Important sources of risk in agriculture are yield and price fluctuations caused by unpredictable and uncontrollable events, inducing income volatility and adding considerable complexity to farmers' decisions. The literature suggests that these events could affect farmers' risk aversion in decision making and justify their preferences for risk minimizing and safety-first survival, rather than a profit maximization strategy. The aim of this study is to test this hypothesis by using a quadratic programming in linearized version and the sumex utility function, which is representable as sum of products of polynomials and exponential (or "polynex") functions to simulate risk aversion for specific traits of the E-V frontier (Nakamura, Mathematical Soc Sci 31:39-47, 1996). The linear approximation of the utility function is obtained with the MOTAD approach, consisting in the minimization of errors generated by total absolute deviations of gross income from the expected value (Hardaker et al. Rev Mark Agric Econ 59:9-22, 1991). This method allows different portfolio simulations to be run of selected cereal and oilseed crops as risky prospects, by varying the risk parametrically. The results obtained confirm the hypothesis that risk affects farmers' decisions and that crop diversification is a viable strategy as a hedge against risk.

Cross-cultural consumer behavior is of market interest due to globalization of marketplaces, migration, multicultural marketplaces, and diffusion in the EU of many languages. The objective of this study is to check whether the local language used in a marketing communication could affect the consumers’ preferences for food products. The theoretical foundation is the consumer motivational approach that goes deeper into motivations interfering with the consumers’ preference order. The multivariate conjoint analysis is used to evaluate the preferences for attributes described in different languages. A number of students from the University of Udine (located in the northeastern part of Italy) have been submitted to interviews to examine their preferences for a simulated sandwich package reporting information in different languages, distributed by vendor machine. The results suggest that the consumer’s reaction to local language depends on sociodemographic profile, cultural background, language knowledge, and family education, and the local language could actually be used as a market tool for market segmentation. These results are of interest to many EU countries with bilingual communities such as Spain, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland, and most of the Italian regions where local languages are still alive. © 2016 Taylor & Franci

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The increasing demand for energy and expected shortage in the medium term, solicit innovative energy strategies to fulfill the increasing gap between demand-supply. For this purpose it is important to evaluate the potential supply of the energy crops and finding the areas of EU where it is most convenient. This paper proposes an agro-energy supply chain approach to planning the biofuel supply chain at a regional level. The proposed methodology is the result of an interdisciplinary team work and is aimed to evaluate the potential supply of land for the energy production and the efficiency of the processing plants considering simultaneously economic, energy and environmental targets. The crop simulation, on the basis of this approach, takes into account environmental and agricultural variables (soil, climate, crop, agronomic technique) that affect yields, energy and economic costs of the agricultural phase. The use of the Dijkstra's algorithm allows minimizing the biomass transport path from farm to collecting points and the processing plant, to reduce both the transport cost and the energy consumption. Finally, a global sustainability index (ACSI, Agro-energy Chain Sustainability Index) is computed combining economic, energy and environmental aspects to evaluate the sustainability of the Agroenergy supply chain (AESC) on the territory. The empirical part consists in a pilot study applied to the whole plain of Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) a region situated in the North-Eastern part of Italy covering about 161,300 ha. The simulation has been applied to the maize cultivation using three different technologies (different levels of irrigation and nitrogen fertilization: low, medium and high input). The higher input technologies allow to achieve higher crop yields, but affect negatively both the economic and energy balances. Low input levels provides, on the average, the most favourable energy and economic balances. ACSI indicates that low inputs levels ensure a more widespread sustainability of the agro-energy chain in the region. High ACSI values for high input levels are observed only for areas with very high yields or near the processing plant.

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