Barnes-Mauthe, M., S. Arita, S. D. Allen, S. A. Gray, and P. S. Leung. 2013. The influence of ethnic diversity on social network structure in a common-pool resource system: implications for collaborative management. Ecology and Society 18(1): 23. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05295-180123

This paper examines recent advances in production economics with special reference to efficiency measurement using production frontiers and its implications for aquaculture management. Compared with agriculture and other industries, the use of production frontiers in aquaculture is still very limited. However, in recent years several frontier applications in aquaculture have appeared in the literature, suggesting potential applications of these techniques in aquaculture. A synopsis of stochastic frontier production function model and data envelopment analysis (DEA), the two most popular approaches to efficiency measurement, is presented, followed by a review of recent frontier studies in shrimp, carp and tilapia production. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of future development and prospects of frontier applications for aquaculture management.

With retail scanner data, we applied hedonic price modeling to explore price premiums for organic, local, and other product attributes of fluid milk in Hawaii. Within the context of revealed preference, this analysis of organic and local attributes, under a single unified framework, is significant, as research in this area is deficient in the existing literature. This paper finds both organic and local attributes delivered price premiums over imported, conventional, whole fluid milk. However, the estimated price premium for organic milk (24.6%) is significantly lower than findings in the existing literature. Likewise, the price premium for the local attribute is estimated at 17.4%, again substantially lower compared with an earlier, stated preference study in Hawaii. Beyond that, we estimated a robust price premium of 19.7% for nutritional benefits claimed. The magnitude of this estimated coefficient reinforces the notion that nutrition information on food is deemed beneficial and valuable. Finally, package size measures the influence of product weight. With each larger package size, the estimate led to a corresponding larger price discount. This result is consistent with the practice of weight discounting that retailers usually offer with fresh packaged food. Additionally, we estimated a fairly high Armington elasticity of substitution, which suggests a relatively high degree of substitution between local and imported fluid milk when their relative price changes. Overall, this study establishes price premiums for organic, local, and nutrition benefits claimed for fluid milk in Hawaii.