Fibre sourcing is a critical strategic question for all sawmills and pulpmills, but the degree of supply integration though long-term contracts and forest ownership varies widely. The purpose of this research was to investigate the extent to which forest-mill integration patterns can be explained by the transaction cost economics (TCE) theory. TCE theory holds that organizations will choose transaction governance forms that minimize transaction costs. The TCE factors expected to influence that choice can be grouped into three categories; transaction frequency, market uncertainty, and asset specificity. Interviews with various industry representatives suggested that factors from all three categories are relevant to the question of forest-mill integration. A survey was conducted of mills in New Zealand and Sweden, providing data on their supply mix and various TCE factors. Of an estimated population of approximately 450 mills, 136 mills were sampled and 88 responded to the survey. Fractional logit models were developed to explore the factors that may influence the integration decision. Considerable evidence was found for the importance of TCE factors in driving fibre supply integration. The evidence was strongest for factors related to asset specificity, including forest owner concentration and the specificity of a mill's fibre requirements. Transaction frequency appears less important; while integration was found to be significantly associated with the number of mills an organisation has within the supply basin, the influence of mill capacity was found to vary. There was weak evidence for the importance of uncertainty, and perhaps only through the impact of forest owner concentration on market conduct. Integration was found significantly higher for pulpmills than sawmills, and higher in Sweden than in New Zealand. The latter result is difficult to explain by TCE theory, and suggests that non-TCE factors play a significant role. Survey responses also indicated that non-TCE factors are important. Further research is required to enlarge the sample size and better understand the role of TCE factors in forest-mill integration.

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This thesis presents an analysis of finished beef marketing in the UK using Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). Transaction costs fall into three broad categories: information costs, negotiation costs and monitoring or enforcement costs. The key insight provided by TCE is that economic activity will be organised, <I>ceteris paribus</I>, so as to minimise the costs of carrying out transactions. Empirical applications of TCE have not kept pace with theoretical developments partly due to data limitations; in particular, there have been few applications of TCE by agricultural economists. Data on the transaction costs which farmers face when marketing finished beef cattle are collected through a survey of beef producers in N.E. Scotland. These data are analysed using Tobit analysis - a limited dependent variable econometric technique. A number of transaction cost and farm characteristic variables are found to be significant in influencing a farmer's decision whether to sell cattle through the live-ring auction or direct to abattoirs. The influence of transaction costs on abattoirs' cattle procurement preferences are then examined using conjoint analysis. This technique allows the joint effect of two variables on a dependent variable to be measured. Procurement channels are described in terms of four key transaction cost attributes. Data from a survey of UK abattoirs allows the extent to which respondents are willing to trade-off attribute levels, and therefore, the relative importance of the transaction cost attributes, to be determined. Conjoint analysis is also used to measure the relative importance of transaction costs in the procurement decisions of retailers, through a small-scale survey of UK supermarket meat buyers. The main contribution of this study is to demonstrate that measuring the importance of transaction costs to the parties to an exchange is a fruitful avenue of research.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / An exciting trend in enterprise computing lies in the integration of applications across an organisation and even between organisations. This allows the provision of services by automated business processes that coordinate business activity among several collaborating organisations. The best successes in this type of integrated distributed system come through use of Web Services and Service-based Architecture, which allow interoperation between applications through open standards based on XML and SOAP. But still, there are unresolved issues when developers seek to build a reliable and robust system. An important goal for the designers of a loosely coupled distributed system is to maintain consistency for each long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Our approach to assist the developers in this domain is to guide the developers with the key principles they must consider, and to provide programming models and protocols, which make it easier to detect and avoid consistency faults in service-based system. We start by defining a realistic e-procurement scenario to illustrate the common problems faced by the developers which prevent them from building a reliable and robust system. These problems make it hard to maintain the consistency of the data and state during the execution of a business process in the occurrence of failures and interference from concurrent activities. Through the analysis of the common problems, we identify key principles the developers must consider to avoid producing the common problems. Then based on the key principles, we provide a framework called GAT in the orchestration infrastructure. GAT allows developers to express all the necessary processing to handle deviations including those due to failures and concurrent activities. We discuss the GAT framework in detail with its structure and key features. Using an example taken from part of the e-procurement case study, we illustrate how developers can use the framework to design their business requirements. We also discuss how key features of the new framework help the developers to avoid producing consistency faults. We illustrate how systems based on our framework can be built using today’s proven technology. Finally, we provide a unified isolation mechanism called Promises that is not only applicable to our GAT framework, but also to any applications that run in the service-based world. We discuss the concept, how it works, and how it defines a protocol. We also provide a list of potential implementation techniques. Using some of the implementation techniques we mention, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype system.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2006. / "A dissertation in computer science and informatics and telecommunications and computer networking." Advisor: Vijay Kumar. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Nov. 9, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-157). Online version of the print edition.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Computer Science, 1999. / Bibliography: p. 281-289. Also available electronically.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2004. / Also available online.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Computer Science, 1999. / Bibliography: p. 281-289. Also available in print form.