associated with congestion pricing in a general network with either fixed or elastic travel demand: what is the maximum efficiency loss of a general second-best pricing scheme due to inexact marginal-cost pricing in comparison with the first-best...

In 2007 and 2008 world food markets observed a significant price boom. Crop failures simultaneously occurring in some of the world’s major production regions have been quoted as one factor among others for the price boom. Against this background, we analyse the stochasticity of crop yields in...

First-best marginal cost pricing (MCP) in traffic networks has been extensively studied with the assumption of deterministic travel demand. However, this assumption may not be realistic as a transportation network is exposed to various uncertainties. This paper investigates MCP in a traffic...

In this study, a novel forecasting model based on the Wavelet Neural Network (WNN) is proposed to predict the monthly crude oil spot price. In the proposed model, the OECD industrial petroleum inventory level is used as an independent variable, and the Wavelet Neural Network (WNN) is used to...

This paper expounds the origin of "collective" in the process of collective land transfer, and analyzes the dislocation phenomenon of the role of collective in the process of collective land transfer as follows: deviation of the role under the conflict of identity; offside of the role under the...

The supply of affordable crop insurance is hampered by the existence of systemic weather risk which results in large risk premiums. In this article, we assess the systemic nature of weather risk for 17 agricultural production regions in China and explore the possibility of spatial...

It is a matter of common knowledge that weather represents the major source of uncertainty in crop production. It is to be expected that weather fluctuations will increase in the future due to climate change. Traditionally, farmers tried to protect themselves against weather-related yield...

The willow tree algorithm, first developed by Curran in 1998, provides an efficient option pricing procedure. However, it leads to a large bias through Curran’s sampling strategy when the number of points at each time step is not large. Thus, in this paper, a new sampling strategy is proposed....