Private Risk Management Research Articles

Ryzyko cenowe na rynku produktów rolno-żywnościowych: źródła, skutki i sposoby zarządzania

Celem artykułu jest zidentyfikowanie przyczyn i skutków ryzyka cenowego występującego na rynku produktów rolno-żywnościowych, jak też sposobów jego ograniczania. Zastosowano metodę studium literatury naukowej oraz analizy statystycznej bazującej na danych GUS przy wykorzystaniu współczynników zmienności indeksów cen rolniczej produkcji globalnej oraz indeksów cen skupu wybranych produktów rolnych w Polsce w latach 1995–2013. Badania własne potwierdzają uzyskane przez innych autorów wyniki, że większe wahania cenowe występują w przypadku produkcji roślinnej niż zwierzęcej. Przegląd badań empirycznych wskazał, że zmienność cen nakładów i produktów rolnych jest transmitowana wzdłuż łańcucha dostaw żywności, przez co wszyscy jego uczestnicy narażeni są na ryzyko cenowe. Reakcją na niepewność i ryzyko mogą być zarówno instrumenty stabilizacji rynków rolnych, jak też prywatne i publiczne zarządzanie ryzykiem.

Skin in the Game: Comparing the Private and Public Regulation of Isotretinoin

This paper engages in a comparative institutional analysis of the private and public risk management programs of the drug isotretinoin, which are designed to prevent the undesired effects isotretinoin has on fetal development. This case study sheds light on the comparative effectiveness of private and public regulation in the pharmaceutical and health care markets. A range of evidence indicates that the private risk management program was more successful in reducing fetal exposures and educating patients about the harmful effects isotretinoin can have on a fetus than the FDA risk management programs designed to accomplish the same goals.

Assessing entrepreneurial and regional‐economic flood impacts on a globalized production facility

AbstractIndirect economic losses and business interruption effects triggered by natural hazards are widely underestimated by corporate managements. They can exceed direct damages in the case of flood events and are difficult to evaluate because of missing data and methods on a micro‐scale. Existing data can be used for meso‐analysis, but are of little relevance for either mitigation policies or cost‐efficient technical mitigation measures for individual flood‐prone premises. The study represents an interdisciplinary collaboration for improving risk management strategies based on a flood scenario for an individual production company in Austria with high regional‐economic impact. Based on flood modelling, using LiDAR data as source, and on expert judgements, we analyse the entrepreneurial and regional‐economic impacts of a specific production site. The flood model used is based on an HQ100 with a climate change variability of 3%, which is mainly triggered by a change in air temperature and successively increasing heavy rainfall events. The main objective for this assessment is to give result‐based recommendations to improve public and private risk management of the affected area and to provide data for cost–benefit frameworks for technical and nontechnical prevention. Overall, we calculated a total decline of revenues of approximately 14.1 to 14.3 million euros, even though the production site experiences only shallow flooding.

A Study of the Relevance of Social Network Sites and Ethics Involving Undergraduate Students

The use of social networking sites (SNSs) has evolved rapidly this past decade with little concern for privacy. This study examines undergraduate students’ use of SNSs and online privacy preferences. Eighty-five students in social work classes were surveyed to determine the frequency of SNS access and privacy control usage. Student participants accessed SNSs (97.6%) more than the general population (72%) surveyed by the Pew Research Internet Project (Brenner & Smith, 2013). Most students restricted access to their profiles through friends-only privacy settings and took steps to eliminate unwanted posts. However, regrets over personal posts were still commonplace. The 2005 National Association of Social Workers and Association of Social Work Boards ethical standards suggest establishing professional boundaries and safeguarding personal information as part of technologically proficient practice. Social work educational programs should provide training on privacy risk management to protect students from unwanted and potentially career damaging disclosures on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other Internet sites.

Risk Management theory: the integrated perspective and its application in the public sector

This article aims to discuss in a normative way, the foundations of the theory of risk management, showing its evolution and reviewing the main best practices. As consequence, after a quick description of the current environment into which public and private organizations currently struggle, we proceed to develop a clear definition of risk. We introduce then, the fundamental aspects of risk management and the practices prescribe in the literature. Moreover, we describe the fundamental elements that have marked the transition from the "silo" approach or compartmental perspective of risk management, to the integrated risk management approach. At the end of the article, we discuss the application of risk management in the public sector, describing its difference from private risk management.

Predicting Consumer Reaction To Online Privacy Concerns: A Nested Logit Model

This paper proposes a theoretical choice model to explain how consumers may react to their concerns regarding online information privacy. A nested logit model is suggested as the appropriate model to predict the choice of online privacy risk management strategies by consumers. Conceptual justification is provided for the proposed model. The validity of the major assumptions behind the model in the context of Internet use is explained. Managerial implications and future research directions are also discussed.

A Privacy-Preserved Analytical Method for eHealth Database with Minimized Information Loss

Digitizing medical information is an emerging trend that employs information and communication technology (ICT) to manage health records, diagnostic reports, and other medical data more effectively, in order to improve the overall quality of medical services. However, medical information is highly confidential and involves private information, even legitimate access to data raises privacy concerns. Medical records provide health information on an as-needed basis for diagnosis and treatment, and the information is also important for medical research and other health management applications. Traditional privacy risk management systems have focused on reducing reidentification risk, and they do not consider information loss. In addition, such systems cannot identify and isolate data that carries high risk of privacy violations. This paper proposes the Hiatus Tailor (HT) system, which ensures low re-identification risk for medical records, while providing more authenticated information to database users and identifying high-risk data in the database for better system management. The experimental results demonstrate that the HT system achieves much lower information loss than traditional risk management methods, with the same risk of re-identification.

Price spikes and world food security. The need for change

Version francaise de l'articleThe recent food price increases in international markets threaten food security and have led many researchers, policy makers and NGOs to analyse them in order to address them. Most analysts talk about price spikes, which they characterise in terms of price volatility. This characterisation leads them to advocate measures – market liberalisation, private risk management instruments, and safety nets – that have been showing their limitations for almost 30 years. Clearly there is a certain level of volatility inherent in agricultural product prices, which has been compounded by trade policies and speculation. But since 2005, a steady upward trend in food prices has been observed, sometimes resulting in spikes. Several factors can explain these spikes: the lack of coordinated storage; insufficient and inappropriate agricultural investment; the depletion of resources; and growing demand from biofuels and emerging countries. Placing these spikes within the context of an upward trend opens new avenues for national and global action that depart from the predominant vision today: basing the rules of international trade on food security; coordinating storage policies at the global level; investing in ecological agriculture; and limiting growth in demand for agricultural products.

Dialing Privacy and Utility: A Proposed Data-Sharing Framework to Advance Internet Research

The current reluctance to share systems and network data derives from gaps in the law, commercial pressures, and evolving considerations of threat models and ethical behavior. Internet research stakeholders have an opportunity to tip the risk scales in favor of more protected data sharing by proactively implementing appropriate privacy risk management. The privacy-sensitive sharing (PS2) framework integrates privacy-enhancing technologies with a policy framework. The authors evaluate this framework along two primary criteria: how well the policies and techniques address privacy risks, and how well policies and techniques achieve utility objectives. A case study applies the framework to enable network operational data sharing for cybersecurity RD.

Protecting personal information using Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP) and Continuous Control Monitoring to enhance corporate governance

The first decade of the new millennium may well become known as the era of data breaches. In a recent speech given by the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) Chief Privacy Officer, Marc Groman, he emphasised to the National Association of Secretaries of States to prepare well because ‘you will have a data breach’ (Washington, DC, 18th February, 2008). This article discusses the present privacy crisis and offers a solution to managing and reducing privacy risk through the use of the AICPA/CICA's Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP). When the court of public opinion or the FTC is grilling an organisation regarding a data breach, the best defence for the organisation is to provide evidence, such as adherence to GAPP criteria or an actual GAPP audit, that they were diligent and serious about data protection policies. Recently, the Chair of Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs in the UK resigned after 25 million Britons had their personal information compromised and the investigation revealed that a mere $102,000 spent on data redaction would have prevented the snafu (see references 1 and 2). Top management, including CEOs, CFOs, CISOs, and CPOs all need to be aware of privacy risk management issues and techniques to reduce privacy risk. Researchers need to help advance the development and measurement of privacy-enhancing techniques and the implementation of GAPP in order to help move organisations along the Privacy Maturity Model. This article is written by a member of the AICPA's Privacy Task Force and a Certified Information Privacy Professional.

Risk perception in Taiwan

In a questionnaire study, 51 Taiwanese college students were asked to judge 48 natural and human‐made hazards on nine risk characteristics. Another group of 61 students were asked to rate the magnitude of 80 hazards and their attitudes toward these hazards. To evaluate the dimensionality of risk perception, participants' ratings for the nine risk characteristics were analyzed using Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling approach. Two dimensions of risk perception were identified: (i) Involuntary versus Immediate Effect; and (ii) Delayed Effect versus Known to Science and Chronic. The relationships of risk perceptions and perceived public and private responsibilities in risk management were examined. Catastrophic, certain‐to‐be‐fatal, dreaded, and uncontrollable risks were perceived as more deserving of public risk management, while controllable risks that were known to science, known to those exposed, and chronic were perceived as more deserving of private management. In particular, diseases are perceived as most deserving of private risk management and least deserving of public risk management; and technologies are perceived as most deserving of public risk management and least deserving of private risk management.

Flight to Quality and Collective Risk Management

We present a model of flight to quality episodes that emphasizes systemic risk and the Knightian uncertainty surrounding these episodes. Agents make risk management decisions with incomplete knowledge. They understand their own shocks, but are uncertain of how correlated their shocks are with systemwide shocks. Aversion to this uncertainty leads them to question whether their private risk management decisions are robust to aggregate events, generating conservatism and excessive demand for safety. We show that agents’ actions lock-up the capital of the financial system in a manner that is wasteful in the aggregate and can trigger and amplify a financial accelerator. The scenario that the collective of conservative agents are guarding against is impossible, and known to be so even given agents’ incomplete knowledge. A lender of last resort, even if less knowledgeable than private agents about individual shocks, does not suffer from this collective bias and finds that pledging intervention in extreme events is valuable. The benefit of such intervention exceeds its direct value because it unlocks private capital markets.

Causation in risk assessment and management: models, inference, biases, and a microbial risk–benefit case study

Causal inference of exposure–response relations from data is a challenging aspect of risk assessment with important implications for public and private risk management. Such inference, which is fundamentally empirical and based on exposure (or dose)–response models, seldom arises from a single set of data; rather, it requires integrating heterogeneous information from diverse sources and disciplines including epidemiology, toxicology, and cell and molecular biology. The causal aspects we discuss focus on these three aspects: • Drawing sound inferences about causal relations from one or more observational studies; • Addressing and resolving biases that can affect a single multivariate empirical exposure–response study; and • Applying the results from these considerations to the microbiological risk management of human health risks and benefits of a ban on antibiotic use in animals, in the context of banning enrofloxacin or macrolides, antibiotics used against bacterial illnesses in poultry, and the effects of such bans on changing the risk of human food-borne campylobacteriosis infections. The purposes of this paper are to describe novel causal methods for assessing empirical causation and inference; exemplify how to deal with biases that routinely arise in multivariate exposure– or dose–response modeling; and provide a simplified discussion of a case study of causal inference using microbial risk analysis as an example. The case study supports the conclusion that the human health benefits from a ban are unlikely to be greater than the excess human health risks that it could create, even when accounting for uncertainty. We conclude that quantitative causal analysis of risks is a preferable to qualitative assessments because it does not involve unjustified loss of information and is sound under the inferential use of risk results by management.

Les marchés dérivés de produits agricoles. Présentation et perspectives de développement dans l'Union européenne

Derivative Contracts for Agricultural Commodities. Presentation and Perspectives of Development within the European Union The 1992 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, the GATT signature in 1994 and the inpending integration of the Eastern Countries bring decisive signals on public market regulations. The first consequence is a definite comeback of consumer's demand on the whole food chain. The second is the increasing price volatility on a short and long term basis. These volatilities bring financial risks to the chain members from the producers to the commodity users. As a consequence, risk management techniques are under the professional's scrutiny. Eventhough the basic techniques of risk pooling and risk spreading through diversification are well-known in theory, their application at market level raises quite a lot of questions. Furthermore, a considerable innovation in diversified and customerized contracts has brought attention to many professionals and academics for potential use and consequences. The article analyses the potential development of private risk management tools as traded on OTC or centralized commodities markets in Europe. These tools are currently heading a new industry on financial markets. What are the perspectives for agricultural commodity markets ? The first part of the paper is a rapid description and essay on the classification for the derivatives which are expanding rapidly in terms of customerized contracts. Not only have the contracts been more finely designed, they are also expanding in volume. The second part develops the main theoretical problems : market efficiency with respect to information and subject to the micro-structure of the market place ; spot and forward price relationships for innovative contracts ; optimal hedging using a dynamic approach or asymétrie price risk management. The potential of development of derivatives contracts used as risk management techniques is presented in part three. As a conclusion, the paper indicates that the partial deregulation of European commodity markets brings a real incentive for risk management at each level of the marketing chain, from the producers to the food industry which transform volatile commodity prices into a fixed price for food products as described in a price range. The total amount of risk management demand will divide itself into mutualized techniques and individual portfolio techniques. Therefore, the absolute value of derivative contracts will increase in the coming years a well as its relative market share. The limit of this analysis is the quantitative evaluation of innovative products which depends on their diffusion rate within the industry. This is a long process where the future equilibrium of techniques is difficult to forecast.