Rationalizing the International Coffee Agreement virtually

Oligopoly in International Commodity Markets: the Case of Coffee Beans

This paper studies the impact of international market structure on commodity prices. I use a standard oligopoly model and exploit historical variations in the structure of the international coffee bean market in order to measure how successful a cartel treaty was and to assess its global welfare consequences. The results suggest that the International Coffee Agreement (ICA, 1965–89) raised pric...

The coffee-machine system: how international selection really works

The literature on expatriate selection tends to present lists of criteria, with the implicit assumption that the process is formal and rational. The limited empirical work there is in this area suggests that these criteria have little impact on selection in practice. This paper argues that a deeper understanding of selection systems is needed and presents research showing the outcomes of differ...

Sustainability in the Coffee Sector: Exploring Opportunities for International Cooperation

The Complexity of Rationalizing Matchings

Given a set of observed economic choices, can one infer preferences and/or utility functions for the players that are consistent with the data? Questions of this type are called rationalization or revealed preference problems in the economic literature, and are the subject of a rich body of work. From the computer science perspective, it is natural to study the complexity of rationalization in ...

Rationalizing meat consumption. The 4Ns.

Recent theorizing suggests that the 4Ns - that is, the belief that eating meat is natural, normal, necessary, and nice - are common rationalizations people use to defend their choice of eating meat. However, such theorizing has yet to be subjected to empirical testing. Six studies were conducted on the 4Ns. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrated that the 4N classification captures the vast majority (83...