Cost-Effective and Stochastic Dominance Approaches to Stochastic Pollution Control

Most economic studies of pollution externalities focus on the relative efficiency or cost-effectiveness of alternative pollution control instruments. Much less attention has been paid to policy goals and objectives. However, a comprehensive pollution control strategy depends on all of these choices. This paper examines several efficiency properties of cost-effective pollution control strategies in a stochastic setting when economic damages from pollution are unknown. A number of policy goals are considered. In this setting and under a primal approach, it is found that certain stochastic dominance conditions must be satisfied for the strategies to exhibit desirable efficiency properties. A dual approach to cost-effective pollution control, which is based on a stochastic dominance objective, is also considered.     

Evaluation of a Truthful Revelation Auction in the Context of Energy Markets with Nonconcave Benefits

We describe a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction for supply and demand bidding in the face of market power and nonconcave benefits in which bidders are motivated to bid truthfully, and evaluate its use for power and gas pipeline capacity auctions. The auction efficiently allocate resources if firms maximize profit. Simulations, including an application to the PJM power market, illustrate the procedure. However, the auction has several undesirable properties. It risks being revenue deficient, can be gamed by cooperating suppliers and consumers, and is subject to the information revelation and bid-taker cheating concerns that make single item Vickrey auctions rare.     

Climate Change and the Representative Agent

The artifice of an infinitely-lived representative agent iscommonly invoked to balance the present costs and future benefitsof climate stabilization policies. Since actual economies arepopulated by overlapping generations of finite-lived persons,this approach begs important questions of welfare aggregation.This paper compares the results of representative agent andoverlapping generations models that are numerically calibratedbased on standard assumptions regarding climate--economyinteractions. Under two social choice rules -- Pareto efficiencyand classical utilitarianism -- the models generate closelysimilar simulation results. In the absence of policies toredistribute income between present and future generations,efficient rates of carbon dioxide emissions abatement rise from15 to 20% between the years 2000 and 2105. Under classicalutilitarianism, in contrast, optimal control rates rise from 48 to 79% this same period.     

The online laboratory: conducting experiments in a real labor market

Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments. They provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool, and allow researchers to control the experimental context. Online experiments, we show, can be just as valid—both internally and externally—as laboratory and field experiments, while often requiring far less money and time to design and conduct. To demonstrate their value, we use an online labor market to replicate three classic experiments. The first finds quantitative agreement between levels of cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma played online and in the physical laboratory. The second shows—consistent with behavior in the traditional laboratory—that online subjects respond to priming by altering their choices. The third demonstrates that when an identical decision is framed differently, individuals reverse their choice, thus replicating a famed Tversky-Kahneman result. Then we conduct a field experiment showing that workers have upward-sloping labor supply curves. Finally, we analyze the challenges to online experiments, proposing methods to cope with the unique threats to validity in an online setting, and examining the conceptual issues surrounding the external validity of online results. We conclude by presenting our views on the potential role that online experiments can play within the social sciences, and then recommend software development priorities and best practices.     

Cost Heterogeneity and the Potential Savings from Market-Based Policies

Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the potential cost savings associated with market-based policies, with an application to the environmental policy realm. These simple formulae can identify instruments that merit more detailed investigation. We illustrate the use of these results with an application to nitrogen oxides control by electric utilities in the United States.     

An alternative to the weighted score card approach to measuring performance: An analysis of English and Welsh probation boards

The UK government published a weighted score card approach in 2003 to analyse the performance of Probation Boards in England and Wales. However, there has not been a thorough analysis of whether non-parametric methods could provide more advanced options for analysing performance than the standard Weighted Score Card approach – a variant of the Balanced Score Card. Our results show there is considerable divergence in the ranks of Probation Boards from that of the WSC when we include the input variable ‘resource expenditure’ within a DEA model, calling into question recent policy initiatives to increase efficiency in the national probation service.