Sustainability certification labels have become an important tool for aiding consumers in evaluating food safety, health concerns, and environmental friendliness. Few studies have explored the attributes of consumers’ environmental consciousnesses from the perspective of environmental concerns; hence, we focus on that lack. Our study contributes to the need to better understand consumer attention to sustainability information when making coffee certification attribute choices. We aimed to explore the importance that consumers attach to coffee certification attributes paid to these attributes while choosing and to willingness to pay (WTP). There were 650 questionnaires completed by those who had purchased coffee beans habitually in Taiwan; after factoring out the invalid questionnaires (i.e., those with omitted answers, incomplete answers, or those in which answers to all the questions received the same scale points were all deemed as invalid and removed), 568 valid ones were collected with a recovery rate of 87.4%. The results indicate that the respondents’ WTP attributes ranked from highest to lowest are traceability, organic, graded, environmentally friendly, and fair-trade certifications. This study provides insights into how consumers’ preferences relate to selection of coffee certification attributes.

In recent years, as competition among international ports has intensified, the impartial and objective evaluation of port operational efficiency has become increasingly important in enabling each individual port to understand its peculiar strengths and weaknesses, as well as any immediate threats or opportunities that may affect its competitive environment. This study applies CCR model, BCC model and 3-stage DEA model to evaluate the changes in efficiency that have taken place between 1998 and 2001 in 10 ports in the Asia-Pacific region using cross-period data. The empirical results show that different model will lead to different result. On average, the efficiency estimated by 3-stage DEA procedure is the highest, while CCR efficiency is the lowest. It should be noted that the efficiencies based on CCR and BCC model are somewhat lower than the 3-stage DEA approaches, because they do not take the environmental factors, managerial inefficiency and statistical noises into account.

Under situations of limited resources, soft powers such as technology development and innovation become critical capabilities for a nation’s continuous growth and sustainability. Therefore, we used analytical hierarchy process (AHP), data envelopment analysis (DEA), and Malmquist productivity index (MPI) to evaluate the performance of research projects in 6 main fields of study managed by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in Taiwan from 2002 to 2012. Among the 6 fields of study, Agriculture and Humanities were two research fields as efficiency; and the sequence of inefficiency 4 fields were sociology, medicine, science, and engineering. Although the field of sociology was inefficiency, it was the only field show continuous growth in result of MPI analysis. Taking the fields as a whole, the result of the analysis of total factor productivity showed recession. However, as seen from the growth in technical change and in scale efficiency change, the MOST was effective to a certain extent during the period. However, the recession in technical efficiency change showed that further improvement in the planning and distribution of manpower and funds is needed.