Attribute Causality in Environmental Choice Modelling

When selecting attributes in environmentalChoice Modelling studies, preference should begiven to those attributes that aredemand-relevant, policy-relevant, andmeasurable. The use of these criteria willoften result in a short list of environmentalattributes of which some are causally related. The inclusion of attributes that have a``cause-effect' relationship may stimulate somerespondents to seek to understand the causalrelations among attributes in order to assigngreater meaning to the alternatives, andpotentially, simplify the decision makingprocess. This may have implications for theweights they assign to each of the attributeswhen identifying the preferred alternatives,and subsequently for the implicit prices and/orwelfare estimates. A test of the impact ofincluding an attribute that causesimpacts on ecosystem health as well as anattribute relating to ecosystem health effectson parameter estimates, implicitprices and welfare estimates is conducted. Twoquestionnaires are developed, one with the`causal' attribute included and one without. Acomparison of results indicates that when the`causal' attribute is included in the vector ofchoice attributes, the implicit value of asingle endangered species falls by 34 per centwhilst no significant difference is detected inthe parameter estimates. Importantly, however,estimates of compensating surplus for a givenpolicy package do not differsignificantly across the two treatments. Thisimplies that to the extent that the inclusionof a `causal' attribute reduces the implicitprices for one or more of the `effect'attributes, the associated loss in utility isapproximately offset by the utility nowassociated with the new attribute.     

Entrepreneurship and second-best institutions: going beyond Baumol’s typology

This paper reconsiders the predominant typology pioneered by Baumol (J Polit Econ 98(5):893–921, 1990) among productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. It is shown that the foundation of Baumol’s classification scheme is the restrictive concept of first-best outcomes, and therefore it easily fails to appreciate the true impact of entrepreneurship in real-world circumstances characterized by suboptimal institutions. We present an alternative way of generalizing the notion of entrepreneurship and show how and why it encompasses the Baumol typology as a special case. Our main distinction is between business and institutional entrepreneurship. We draw on Schumpeter and introduce the entrepreneur in an additional function: as a potential disturber of an institutional equilibrium. Various subsets of institutional entrepreneurship are posited and discussed. It is shown that changing the workings of institutions constitutes an important set of entrepreneurial profit opportunities. An implication of this is that entrepreneurial efforts to reform or offset inefficient institutions can, in many cases, be welfare-improving.     

Dealing with Ignored Attributes in Choice Experiments on Valuation of Sweden’s Environmental Quality Objectives

Using a choice experiment, this paper investigates how Swedish citizens value three environmental quality objectives. In addition, a follow-up question is used to investigate whether respondents ignored any attributes when responding. The resulting information is used in model estimation by restricting the individual parameters for the ignored attributes to zero. When taking the shares of respondents who took both the environmental and the cost attributes (52–69% of the respondents) into account, then the WTP for each attribute changes if the respondents who ignored the attributes have a zero WTP. At the same time, we find evidence that not all respondents who claimed to have ignored an attribute really did. However, the most commonly ignored non-monetary attributes always have the lowest rankings in terms of WTP across all three environmental objectives. Thus, our results show that instead of ignoring attributes completely, respondents seem to put less weight on the attributes they claimed to have ignored.     

Salience and horizontal differentiation

I study a horizontal differentiation model in which one of two attributes of a product, product fit and price, is more salient for a consumer than the other and different consumers can find a different attribute salient. The attribute that is more salient is determined by relative differences between the two products and is determined endogenously as a result of firms' pricing strategies. High (low) marginal costs soften (toughen) price competition between firms. Pass-through rates are greater than 1 for some parameter values. Both industry- and firm-level cost increases may be beneficial for firms.     

To Trade Or Not To Trade: Economies With A Variable Number Of Tradeables*

We present a general equilibrium model that encompasses the endogenous selection and shadow‐pricing of a set of tradeable commodities, with home‐based and social production activities. In the model, a market system is a set of costly social institutions which embody the trade and production technologies available in the economy. Our equilibrium concept describes the pricing of market institutions, thus pricing the tradeability of a commodity. We obtain the existence and the decentralization of Pareto‐efficient allocations. We discuss an example regarding the transition of a guild‐based economy into a market‐based economy.     

Using eye-tracking to model attribute non-attendance in choice experiments

We investigate revealed attribute attendance in discrete choice experiments using eye-tracking. A simple theoretical framework is proposed in which choices are a function of visual attention. Consistent with the existing literature, the assumption that participants use all the available information to make their decisions does not hold. The results also illustrate that model fit and predictive power are greatly increased by using visual attendance measures as regressors. The use of eye-tracking technology has value for measuring revealed attention and to benchmark with existing choice models.     

Property and Economic Power as Issues in Institutional Economics

In the first part of this two-part paper, I presented an "irenic" reconciliation of the three apparently contradictory definitions of "institution" within original institutional economics (OIE), employing the methodology of critical institutionalism. The critical institutionalist reconciliation of these definitions conceptualizes institutions as an emergent process by which the internal and necessary relations of social structure as collective action, mediated through agency, results in the control, expansion, and liberation of the individual action of social actors in transactions. In short, an institution is the emergent process of social structure actualized in transactions (social action). Institutions, therefore, not only have a structural existence, but also an actual existence as they are the process of the emergence of the actual (in transactions) from the structural. Institutions are multi-level processes and cannot be reduced to structures, actions, behaviors, or patterns of behaviors. In this part, I demonstrate the significance of this reconciliation in two areas. The first is its ability to further differentiate the institutional definition of economics as "the science of social provisioning" from the mainstream definition of economics as "a relationship between ends and scarce means" by decomposing the institutional definition into its productive and distributive processes. The second is its usefulness in modeling the interaction of non-economic social institutions with economic institutions at varying levels of detail. I also introduce critical institutional analysis, and use as a method, for model-building and use it to build models of communal, feudal, and industrial capitalist economies.     

TECHNOLOGICAL LEARNING AND LABOR MARKET DYNAMICS

The search‐and‐matching model of the labor market fails to match two important business cycle facts: (i) a high volatility of unemployment relative to labor productivity, and (ii) a mild correlation between these two variables. We address these shortcomings by focusing on technological learning‐by‐doing: the notion that it takes workers' time using a technology before reaching their full productive potential with it. We consider a novel source of business cycles, namely, fluctuations in the speed of technological learning, and show that a search‐and‐matching model featuring such shocks can account for both facts. Moreover, our model provides a new interpretation of recently discussed “news shocks.”     

Social interaction,co-worker altruism,and incentives

Social interaction with colleagues is an important job attribute for many workers. To attract and retain workers, managers therefore need to think about how to create and preserve high-quality co-worker relationships. This paper develops a principal-multi-agent model where agents do not only engage in productive activities, but also in social interaction with their colleagues, which in turn creates co-worker altruism. We study how financial incentives for productive activities can improve or damage the work climate. We show that both team incentives and relative incentives can help to create a good work climate.     

基于总和生产力观点的企业家社会责任(上)——实质与基本属性

总和生产力具有倍增生产能力 ;总和生产力内含着生产力剩余 ,其价值体现具有利益公共性 ,在生产资料私有制条件下 ,却首先为企业家私人占有 ;其价值构成具有模糊性 ,造成价值分配的灰色区域 ;这部分价值是否事实上用于社会积累 ,构成判别价值分配性质的分水岭 ;其社会积累功能具有历史必然性 ,使企业家必定要担负起将生产力剩余运用于社会积累的责任。企业家社会责任具有四个基本属性 ,其实质是顺应社会生产力的发展。     

A consistent multidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle

The unidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle demands that a regressive transfer in income—a transfer from worse-off (poor) to better-off (rich)—decreases social welfare. In a multidimensional setting the direct link between income (or any other attribute) and individual well-being is absent. We interpret the social welfare level of a distribution in which each individual has the same bundle as the individual well-being level. We define regressivity on the basis of this individual well-being ranking. In a setting with both transferable and non-transferable attributes, the imposition of the ensuing “consistent” Pigou-Dalton principle forces individual well-being to have a quasi-linear structure in the transferable attributes. Since we allow for transferable and non-transferable attributes, our result provides a normative underpinning for criteria in the distinct literatures of multidimensional inequality measurement (only transferable attributes) and of needs (one transferable and one non-transferable attribute).     

The Health Services Industry: Realism in Social Control

The aim of the paper is to investigate the relationship between institutions and development ethics. In a value context, the center of the discussion between institutions and development ethics is based on confronting ethics as "means of the means," which implies that ethics is not only concerned with the ends of human action but also enters into the value dynamisms of the instruments utilized by development agents in achieving these ends: the means. A common acceptable definition of development ethics is the ethical reflection of the ends and means for any purposeful social-economic activity toward development. Institutions are the social cement that condition and enhance the roles agents play in economic life. We argue that development ethics and institutions are entwined: development ethics influence institutions and institutions influence development ethics.     

Attending to the Reasons for Attribute Non-attendance in Choice Experiments

This paper focuses on behavioural reasons underlying stated attribute non-attendance in choice experiments. In order to identify and incorporate procedures for dealing with heterogeneous attribute processing strategies, we ask respondents follow-up questions regarding their reasons for ignoring attributes. Based on these statements, we conclude that the standard way of assigning a zero impact of ignored attributes on the likelihood is inappropriate. We find that some respondents act in accordance with the passive bounded rationality assumption since they ignore an attribute simply because it does not affect their utility. Excluding these genuine zero preferences, as the standard approach essentially does, might bias results. Other respondents claim to have ignored attributes to simplify choices. However, we find that these respondents have actually not completely ignored attributes. We argue along the rationally adaptive behavioural model that valid preference information may indeed be elicited in these cases, and we illustrate how recoding of non-attendance statements conditional on stated reasons may be a more appropriate solution than the current standard way of taking stated non-attendance into account.     

Cost thresholds,cut-offs and sensitivities in stated choice analysis: Identification and implications

Within the discrete choice literature, there is growing recognition that some respondents do not process all attributes when evaluating their choice outcomes. Worryingly, the cost attribute is often among those attributes that are likely to be ignored by respondents. We use probabilistic decision process models (similar in form to latent class models, but where we define the classes to describe specific heuristics) to facilitate situations where respondents adopt cost thresholds and cut-offs. We further develop this model to address the potential confounding between preference heterogeneity and processing heterogeneity by simultaneously allowing for a segmentation of respondents based on their sensitivities to cost. Results, based on an empirical dataset on the existence value of rare fish species in Ireland, provide further confirmation that a share of respondents did not attended to cost. Importantly, however, when heterogeneity to cost levels is accounted for the inferred incidence of complete non-attendance is markedly lower, to the extent that when cost thresholds and cut-offs are also accommodated it almost disappears. This modelling approach leads to significant gains in model fit and has important implications for welfare analysis.     

The effect of physician board membership on uncompensated care provision

Previous studies indicate that nonprofit and for-profit hospitals provide comparable levels of uncompensated care, when taking into account their sizes. This evidence suggests that for-profit hospitals extract some indirect benefit when providing uncompensated care. Our article investigates how physician board membership affects uncompensated care provision. With data for hospitals in California from 1997 to 2010, we estimate a fixed-effect model where uncompensated care is a function of physician board membership, other board attributes, as well as hospital characteristics. Our results indicate that physician board membership in for-profit hospitals relates positively with uncompensated care provision. Prior evidence, such as Goldstein and Ward (2004) and Molinari et al. (1995), has shown that involving physicians in strategic decisions improves hospitals’ financial performance. Our results reinforce the notion that having physicians in leadership or strategic positions benefits for-profit hospitals. In these hospitals, physicians seem to understand the strategic component of providing uncompensated care, possibly due to their closer assessment of patients’ needs.     

A model of the origins of basic property rights

This paper studies the origins of one of the most basic of property rights, namely, the right of an individual or an organization to the fruits of its labour. My objective is to address the questions of why, when and how this property right can emerge and be made secure. I develop a model of the strategic interaction between two players in the state-of-nature, which is an environment characterized by the absence of any laws and institutions (including property rights and the state). My analysis explores, in particular, the roles of the players' fighting and productive skills on the emergence and security (or otherwise) of this property right.     

Multidimensional generalized Gini indices

Summary. The axioms that characterize the generalized Gini social evaluation orderings for one-dimensional distributions are extended to the multidimensional attributes case. A social evaluation ordering is shown to have a two-stage aggregation representation if these axioms and a separability assumption are satisfied. In the first stage, the distributions of each attribute are aggregated using generalized Gini social evaluation functions. The functional form of the second-stage aggregator depends on the number of attributes and on which version of a comonotonic additivity axiom is used. The implications of these results for the corresponding multidimensional indices of relative and absolute inequality are also considered.Received: 20 August 2003, Revised: 26 May 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D63. Correspondence to: John A. WeymarkWe are grateful to our referee for his or her comments.     

Patients rank toxicity against progression free survival in second-line treatment of advanced renal cell carcinoma

Abstract

Background:

The aims of this study were to quantify and contrast patient preferences between second-line advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) medication profiles and their associated benefits and toxicities, and to help frame the doctor–patient discussion about selecting appropriate RCC therapies.

Research design and methods:

Adult residents of the US with a diagnosis of RCC completed a Web-enabled choice-format conjoint survey consisting of a series of 10 treatment-choice questions, each of which included a pair of hypothetical RCC medication profiles. Each profile was described by various medication attributes (features or outcomes) with varying levels. The attributes included efficacy (progression-free survival [PFS]), tolerability (fatigue, stomach problems, mucositis or stomatitis, hand–foot syndrome [HFS]), serious but rare adverse events (pneumonitis, hepatic impairment), and mode of administration. Treatment-choice questions were based on an experimental design with known statistical properties. Random-parameters logit regression was used to estimate relative preference weights for each attribute level. Benefit equivalent measures (additional months of PFS in exchange for toxicities) were also calculated.

Results:

Of the 272 patients who completed the survey, the majority were female (53%), white (92%), and had at least a college degree (66%). The mean age was 57 years (standard deviation: 10 years). Over the range of attributes and attribute levels included in the survey, PFS was the most important attribute, followed by fatigue, stomach problems, hepatic impairment, mucositis or stomatitis, HFS, pneumonitis, and mode of administration. To reduce severe fatigue to mild-to-moderate fatigue, patients on average would be willing to forego 4.4 months of PFS. To reduce hepatic impairment risk from 0.5% to 0.0%, patients on average would be willing to forego 1.0 month of PFS. The main study limitation was that patients answered hypothetical treatment-choice questions.

Conclusions:

This study provides information to physicians about patient priorities when reviewing and selecting RCC therapies with patients.     

Terrorism's Role in Re-shaping Border Crossings: 11 September and the US Borders

To what extent do boundaries shape state-centred scales of discourse and action? In an attempt to answer this question, the article delves into one of the key ambiguities characterising boundaries: their being both static markers of sovereign jurisdictions and socially produced and reproduced institutions. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of ‘productive power’, and taking as a referent the Durand Line, the paper elaborates upon Robert Sack's contribution, and proposes an analytical framework that simultaneously captures, while maintaining distinct, two dimensions of territoriality: territoriality as a strategy operating in a socially emptiable space, and territoriality as it unfolds in its actuality. It argues that such framework provides insights on the multi-scalar and place-specific power relations that define the social context in which the Durand Line unfolds, offering important tools for the assessment of boundaries' role in the reproduction of society's contradictions and inequalities. The flexible territoriality of the Durand Line is defined by its simultaneous, and more or less successful, attempt at ordering space across multiple dimensions .