The Nature of Water Resources Policy and Policymaking

A bstract . The inclusion of environmental quality as an explicit goal and income redistribution as an implicit goal in the federal water policy changes the nature of the policy from strictly distributive to a mixture of distribution, regulation , and redistribution. To accommodate these goals, a new decisionmaking system and a nevi policymaking process are developed. Theodore Lowi's policy typology and Robert Salisbury's concept of shifting policy nature are employed to help account for changes in policy and the policymaking system and process.     

An experimental comparison of human schedulers and heuristic algorithms for the traveling salesman problem

Vehicle routing and scheduling for laundry, courier, mail, and other service operations is a significant service industry problem. Several computer-based heuristic algorithms have been developed to assist schedulers in developing efficient delivery (and pick up) vehicle routes. This paper reports the results of an experiment that compared the performance of inexperienced human schedulers and seven heuristic vehicle routing algorithms. A large set of traveling salesman test problems ranging in size from 10 to 80 customers was used in the experiment. The results of the experiment suggest that inexperienced, untrained human schedulers can consistently find traveling salesman solutions as good as or better than all but one of the seven heuristic algorithms tested (including the widely used ClarkeWright distance saved heuristic and the recently published largest-angle insertion heuristic). The human schedulers found traveling salesman routes as good as the best heuristic tested (Lin 's 3-optimal) in 29 percent of the test problems. On average, the human schedulers' solution distances were only 2.8 percent above the 3-optimal heuristic solution distances.     

The concept of a marketing crisis

Numerous marketing crises have gained media attention in recent years. The author examines the development of the concept of the crisis by political scientists, sociologists, and organizational theorists. Upon this base, a tentative definition for the marketing crisis is developed and a number of implications are drawn. Furthermore, the author suggests some directions for future research into the area of marketing crises.     

The Effects of Technological Change on the Economic Impact of Agricultural Drought in Manitoba

A series of physical and economic models is used to simulate the effects of drought and two drought-mitigating cropping strategies on the performance of Manitoba's agricultural sector. A drought scenario, defined in terms of the weather events of 1936–37, is compared with anormal weather scenario, consisting of the average soil moistures of 1961 to 1982. Results simulated under 1979–80 economic/technological conditions indicate that, in the absence of drought-mitigating measures, two years of drought followed by three more “normal” years (1938 to 1940 weather) result in an average annual crop revenue loss of 10%, most of which accrues in the calendar year following the year of most severe drought. Examination of two potential drought-mitigating strategies – conservation tillage in conjunction with one million acres of winter wheat, and two irrigation projects – suggests that their revenue-enhancement effects predominate. The alternative strategies would result in significantly increased gross (but not necessarily net) sales revenues over the entire simulation period, but the variance of these revenues over time would not be attenuated. Nous avons eu recours à une série de modèles physiques et économiques pour simuler les effets de la sécheresse et de deux stratégies culturales visant à réquire ces effets sur le rendement du secteur agricole du Manitoba. Un scénario de sécheresse fondé sur les conditions observées en 1936–1937 a été comparé à un scénario normal fondé sur les conditions ?humidité moyenne du sol observées de 1961 à 1982. La combinaison de ces donnés et des conditions économiques et technologiques qui existaient en 1979–1980 laissent conclure qu'en ?absence de mesures de lutte contre la sécheresse, deux années de sécheresse suivies par trois années “normales” (conditions observées de 1938 à 1940) entraînent une perte moyenne annuelle des revenus des cultures de 10%, la majeure partie de cette perte survenant au cours de ?année civile suivant immédiatement ?année de la sécheresse la plus grave. ?étude de deux stratégies possibles de lutte contre la sécheresse (méthode de travail du sol favorisant la conservation et ensemencement ?un million ?acres en blé ?hiver et deux projets ?irrigation) laisse conclure que les effets ?augmentation du revenu prédominent. Les stratégies de rechange ont laissé voir des hausses sensibles des recettes brutes (mais pas nécessairement des recettes nettes) sur ?ensemble de la période de simulation mais la variance correspondant à ces recettes n'a pas été atténuée.     

The Evidence of History

The historical method of the 'counter-factual' is used in this symposium to shed light on the circumstances in which the welfare state came over time to supplant voluntary private services in education, health, pensions, etc. The fundamental cost of the welfare state is its displacement of these services.     

Memory for the visual and verbal components of print advertisements

A model is developed and proposed to describe the underlying processing of the visual and verbal components of print advertisements. Based upon past research, the processing of these two components of print advertisements is viewed as consisting of (1) different levels of processing, (2) elaborative encoding, and (3) encoding distinctiveness. An empirical test of the model indicates that the visual/pictorial component of the print ad is more elaboratively and more distinctively encoded than the verbal component. Results of the research are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding vivid versus salient effects of information presentation.     

Implicit oligopolistic collusion is destroyed by uncertainty

Uncertainty is introduced into the simplest (mineral spring) conjectural variation model of oligopoly. It is shown that the only equilibrium to survive is the Bertrand or competitive outcome.     

A National Policy and Budgetary Framework for Housing and Community Development*

Recent legislation has determined that federal budget allocations and tax expenditures for housing should be tied to specific housing goals or “missions.” The major issues of national housing policy can be organized within six problem areas—three relating to production and three to consumption. Current federal housing programs can be classified into four broad budget categories (involving mortgage credit and thrift institutions, housing assistance, community development, and tax expenditures) and a fifth off-budget category of credit market activities. By examining a matrix that relates these five areas of federal involvement to the six broad problem areas, this article attempts to provide an analytical foundation for a national policy and budgetary framework for housing, housing finance, and community development.