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Wholesale markets are established to be operated in a modern way for the purpose of ensuring that fresh fruits and vegetables are traded in a high-quality manner in compliance with food safety and other standards under free competition conditions, goods are supplied, distributed and sold efficiently, and the rights and benefits of producers, consumers and professionals are protected. In Turkey, fresh fruits and vegetables are traded in wholesale markets under the control of municipalities in accordance with legal regulations. For this reason, wholesale markets play a significant role in the regional and national economy, contributing to the revenues earned by municipalities and to the foreign exchange inflow into the national economy by means of export. Different marketing channels are used in Turkey for transferring fresh fruits and vegetables from producers to consumers. However, fresh fruits and vegetables are generally marketed more in the domestic market through wholesale markets. Therefore, the importance of wholesale markets, which form fresh fruit and vegetable prices by bringing supply and demand together, is undeniable. The purpose of this study is to present the demographic profile of wholesale market brokers, who play a significant role in the marketing of fresh fruits and vegetables, and the forms of supply and sale in fresh fruit and vegetable marketing, to identify the problems they encounter and to offer solutions. The main material of the study is the data obtained using face-to-face questionnaires conducted with 33 brokers in the central district of Kocaeli province. In the study, 2014 data was used and analyzed by SPSS Statistics V22.0. As a result of the analyses, it was found that the average age of the brokers was 45.48 years and the mean years of experience of them was 16 and above (by 75.75%), that 96.97% of the wholesalers sold both fruits and vegetables and 3.03% of them sold only onions and potatoes, and that Saturday and Sunday were the top trading days in the wholesale market for fresh f ruits and vegetables located in the central district of Kocaeli province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hui, one of the 10 Muslim minority groups in China, have long been regarded as cultural and economic brokers owing to their commercial prowess and their participation in multiple cultural milieus. Such phenomenon can be typically elaborated through examining their privileged role as middleman in Yining, an ethnically diverse city on the northwest frontier of China in Xinjiang Province. Yining is characterized by a mix of groups and cultures: Muslim and non-Muslim, Chinese culture and Chinese Muslim culture, and ethnic minorities and Han—the largest ethnic group in China. The distinctive function of the Hui in transforming, communicating and coordinating in different areas and among different ethnic groups is deserving of discussion. The author suggests that although the importance of the mediating role played by the Hui in the economic sphere has been emphasized by some scholars, the Hui’s role as the cultural and political “middleman” in mediating relationships and eliminating conflict among hostile ethnic groups—is not sufficiently discussed in scholarship concerning China’s ethnic minorities in contemporary northwest frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maintains that, from the institutionalist perspective, the characteristics of a political system and the local public administration condition the development of clientelistic practices. This research aims to shed light on the controversial relationship between vote buying and the district's size in Spain as well as to prove how the population size has implications beyond the financial and administrative dimension. In this sense, the objective is to introduce to the debate the effects of inframunicipalism on the quality of democracy. Toward that end, some practices associated with clientelism are identified that are related to the size of the habitat in a series of surveys by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS). Thus, regression techniques have been used to determine what these practices are and what impact they have. The main finding emphasizes that the likelihood of clientelistic relationships (measured by several indicators) increases as the size of the habitat decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a sample of CCIM designees and candidates in an experimental setting, this study examines the impact of broker signaling in commercial real estate transactions. It also explores the effect of certainty of closure in commercial real estate transactions. Findings suggest brokers are able to influence transaction pricing. Moreover, detailed analysis reveals that when a signal is above a reference point implied by previous transactions, the strength of the signal matters; privately communicated signals from reliable sources have significantly greater impact than signals which are made widely available. Additionally, we find an approximately 10% premium in transactions with lower certainty of closure than one with high certainty. The latter result varies by transactional participant type; owner/developers require a larger premium than institutional sellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A broker’s acquisition of the capacity of a merchant, whether natural or corporate, would place him in a legal status different from other people. The problem of this study is that many people engage in the business of brokerage without realizing the requirements of the legal status they get into, and without understanding the rules of this issue in their minds. The study aimed to shed light on the requirements brokers should possess in order to acquire the capacity of a merchant as well as other matters pertaining to this issue. This issue was addressed within the framework of Yemeni and Egyptian legislations, supported by Fiqh opinions and judicial judgments where possible. The researcher used the descriptive, analytical and comparative method as per the research requirements. The study concluded that Yemeni Commercial Law (1991) considers brokerage a commercial business in all cases, regardless of the broker’s capacity or intention. Also, engaging and practicing the profession of brokerage independently by any person who has the commercial capacity would make the broker obtain the capacity of a merchant, whether be it commercial or civil brokerage. It was recommended to add a stipulation to the law which makes it obligatory for the broker to have a work permit so as to regulate the business of brokerage and ascertain the availability of requirements for becoming a broker and acquiring the capacity of a merchant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Moderne Staat is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The mutual fund fee structure varies substantially across funds, a major variable being whether a contract imposes a fixed fee or marginal fee structure. This paper examines how the use of a fee structure affects broker compensation, investor investment decisions and broker benefits. Theory suggests that marginal fee contracts are the results of either economies of scale or non-linear fund performance. The intent of this study is to understand if the fee structure framing has a significant economic effect on broker compensations. Furthermore, to understand if fund inflows as well as fund performance are directly influenced by fee structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A broker in an open e-marketplace enables buyers and sellers to do business with each other. Although a broker plays an important role in e-marketplaces, theory and guidelines for matching between buyers and sellers in multi-attribute exchanges are limited. Therefore, a challenge for a broker’s responsibility is how to maximize a buyer’s total satisfaction degree as its goals under the consideration of trade-off between a buyer’s buying quantity and price paid to a seller, and other attributes. To solve this challenge, this paper proposes an economic model-based matching approach between a buyer’s requirements and a seller’s offers. The major contributions of this paper are that (i) a broker can model a seller’s price policy as per a buyer’s buying quantity through communication between a broker and a seller; (ii) due to each buyer’s different quantity demand, a broker models a buyer’s satisfaction degree as per a buyer’s buying quantity based on communication between a broker and a buyer; and (iii) to carry out a broker’s matching processes, an objective function and a set of constraints are generated to help a broker to maximize a buyer’s total satisfaction degree. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Internet of Things (IoT) application layer, a physical phenomenon, which is sensed by a server (i.e., an IoT device), is defined as an IoT resource. In this paper, we propose to cache popular IoT resources in brokers, which are considered as the application layer middleware nodes. Caching popular resources in the brokers is to move the traffic loads (for delivering the up-to-date contents of the resources) from the servers (which host these popular resources) to the brokers, thus reducing the energy consumption of the servers. However, many brokers may be geographically distributed in the network and caching popular resources in nearby brokers may result in unbalanced traffic loads among the brokers, and may thus dramatically increase the average delay of the brokers in delivering the contents of their cached popular resources to clients. To reduce the average delay among the brokers, we propose to re-cache/re-allocate the popular resources from heavily loaded brokers into lightly loaded brokers in order to balance the traffic loads among brokers. We formulate the popular resource re-caching problem as an optimization problem, which is proven to be NP-hard. We design the latency aware popular resource re-caching (LEARN) algorithm to efficiently solve the problem, and demonstrate the performance of LEARN via simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Complex social and environmental issues call for broader collaboration across different sectors so as to instigate transformative social change. While previous scholars have emphasized the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in facilitating social change, they have not provided a nuanced assessment of NGOs’ different roles. We use the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) research partnership as a study case and explore NGO partners’ different roles in a large cross-sector social partnership (CSSP). By interviewing 12 NGO partners and 4 non-NGO partners involved in the PEPSO research partnership, our research results show that NGOs primarily have 10 roles in a CSSP. They include enabling roles such as consultant, capacity builder, analyst, and funder; coordinating roles such as broker and communicator; and facilitating roles such as initiator, leader, advocate, and monitor. These roles allow NGOs to fulfil their duties to make substantial contributions to a CSSP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether and to what extent individual firms improve their innovation from behaving as brokers connecting other actors in the Spanish ceramic tile cluster. The effects of the brokerage roles are analyzed for different innovation levels by means of quantile regressions. Finally, we speculate about the indirect and interactive effects of the distinct individual organization attributes and these benefits. Results show that brokerage activities unevenly influence the broker's innovative performance. In addition, the intensity of the impact varies for different innovation levels and the firm's absorptive capacity moderate the final effect of acting as a broker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Universitatis George Bacovia. Juridica is the property of George Bacovia University, Faculty of Sciences Economics, Juridical & Administrative and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A intermediação é inerente à mobilização social, porque as tarefas de coordenação de atores mobilizados não podem ser realizadas sem intermediários – sejam eles informais ou institucionalizados. Contudo, a intermediação institucionalizada no âmbito da sociedade civil tem recebido pouca atenção. Este artigo analisa conceitualmente o papel de organizações cuja função é exercer papéis de intermediação entre atores da sociedade civil e entre estes e outros tipos de atores. O texto propõe uma definição desses brokers e desenvolve uma tipologia com intuito duplo: avançar na compreensão das diversas modalidades de intermediação institucionalizada e na análise dos dilemas associados à criação de organizações encarregadas de diferentes papéis de intermediação. Com base em trabalhos de pesquisa anteriores e como um exercício de aplicação da tipologia, o artigo também oferece uma análise empírica da atuação de brokers institucionalizados e suas mudanças ao longo do tempo.

Budget mafia practices and brokerage phenomenon in ministries/agencies and the parliament in the country's financial dredge is very alarming. Not counted how much money is successfully robbed. The modus is varying, so it is not easy to dismantle. Because expert move, the law enforcers had trouble catching them. This article tried to describe the mode of action and often they do. The method is done by tracing the various reports in newspapers. From tracking and in-depth analysis, it could be concluded that in order to minimize the action of brokers and budget mafia practices there are some necessary steps. First, fixing the finances system of political parties, reducing the dominance of parliament in budget management and election of public officials, and encourage law enforcement. Second, transparency debates the state budget in the parliament to be a key budget reforms. Third, the involvement of the community is also important to increase the transparency of the state budget discussions.

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cyber-attacks impacting the broker-dealer industry are increasingly common, causing greater financial losses and damage than ever before. Firms are employing a broad range of practices to defend against and mitigate these cybersecurity risks. This paper examines the cybersecurity risks faced by broker-dealers and common cybersecurity practices at broker-dealers. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is a US-based self-regulatory organisation (SRO) for broker-dealers with the dual mission of investor protection and market integrity. Pursuant to its mission, FINRA continues to emphasise the importance of broker-dealers understanding how to identify cyber risks and the actions necessary to safeguard their systems, data and operations to mitigate the risk of cybersecurity attacks and breaches and to protect their customers. Sources include information obtained or observed during FINRA examinations, enforcement cases, customer complaints and firm self-reported cyber events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interorganizational network structure can be modified by the actions of key actors. This paper presents a set of strategies for detecting those actors through Social Network Analysis. To that end the potential of centrality measures, the Key Player Problem and the power of graphic visualization for identifying such actors and determining their ability to generate changes in network structures are introduced. To test the hypothesis under study five interorganizational networks made up of 32 cultural organizations are analyzed. Four types of key player are identified: (a) central actors; (b) intermediary actors; (c) disseminators; and (d) brokers. Each type has a distinct ability to influence network structures. The Structural Social Capital (SSC) in networks is examined in order to identify the elements that characterize each type of key actor. To that end, structural hole measures are evaluated. Two multiple regression models are developed to learn what factors influence SSC. Results show centrality and brokerage have positive impacts on SSC while density and constraint have negative effects. Finally the potential of each group of key actors for implementing strategies focused on optimizing inter-organizational networks is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, IoT has been studying a lightweight protocol to satisfy device communication in a limited network environment. MQTT is a typical lightweight protocol. It supports small fixed headers to minimize overhead, and adopts publish/subscribe structure to guarantee real-time performance. However, MQTT does not support prioritization of important data and can not provide QoS in a specific IoT service. In this paper, we propose a message processing method to consider the priority of various IoT services in MQTT. In the proposed method, the priority flag is added to the fixed header of the MQTT in the node to transmit the message, and the broker confirms the priority of the corresponding message and processes it preferentially. Through experiment and evaluation, we confirmed the reduction of end-to-end delay between nodes according to priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dependability is one of the highly crucial issues in cloud computing environments given the serious impact of failures on user experience. Cloud computing is a complex system based on virtualization and large scalability, which makes it a frequent place for failure. In order to fight against failures in a cloud, we assure dependability differently from the common way where the focus of fault management is on the Infrastructure as a Service and on the cloud provider side only. We propose a model that integrates dependability with respect to three dimensions according to The Open Group Architecture Framework principles. These dimensions involve various cloud actors (consumer, provider, and broker). They take into consideration the interdependency between the cloud service models (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service) and the different architecture levels (contextual, design, logical, procedural, and operations). DMD proves an enhancement of dependability attributes compared to classically designed and executed cloud systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Context refers to the particular settings that give additional information on the reasons behind the set of data that is obtained and its value to the end user. Context is often derived through inferences and reasoning techniques, the aim being disambiguation, reducing doubts, and improve confidence levels. In essence, context is determined based on factors including time, location, frequency, participating persons and devices, etc. It is critical for data to be considered in its context, albeit the quality of context is equally important. How data is collected (processes), its usefulness (validity), its correctness (accuracy), and its up-to-dateness (latest facts) are just some key parameters considered in evaluating the quality of the data that is being processed. In recent years, there has been numerous attempts to deploy middeware agents such as brokers in a myriad of applications in domains such as retail, education, and healthcare. The context broker that is presented in this paper addresses some critical healthcare issues: availability, cost and quality. This broker is for general and specialised healthcare needs in specific medical fields, and it is especially useful in emergency situations. It showcases how a broker can be used to enhance the provision of cost-effective and quality medical services across the 34 main healthcare centres in the city of Pretoria. The context broker collects queries from users (patients or their dependents), and refers them to the best and most affordable hospitals on the basis of their geographical location, financial status, quality of care and the availability of the requested medical services at the time their request is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine trading activity around insider transactions on the Toronto Stock Exchange and find evidence that some traders mimic insider positions. Our unique data set allows us to establish a direct connection between insiders, their brokerages, and the brokerages' other clients. The findings are consistent with the possibility that some brokerages tip their clients about insider trades. Insiders in our sample have good timing; returns are usually positive (negative) after insider purchases (sales). Insiders' good timing translates to the mimicking transactions, which appear to be profitable net of trading costs. Evidence consistent with tipping is observed mainly for smaller independent brokerages. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US Securities and Exchange Commission expects its registered broker-dealers, investment advisers and investment companies to implement cybersecurity safeguards through policies and procedures reasonably designed to protect customer records and information, as well as to prepare generally for cybersecurity threats that could undermine the ability to meet regulatory obligations. However, the manner in which registrants are expected to accomplish these goals is uncertain given the SEC's reliance on a principles-based standard, non-specific staff guidance, and the contextualisation of its expectations through enforcement actions. This paper explains the bases of the SEC's approach to cybersecurity preparedness and the challenge of navigating through changing and uncertain expectations, and then offers simple steps to understand and respond to regulatory signals when choosing appropriate cybersecurity measures, as well as memorialising that a firm has acted with the appropriate standard of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]