Rodney Beard

Time-Consistent Fair Water Sharing Agreements

Scarcity of water has become a major issue facing many nations around the world. To improve the efficiency of water usage there has been considerable interest in recent years in trading water. A major issue in trading water rights is the problem of how an allocation system can be designed in perpetuity that also has desirable properties at each point of time. This is an issue of the time consistency of the contract to trade water. In this chapter we develop a model of dynamic recontracting of water rights and study time consistency properties of the resultant contracts using the ideas of Filar and Petrosjan [7].

Industry Structure and the Reform of the Queensland Sugar Industry: A Computational Model

A computational model of pricing and profitability in the Queensland sugar industry is applied to a comparative analysis of likely alternative industry structures that may arise in the wake of industry reform. Implementation of proposals suggested by the sugar industry review working party and in some of the submissions to it are also examined. The model is a simple static optimisation model of the trade in sugarcane in a local mill area. Numerical results are presented to compare prices and profitability for both a representative mill and growers in a monopsony situation, a contestable market, and under the current institutional arrangement. The results indicate that although deregulation has the potential to lead to improved welfare for both growers and the mills, this will only be the case if mills price competitively, i.e. in the contestable market case where the threat of competition from neighbouring and competing mills is sufficient to force the incumbent mill to pay for cane at a competitive price to prevent the entry of potential competitors.

Implementation of a Next-Generation Course Architecture for Blended Learning

A learning architecture for class management and student learning is described that incorporates a mix of online technology, mobile technology, and face-to-face learning. The architecture was implemented for four classes in Agribusiness Management in the Oklahoma State University program at International College Beijing, China Agricultural University in 2016. The architecture involves a combination of Internet technologies in a blended learning environment. Students work both online at home and in class to interact with next-generation learning management systems such as Piazza and Nb and to complete exercises using Jupyter interactive notebooks which allow a mix of verbal and numeric exercises to be completed by students in a single interactive document. Mobile technology is incorporated by linking classroom materials using QR codes so that students can directly access class materials using their phones. Class activity involved a mix of more traditional class delivery using lectures and mini-lectures where appropriate and computer labs where students engaged with both online materials in the classroom with instructor support. A number of these lab sessions were taught using methods borrowed from just-in-time teaching. The use of online anonymous discussions on Piazza and Nb lowered the participation threshold for students. In addition, Piazza’s support for equation typesetting allowed students to easily ask quantitative questions online. File management for the courses employed the Git version control system so that class materials were simply dropped into a local directory on the instructor’s laptop which synced with all the online learning systems. The method was used for teaching a range of subjects in Agribusiness; however, it can be employed in both blended and fully online learning environments. The paper will also discuss some challenges of using technology in teaching in a country like China in which the IT infrastructure is still being developed.