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Much recent discussion has focused on the pros and cons of cloud computing. Some institutions are attracted to cloud computing benefits such as rapid deployment, flexible scalability, and low initial start-up cost, while others are concerned about cloud computing risks such as those related to data location, level of service, and security infrastructure. For institutions that have done due diligence and determined that the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the risks, this article serves as a resource to help mitigate those risks through the contract terms with a cloud services provider. It is intended to highlight some best practices and complement, not obviate, an institution's existing legal, contractual, or purchasing policies. (Contains 12 endnotes.)

Pay-as-you-go contracts reduce minimum purchase requirements, which may increase market participation. This paper randomizes the introduction and price(s) of a novel pay-as-you-go contract to the California auto insurance market, where 17% of drivers are uninsured. The pay-as-you-go contract increases take-up by 10.8 p.p. (89%) and days with coverage by 4.6 days over the 3-month experiment (27%). Demand is relatively inelastic, and pay-as-you-go increases insurance coverage in part by relaxing liquidity requirements: most drivers' purchasing behavior is consistent with a cost of credit in excess of payday lending rates, and 19% of drivers have a purchase rejected for insufficient funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on another innovative application for the Super Slurper, a super-absorbent starch-based polymer. Its significance; Details of the cooperative agreement with Artifex Equipment Inc. of Penngrove, California.

In this paper we focus on mechanisms of coordination in agricultural contracts. Our approach is intended to advance understanding of social relations of production and distribution of power in agrofood systems. Through an analysis of contracts between farmers and intermediaries (e.g., processors, shippers, consignment agents) for California fruits and vegetables, we identify three functions of contracts: they help to coordinate production, they provide incentives (and penalties) to induce particular behaviors, and they allow farmers and intermediaries to share risk. These functions are implemented via four policing instruments: input control, monitoring, quality measurement, and revenue sharing. The instruments are employed by intermediaries to mitigate "blind spots" in contracts and to control farmers' actions and the quality of their output. This "mechanism design" approach is complemented by a sociologically oriented analysis emphasizing the embeddedness of economic institutions. We problematize the stylized fashion in which the concept of authority has been treated in the contract farming literature, and propose an alternative approach to studying new organizational forms and divisions of labor among farmers and intermediaries.

The authors use de-identified data from California personal income tax returns to measure the frequency and nature of independent contracting and self-employment in California. They identify this work by the presence of a Schedule C on the tax return and/or the receipt of a Form 1099 information return. The authors estimate that 14.4% of California workers aged 18 to 64 in tax year 2016 had some independent contracting or self-employment income and approximately half of this subgroup also had earnings from traditional W-2 jobs during the year. Only a small share (1.4%) of workers had earnings from online labor platforms (often called gig work). Workers with low earnings were significantly more likely to earn independent contracting or self-employment income and to rely primarily or exclusively on that income. The article explores the characteristics of workers engaging in independent contracting and self-employment and their distribution across family type, geography, and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study direct load control contracts that utilities use to curtail customers' electricity consumption during peak-load periods. These contracts place limits on the number of calls and total number of hours of power reduction per customer per year as well as the duration of each call. The stochastic dynamic program that determines how many customers to call and the timing and duration of each call for each day is an extremely difficult (NP-hard) optimization problem. We design a scenario-based approximation method to generate probabilistic allocation polices in a reasonable amount of time. Our approach consists of three approximations: deterministic approximation of demand, discretization of the expected demand, and aggregation/disaggregation of the resources. We show the relative information error resulting from the deterministic approximation is O (1 / n) , the discretization error is O (1 / n) , and the aggregation/disaggregation error is O (1 / n) , where n represents the length of the horizon. Finally, we show the total relative error is O (1 / n). Our error analysis establishes that our approximation method is near optimal. In addition, our extensive numerical experiments verify the high quality of our approximation approach. The error, conservatively measured, is quite small and has an average and standard deviation of 8.6% and 1.4%, respectively. We apply our solution approach to the data provided by three major utility companies in California. Overall, our study shows our procedure improves the savings in energy-generation cost by 37.7% relative to current practices. This paper was accepted by Chung Piaw Teo, optimization. Funding: The authors thank the UCLA Ziman Center's Howard and Irene Levine Program in Housing and Social Responsibility and the Morrison Family Center for Marketing Studies and Data Analytics for generous funding. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4493. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Impact of COVID-19 on ECE programs differed greatly by program type, funding source. • Family child care homes fared worse in most measures of economic well-being with direct implications for individual providers during COVID-19. • Lower attendance, staffing concerns were pandemic challenges for center-based care. • Voucher-receiving centers more likely to face negative impacts during COVID-19. • Head Start/state-contract centers more able to support staff well-being in pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has overwhelmed and weakened the United States early care and education (ECE) sector, jeopardizing a system that was already precariously situated atop a weak foundation. While multiple national- and state-level studies have highlighted the overwhelming impacts of the pandemic on the ECE sector, little has been reported about how much variation in impacts exists, and in what forms, within the ECE sector. Based on a statewide survey of 953 licensed care providers in California conducted in June 2020, this paper examines the impact of COVID-19 experienced by ECE providers, focusing on the variations between centers and family child care homes (FCCs) and among center-based programs. Results indicate that the challenges programs face differ greatly depending on program type and funding source. Compared to center-based programs, FCCs fared worse in most measures of economic hardship that directly impact individual providers with medium to large effect sizes. Centers were more likely than FCCs to struggle with reduced attendance and changes in program operations by medium to large effect sizes and report staffing challenges by small to medium effect sizes. Among the center-based programs, subsidized programs holding contracts with Head Start or the California Department of Education (such as state preschool programs) were more stable and better able to financially support their staff during the pandemic, with effect sizes ranging from medium to large. Centers receiving government subsidies in the form of vouchers were more likely to be negatively impacted by the pandemic compared to unsubsidized centers and Head Start and state-contracted centers. Implications for future research and policy are discussed in the context of addressing the complex delivery system of ECE services and supporting outcomes that are effective and equitable for children, families, and the ECE workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have indicated a large model disagreement in the future projections of precipitation changes over the regions featuring Mediterranean climate. Many of these highly populated regions have been experiencing major droughts in the recent decades, raising concerns about future precipitation changes and their impacts. Here we investigate precipitation projections across the five Mediterranean climate regions in the CMIP6 ensemble, and study their respective model agreements on the sign of future precipitation changes. We focus on the period 2050–2079 relative to 1970–1999, and consider two climate change scenarios (ssp2-4.5 and ssp5-8.5) over the Mediterranean Basin (MED), California (CAL), the central coast of Chile (SAA), the Cape Province area of South Africa (SAF) and southwest Australia (AUS). The CMIP6 ensemble mean suggests that annual mean cumulative precipitation will decrease over all the regions studied with the exception of northern California. In most cases, this decline is primarily attributed to a reduction in winter precipitation, except over the Mediterranean Basin, where the most significant decrease occurs in autumn. The model agreement on the sign of future precipitation changes is generally high over the regions and seasons where the ensemble mean indicates the precipitation decline in the future, and low over the regions showing the precipitation increase or no change. Specifically, the model agreement is low in southern California during all seasons, in northern Mediterranean during winter and autumn, and in southwest Australia during austral summer and autumn. CMIP6 ensemble means also indicate that the consecutive dry days (CDD) will increase in the future in all regions, but again the model agreement on this increase is low over southern and central California, the southern Mediterranean, and parts of southwest Australia. Similarly, the ensemble mean consecutive wet days (CWD) indicates a decrease in all regions, with weak model agreement on the sign of future changes over CAL, northeast AUS and part of the MED region. The ensemble mean maximum one-day precipitation increases over all the regions, the most over the parts of southwest Australia and the Mediterranean. We conclude that despite substantial improvements to the new CMIP6 generation of models, the intermodel differences in future projections of precipitation changes continue to be high across parts of California, the Mediterranean Basin and southwest Australia. Impact studies need to account for these uncertainties and consider the whole intermodel range of projected precipitation changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negative effects of claims and disputes have serious negative impacts on contracting parties, their projects, the construction industry as a whole, and consequently on the nation’s economy. This paper explores a method for mitigating the negative effects associated with contractors’ claims and disputes using a risk retention approach. This method can help contractors in getting early relief from the financial and economic burdens of construction claims. To meet the goals and objectives of this study, the writers have: (1) investigated the feasibility of pricing insurance premiums using the options pricing theory; (2) explored the applicability of modeling the options pricing theory using Monte Carlo simulation; (3) set up the principles required for optimal design of a risk retention group for construction claims; and (4) tested the possible impact of the newly developed risk retention group using historic data of 10,193 construction projects spanning over 12 different California districts. Pursuant to this study, it was verified that construction claims satisfy the required principles for insurance. Also, based on the used testing framework, the developed risk retention group for construction claims has been proved a success from the insured and insurer sides. It is the writers’ hope that this study will lay the basis for a leading risk management technique that could be extended over the nation for the benefit of relieving the negative consequences associated with lengthy claims and disputes resolution in the construction industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that Anacomp Inc. has been selected by the Property Assessor's Office to provide electronic document scanning and conversion services at Ventura County in California. As part of the contract, Anacomp will scan more than four million pages of property records of the agency, particularly tax laws and inventory into electronic files. It states that Anacomp's document services include indexing and conversion, intelligent document recognition (IDR), advanced data extraction and multiple retrieval options.

Although California's carbon market is generally seen as a model climate policy, recent reforms now credit utilities for shifting legacy coal contracts to their unregulated neighbors, a practice that causes leakage. To the extent the market relies on leakage to generate compliance on paper, it is producing the false appearance of emissions reductions through an accounting scheme that does not reflect real climate benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how honey bee population dynamics, the scale and timing of almond bloom, and unmarketability of almond honey interact to create misaligned incentives for growers and beekeepers in the California almond pollination services market. We combine economic contract theory with data from the first pollination contract survey to examine the design of pollination contracts. 89.2% of respondents used contracts with minimum colony population requirements, suggesting that all colonies are not considered to be equal providers of pollination services. Contracts that involved enforcement every year provided the highest pollination fees on average, while those with no enforcement provided the lowest fees. We contribute to the literature regarding pollination services by demonstrating that the number of hives and price per hive present an incomplete picture of almond pollination transactions without information regarding colony strength requirements and enforcement. We also provide a theoretical rationale for why almond pollination agreements have anecdotally become more formal over time: as the marginal value of colony strength increases, the grower offers the beekeeper stronger incentives to provide high colony strength. California almond production is an extreme case of a crop relying almost solely on managed pollinators, but ultimately could reflect the future for many pollinator-dependent crops if pollinator populations continue to decrease while monoculture crop production increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the tools of transaction cost economics (`TCE') and economic analysis more generally to analyze the provisions of a long-term multi-million-dollar contract in the petroleum industry, the 35 year Field Contractors Agreement signed in 1965 for the development of a major oil field just offshore from Long Beach, California. There is a substantial public record regarding the deliberations that ultimately led to the choice of contract terms. That record makes it possible to identify how various TCE-based and related economic concerns--about dealing with information impactedness and restricting the scope for opportunistic behavior--affected the choice of contractual provisions. As such, this case study provides useful insights into the relevance of TCE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We empirically examine the impact of relationships between contractors and subcontractors on firm pricing and entry decisions in the California highway procurement market using data from auctions conducted by the California Department of Transportation. Relationships in this market are valuable if they mitigate potential hold-up problems and incentives for ex post renegotiation arising from contractual incompleteness. An important characteristic of informal contracts is that they must be self-enforcing, so the value of relationships between firms and suppliers depend on the extent of possibilities for future interaction. We construct measures of the stock of contractors' prior interactions with relevant subcontractors and, most importantly, an exogenous instrument to measure the future value of ongoing relationships that is orthogonal to contractor–subcontractor match-specific productivity. We find that a larger stock of relationships leads to a greater likelihood of entry and to lower bids. Importantly, this relationship does not hold in periods of time and areas with little future contract volume, suggesting that the value of the future is crucial in providing value for informal contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: This study examines policies set in the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) negotiated between teachers’ unions and school boards and explores what kinds of districts have contract provisions that restrict district administrators, enhance administrative flexibility, and/or improve teachers’ professional work lives and that have contracts that are more restrictive overall. Method: The author analyzes a sample of 465 California CBAs and uses linear probability models to highlight the relationships between a set of 95 representative provisions and characteristics of districts that may make them “hard to staff.” A measure of overall contract restrictiveness is generated and used to assess the relationships between these district characteristics and contract strength. Findings: Some CBA provisions restrict district administrators, whereas others may provide administrators with greater flexibilities. In addition, many provisions serve to enhance teachers’ working conditions. Many of the most restrictive clauses are more frequently found in the contracts of urban districts and districts with higher proportions of minority and poor students. However, many of these same districts have contracts that include important flexibilities and provisions that may enhance teachers’ working conditions. Large and urban districts have more restrictive contracts overall, although districts with high proportions of poor and minority students do not. Implications: As policymakers consider renegotiating provisions within CBAs and diminishing the strength of CBAs themselves, it will be important to consider the specific regulations within CBAs and whether they truly constrain administrators or serve some other purpose and whether specific high-need districts are more or less harmed by the contents of CBAs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An agency model of contracts used in California's processing‐tomato industry is estimated in three stages. We first estimate growers' stochastic production possibilities, and then, for a given vector of preference parameters, compute an optimal compensation schedule. Finally, we compare computed compensations with actual compensations and choose preference parameters to minimise distance between the two. Assuming perfect competition and risk neutrality for processors, we obtain an estimate of 0.08 for growers' measure of constant absolute risk aversion, and find that growers who face higher‐powered incentives produce higher levels of soluble solids, at a cost that is 1.8 per cent greater than otherwise. Efficiency losses from information constraints are 1 per cent of mean compensation, whereas existing quality measurement improves efficiency by 1.08 per cent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article analyses the competitive bidding on the heavy construction projects of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District. An analytic model that is appropriate to the study of the BART bidding experience has been developed and it is used to derive a number of propositions concerning the bidding behavior of the participating contractors. Given that the data pertaining to 77 BART construction projects is available, it is possible to test statistically many of the propositions derived. There are at least two reasons which prompted the authors to undertake this study. First, because of a lack of data, the empirical study of bidding environments has lagged the development of theoretical bidding models. Second, the theoretical treatment of bidding problems has tended to focus on developing strategies to be followed by the individual bidders. Little attention has been given to the problems faced by the procuring agency itself. The study identifies certain variables that affect the outcome of the bidding process and in this regard provides the agency with information as to how to control the bidding environment.