A Theory of Fraud and Overtreatment in Experts Markets

Consumers often rely on an expert's diagnosis to assess their needs. If the expert is also the seller of services, he may use his informational advantage to induce overtreatment, which is a pervasive phenomenon in experts markets. We offer and discuss conditions leading to equilibrium overtreatment in an otherwise purely competitive model. This market failure results from consumers' ability to turn down an expert's recommendation: experts defraud consumers to keep them uninformed, as this deters them from seeking a better price elsewhere.     

Modeling political change with a regime-switching model

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether legislators vote in two distinct regimes as suggested by the U.S. political system and whether these voting patterns can be explained by economic variables. The paper exploits U.S. Roll-Call votes from a rich unbalanced panel data set of 540 legislative positions over 104 Congressional sessions and Presidents since the Korean War. The paper employs a variant of the Hamilton Regime-Switching Model (1989) to uncover three major patterns in the data. There appear to be two distinct regimes closely related though not identical to the two-party system. Shifts in these regimes are most frequent in Presidential elections and are less frequent in the Senate and the House. Finally, since World War II, economic variables do not seem to influence the shifts implying that these political shocks are exogenous. However, over longer horizons, recessions do tend to force political change in the legislature.     

Learning specific content in technology education: learning study as a collaborative method in Swedish preschool class using hands-on material

This article describes the process of a learning study conducted in technology education in a Swedish preschool class. The learning study method used in this study is a collaborative method, where researchers and teachers work together as a team concerning teaching and learning about a specific learning object. The object of learning in this study concerns strong constructions and framed structures. This article describes how this learning study was conducted and discusses reflections made during the process. Furthermore, we discuss how the learning study method could be implemented in technology education using hands-on material. Some of the results point to problems of delimiting an object of learning in technology education using hands-on material and the complexity in the relation between content and context in learning. The results also show benefits from the collaborative method where researchers and teachers work together with regards to specific learning content in the technology classroom.     

Impact of the European Water Framework Directive on local-level water management: Case study Oxunda Catchment, Sweden

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union provides a common framework for water policy that focuses on holistic and integrated water management in river basins. In many member states, implementation of the WFD has shifted the main responsibility for local water issues from the municipal level to the regional or supra-regional levels. In this study, we investigated how the implementation of the WFD has influenced local-level water management including the interpretation of the new environmental quality standards. Specifically, we considered Sweden, which has traditionally had relatively strong governance at the municipal level. Because a sufficient amount of time has now passed for evaluation of WFD-related effects on operational water handling, we interviewed individuals directly involved in water planning and land use planning at the municipal level in one sub catchment in the Northern Baltic Sea River Basin District of Sweden, as well as representatives for superior levels and associations. Despite divergent views regarding the priority of water issues in physical planning among the local-level planners interviewed, they had all participated in successful inter-municipal pre-WFD collaboration projects. Although such collaborations could help increase the understanding and acceptance of WFD-related goals and costs, as well as facilitate conflict solving, as shown in the Oxunda Catchment, they have not gained much attention in the WFD implementation process. Additionally, physical planners have generally been reluctant to accept new environmental quality standards resulting from WFD implementation, in part because they lack precise definitions, but also because they could challenge the municipal routine of weighing various objectives against each other. Furthermore, despite WFD-related increases in ambition levels, lack of resource improvements at the municipal level were identified as potential problems by local environmental planners.