Factors affecting women's participation in forestry in Turkey

This study analyses women's participation in forestry. The study was carried out with 270 women in the Bartın province, located in the West Black Sea Region of Turkey. By employing a Principal Component Analysis it was found that the most important factors affecting women's participation are women's perception related to (1) forest dependence, (2) quality of cooperatives, (3) quality of Forest Organisation, and (4) forest quality. These four factors explained 58% of women's participation. These factors need to be taken into consideration to enhance women's participation in forestry and to achieve sustainable forestry in Turkey.Regression analyses indicate that age, marital status, the rate of population increase and wealth are important variables for explaining variation in levels of participation. The estimated game theoretic model on women's participation indicates that the sharing of forest benefits among women in Turkey is considerably harmonious, while there is scope for improving the Forest Organisation, namely by stimulating participation towards a more effective management of the Turkish forests.     

Endangered Visitors: A Phenomenological Study of Eco-Resort Development

With the growing awareness of eco-tourism and the development of infrastructure at attractions, it has become necessary to use best practices to reduce the impact of increased visitor numbers. It has been noted that many of the past and current developments of eco-tourism infrastructures have been made in an improvised manner resulting in unsustainable practices. This study highlights the current planning trends in the ad hoc development of eco-resorts through a phenomenological approach. The methodology applied qualitative research methods to examine university students' understanding of eco-resort development and best practice. The use of an eco-resort development exercise on a fictional Peruvian site was the basis of analysis. The content of planned developments by the respondents and their experience of eco-tourism formed significant results. Results showed a difference between a theoretical definition and the application in practice, which could lead to eco-tourism being defined out of existence.     

Explaining incubators using firm analogy

Incubators are initiated to accelerate the development of new technology-based firms. Policy actors see them as a tool to initiate or revive innovativeness in regions and universities as a way to commercialize research results. However, even though the intended results of the incubator are good it is not known how the incubator should be managed and organized in order to achieve this end. When faced with a new type of organizations analogies can provide insights gathered from other contexts. To contribute to the further understanding of incubators this paper discuss the implications, in terms of highlighted dimensions and further clarifications needed when using the analogy of a firm. The paper uses empirical findings from six incubators. The discussion shows it is not clear who is the actual customer of the incubator. For example, can the policy actors that provide the funding to the incubator be seen as a customer paying for the service of regional revival and the NTBFs customers when their fees are not in relation to the services they are provided? In the discussion it is suggested that the incubator can have many customers with different value creation processes or no customers depending on the viewpoint taken.     

Risk Attitudes of Children and Adults: Choices Over Small and Large Probability Gains and Losses

In this paper we examine how risk attitudes change with age. We present participants from age 5 to 64 with choices between simple gambles and the expected value of the gambles. The gambles are over both gains and losses, and vary in the probability of the non-zero payoff. Surprisingly, we find that many participants are risk seeking when faced with high-probability prospects over gains and risk averse when faced with small-probability prospects. Over losses we find the exact opposite. Children's choices are consistent with the underweighting of low-probability events and the overweighting of high-probability ones. This tendency diminishes with age, and on average adults appear to use the objective probability when evaluating risky prospects.     

Commodity and asset demands with and without quantity constraints in the labour market

This paper reformulates the consumer's decision-making problem in a temporary framework with and without quantity constraints in the labour market in such a way as to define a complete demand system which includes consumption, labour and saving. Then, based on American and Canadian data (1948–1980), this extended complete demand system is estimated using a priori theoretical properties. Quantity constraints in the labour market cannot be rejected, and marginal propensities to consume out of labour income are very different from the marginal propensities out of non-labour income. Temporal separability is rejected and Slutsky conditions are preserved.     

Leading-by-example and signaling in voluntary contribution games: an experimental study

We report experimental results on the effect of leadership in a voluntary contribution game. Consistent with recent theories we find that leading-by-example increases contributions and earnings in an environment where a leader has private information about the returns from contributing (Hermalin in Am Econ Rev 88:1188–1206, 1998; Vesterlund in J Public Econ 87:627–657, 2003). In contrast the ability to lead-by-example has no effect on total contributions and earnings when such returns are commonly known. In our environment the success of leadership therefore appears to be driven by signaling rather than by nonpecuniary factors such as reciprocity. This paper was started while the authors were visiting the Harvard Business School during the fall of 2000. We are grateful for their hospitality and financial support. Vesterlund acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation and Potters from the Royal Netherlands’ Academy of Arts and Sciences. We thank Henrik Orzen for assistance in conducting the experiment. We also thank David Cooper and an anonymous referee who helped us improve the paper. Finally we thank Chris Anderson, Jim Andreoni, John Duffy, Simon Gaechter, Ernan Haruvy, Muriel Niederle, Jack Ochs, Elke Renner, Al Roth, participants at ESA-meetings (Barcelona, 2001), the Leadership and Social Interactions Workshop (Lyon, 2003), SITE (Stanford, 2004) and seminar participants at Alabama, CMU, Duke, Keele, Maryland, Nottingham, NYU, Pittsburgh, OSU, and York for valuable comments.     

Provider Competition in a Dynamic Setting

We examine provider and patient behavior in a dynamic model where effort is noncontractible, competition between providers is modeled in an explicit way and where patients' outside options are solved for in equilibrium. Physicians are characterized by an individual-specific ethical constraint which allows for unobserved heterogeneity. This introduces uncertainty in the patient's expected treatment if he were to leave his current physician to seek care elsewhere. We also introduce switching costs and uncertainty in the treatment–outcome relationship. Our model generates equilibria with treatment heterogeneity, unstable physician–patient relationships, and overtreatment (a form of defensive medicine).     

Time to Slow Down for High-Frequency Trading? Lessons from Artificial Markets

In this paper, we focus on the French cancel order tax implemented on 1 August 2012. We question the effectiveness of the modified tax with no exemptions and we analyze its impact on market quality, measured by liquidity, volatility and efficiency. Additionally, this paper raises the question whether this tax leads to a reduction of high-frequency trading (HFT) activities and a decline in trading volume. Based on our findings we report that introduction of cancel order tax only slightly reduces HFT activities, but it significantly affects market liquidity, increases market volatility and leads to deteriorating market efficiency. We conclude that it is difficult to dissuade investors from entering into unproductive trades and eliminate negative outputs of HFT (such as price manipulations) through tax, without altering the benefits of HFT like liquidity provision and efficient price discovery.