Micro economic approaches to technical change in the Canadian beef cattle industry: two studies of crossbreeding as an innovation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the process of genetic-based technical change in the Canadian beef cattle industry. Specifically, I analyze the effect of market forces on three processes necessary for genetic-based technological change: expansion of the genetic pool, inbreeding of divergent genetic strains to increase the probability of desired heritable properties in a pure breeding strain, and crossing of pure breeding strains to take advantage of hybrid vigour. This is accomplished through two studies. The first study, examines the expansion of the genetic pool through the establishment of purebred breeders of cattle breeds imported since 1965. A model is developed to explain the location of breeders within a time framework. The model was tested across breeds and over time. The process of breeder location appears consistent for the various breeds and can help explain the dates of availability of new breeds of cattle in different areas of the country. The second study examines the ongoing process of genetic technical change through the improvement and sale of breeding stock. A model is developed explicitly using the "characteristics" approach to production with the phenotypic characteristics of breeding bulls as arguments in a production function. Prices of individual bulls and values for the characteristics were collected at bull sales and shadow values for the characteristics estimated. These shadow values were used to predict characteristics which should be emphasized in herd improvement, and the prediction was compared to observed practices. The use of the characteristic: approach led to the identification of a different production function for the traditional straightbred technology and the new crossbred technology. Market forces seem to regulate the process of technological change and promote breed improvement. The major constraint to availability appears to be the limitation on imports and the biological limits to increasing the stock of purebred females.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".