Estimation of cost efficiency of fattening pigs, sows, and piglets using SFA approach analysis: Evidence from China

The hog industry is the core industry in the field of agriculture and animal husbandry in China, which development is related to the improvement of people’s quality of life. The production of the hog industry has been restricted by environmental regulations, which needs to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Based on the data of 29 provinces from 2008 to 2019, this paper aims to use the stochastic frontier analysis method to calculate the cost efficiency of fattening pigs, sows, and piglets in three stages of pig production and focuses on the impact of environmental regulation policies on cost efficiency. The study found that the cost efficiency of fattening pigs, sows, and piglets in China were 0.77, 0.79, and 0.53, respectively, and the efficiency losses were 23%, 21%, and 47%, respectively. The impact of environmental regulation policies on the cost efficiency of fattening pigs showed an ’ N ’ trend, and the impact on the cost efficiency of sows and piglets showed an inverted ’ N ’ trend. For fattening pigs, increasing the intensity of environmental regulation, and exceeding the second inflection point of the ’ N ’ curve can achieve the dual goals of environmental governance and cost reduction and efficiency increase. For sows, reducing the intensity of environmental regulation appropriately can avoid cost-efficiency loss. For piglets, environmental regulation policies have not effectively incentives the cost efficiency of piglets. In addition, raising the level of technology investment in fattening pigs and sows can achieve cost efficiency gains, and can farmers use emerging financial product tools such as ’ insurance + futures ’ to avoid market risks and efficiency losses.

KEY FACTOR: PARTICULARIZATION MODEL FOR TPM DEPLOYMENT

TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), which is part of the Lean Management philosophy, aims to increase the company's productivity by reducing efficiency losses during manufacturing. TPM allows organizations to know the real efficiency with which they are working and the losses of the production process, and with the application of this methodology to improve the efficiency of the equipment and the competitiveness of the company.

Implementation of the LAMMPS package using T-system with an Open Architecture

Supercomputer applications are usually implemented in the C, C++, and Fortran programming languages using different versions of the Message Passing Interface library. The "T-system" project (OpenTS) studies the issues of automatic dynamic parallelization of programs. In practical terms, the implementation of applications in a mixed (hybrid) style is relevant, when one part of the application is written in the paradigm of automatic dynamic parallelization of programs and does not use any primitives of the MPI library, and the other part of it is written using the Message Passing Interface library. In this case, the library is used, which is a part of the T-system and is called DMPI (Dynamic Message Passing Interface). In this way, it is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of the MPI implementation available in the T-system. The purpose of this work is to examine the effectiveness of DMPI implementation in the T-system. In a classic MPI application, 0% of the code is implemented using automatic dynamic parallelization of programs and 100% of the code is implemented in the form of a regular Message Passing Interface program. For comparative analysis, at the beginning the code is executed on the standard Message Passing Interface, for which it was originally written, and then it is executed using the DMPI library taken from the developed T-system. Сomparing the effectiveness of the approaches, the performance losses and the prospects for using a hybrid programming style are evaluated. As a result of the conducted experimental studies for different types of computational problems, it was possible to make sure that the efficiency losses are negligible. This allowed to formulate the direction of further work on the T-system and the most promising options for building hybrid applications. Thus, this article presents the results of the comparative tests of LAMMPS application using OpenMPI and using OpenTS DMPI. The test results confirm the effectiveness of the DMPI implementation in the OpenTS parallel programming environment

THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF AGILE RETROSPECTIVES ON THE COLLABORATION OF DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT TEAMS – A PRACTICAL APPROACH ON THE EXAMPLE OF BOSCH ENGINEERING GMBH

To counteract competitive pressure, increasing customer requirements and growing product complexity successful distributed collaboration in product development is vital. Companies have to face new challenges, such as efficiency losses in communication. To overcome these challenges agile working practices, such as agile retrospectives, could be beneficial. The objective of this scientific work is to evaluate the benefit of agile working practices on the example of agile retrospectives, for the improvement of collaboration in distributed development teams. Based on literature analysis, qualitative and quantitative expert interviews following the DRM by Blessing and Chakrabarti, this scientific work shows that agile working practices have a high potential to improve distributed collaboration. To address this potential, several virtual agile retrospectives are developed and conducted within a distributed team at Bosch Engineering GmbH. The evaluation of this approach results in a high potential of agile retrospectives indicating an improvement tendency. Especially iteratively implemented virtual agile retrospectives have a positive impact on successful distributed collaboration.

Tight Money-Tight Credit: Coordination Failure in the Conduct of Monetary and Financial Policies

Violations of Tinbergen’s rule and strategic interaction undermine stabilization policies in a New Keynesian model with the Bernanke-Gertler accelerator. Welfare costs of risk shocks are large because of efficiency losses and income effects of costly monitoring, but they are much larger under a simple Taylor rule (STR) or a Taylor rule augmented with credit spreads (ATR) than with a Taylor rule and a separate financial rule targeting spreads. ATR and STR are tight money-tight credit regimes responding too much (little) to inflation (spreads). The Nash equilibrium of monetary and financial policies is also tight money-tight credit but it dominates ATR and STR. (JEL E12, E31, E44, E43, E52, E63)

Missing Observations in Split-Plot Central Composite Designs: The Loss in Relative A-, G-, and V- Efficiency

The trace (A), maximum average prediction variance (G), and integrated average prediction variance (V) criteria are experimental design evaluation criteria, which are based on precision of estimates of parameters and responses. Central Composite Designs(CCD) conducted within a split-plot structure (split-plot CCDs) consists of factorial (𝑓), whole-plot axial (𝛼), subplot axial (𝛽), and center (𝑐) points, each of which play different role in model estimation. This work studies relative A-, G- and V-efficiency losses due to missing pairs of observations in split-plot CCDs under different ratios (d) of whole-plot and sub-plot error variances. Three candidate designs of different sizes were considered and for each of the criteria, relative efficiency functions were formulated and used to investigate the efficiency of each of the designs when some observations were missing relative to the full one. Maximum A-efficiency losses of 19.1, 10.6, and 15.7% were observed at 𝑑 = 0.5, due to missing pairs 𝑓𝑓, 𝛽𝛽, and 𝑓𝛽, respectively, indicating a negative effect on the precision of estimates of model parameters of these designs. However, missing observations of the pairs- 𝑐𝑐, 𝛼𝛼, 𝛼𝑐, 𝑓𝑐, and 𝑓𝛼 did not exhibit any negative effect on these designs' relative A-efficiency. Maximum G- and Vefficiency losses of 10.1,16.1,0.1% and 0.1, 1.1, 0.2%, were observed, respectively, at 𝑑 = 0.5, when the pairs- 𝑓𝑓, 𝛽𝛽, 𝑐𝑐, were missing, indicating a significant increase in the designs' maximum and average variances of prediction. In all, the efficiency losses become insignificant as d increases. Thus, the study has identified the positive impact of correlated observations on efficiency of experimental designs. Keywords: Missing Observations, Efficiency Loss, Prediction variance

Intensification of Heterogeneous Photocatalytic Reactions Without Efficiency Losses: The Importance of Surface Catalysis

Advances in LED and photoreactor technology have brought semiconductor photocatalysis to the verge of feasibility of industrial application for the synthesis of value-added chemicals. However, the often observed efficiency losses under intensified illumination conditions still present a great challenge. This perspective discusses the origin of these efficiency losses and what needs to be done to prevent or counteract it and pave the way for efficient, intensified heterogeneous photocatalytic processes. The role of surface catalysis is particularly highlighted as one of the rate-limiting steps. Graphic Abstract

Between Market Failures and Justice Failures: Trade-Offs Between Efficiency and Equality in Business Ethics

The Market Failures Approach (MFA) is one of the leading theories in contemporary business ethics. It generates a list of ethical obligations for the managers of private firms that states that they should not create or exploit market failures because doing so reduces the efficiency of the economy. Recently the MFA has been criticised by Abraham Singer on the basis that it unjustifiably does not assign private managers obligations based on egalitarian values. Singer proposes an extension to the MFA, the Justice Failures Approach (JFA), in which managers have duties to alleviate political, social, and distributive inequalities in addition to having obligations to not exploit market failures. In this paper I describe the MFA and JFA and situate them relative to each other. I then highlight a threefold distinction between different types of obligations that can be given to private managers in order to argue that a hybrid theory of business ethics, which I call the MFA + , can be generated by arguing that managers have obligations based on efficiency and duties based on equality to the extent that these latter obligations do not lead to efficiency losses. This argument suggests a novel theoretical option in business ethics, elucidates the issues that are at stake between the MFA and the JFA, and clarifies the costs and benefits of each theory.