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Examines the response of agribusiness firms to regulatory environment of Ocean Shipping Act of 1998 (OSRA). Provisions under OSRA; Impact of OSRA on international competitiveness of sectors that depend on ocean shipping; Ocean freight rates and logical costs of using under liner services; economic and statistical model of a shipper's decision making process.

The United States Congress recently passed a law that creates an alternative to individual transferable quota (ITQ) management. The American Fisheries Act promises the ability to rationalize one of the world's largest fisheries, the North Pacific pollock fishery, without the overt appearance of allocating permanent property rights to a public resource. The Act enabled pollock fishers to form cooperative bargaining units that are guaranteed a fixed share of the total allowable catch (TAC) providing they deliver to historic processors. This paper explores the evolution of that policy change and the innovative use of fishery cooperatives to advance voluntary decapitalization and rationalization that Congress intended to benefit both vessels and processors. Game theory offers insights into the likelihood of achieving congressional intent. It is argued that while the Act is Pareto improving, it may violate the legislative intent of win-win rationalization and may introduce a market failure while attempting to rid the fishery of the open-access externality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economics is characterized by well-developed predictive theories of human behavior. A wide variety of empirical tests of models based on those theories have been developed, as well as extensive and reliable data bases to test theories. Thus, one can experiment with and simulate economic behavior. For these reasons, the conventional lecture-discussion format may be the least effective way to teach economics. Rather, the most effective teaching method may be as a laboratory science. Authors report on recent efforts to convert economics to a true, experimental, laboratory social science. The project at Denison University is a demonstration since its design does not have a randomly assigned control group. All economics majors in the program at Denison took part in the project. Using a classical random experimental design, Washington State University is testing the conversion of introductory micro- and macroeconomics courses from a standard lecture and discussion format to a lecture and laboratory format that integrates the principles of active learning with personal computers, data on actual economic behavior, and in-class economic experiments.

Abstract--Two important issues in econometric freight transportation demand analysis are addressed: (1) the simultaneity between quantity shipped and mode/destination choices, and (2) the effect of spatial price competition on the demand for the transportation factor. In the theoretical model spatial price competition determines the firm's market area and thus determines its sales and shipment sizes. The model is estimated using switching regression techniques since shipment size and mode/destination choice are derived from the same optimization problem. The empirical model provides consistent estimates of unconditional freight demand. These estimates are needed to forecast transportation flows and derive elasticities for policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]