The influence of activity importance and similarity on perception of recreation substitutes

Abstract

This study examines how substitutes are selected for a fly‐angling and camping recreation activity. Results show that although people choose substitutes similar to their intended activity, the degree of similarity between substitute and original is unrelated to perceived quality of substitute. Also, both the quality of a substitute and the number of available substitutes are inversely related to the importance of an activity's attributes. The lack of a relationship between activity/substitute similarity and quality of the substitute poses problems for application of the substitutability concept.     

Would Freeing Up World Trade Reduce Poverty and Inequality? The Vexed Role of Agricultural Distortions

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in non‐farm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others, so the net effects are unclear without empirical modelling. This article summarises a series of new economy‐wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries. The global Linkage model results suggest that removing those remaining distortions would reduce international inequality, largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries, and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 per cent. The analysis based on the Global Trade Analysis Project model for a sample of 15 countries, and nine stand‐alone national case studies, all point to larger reductions in poverty, especially if only the non‐poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue.     

Resolving Cross-cultural Ethical Conflict: An Empirical Test of a Decision Tree Model in an Educational Setting

The authors have previously developed and described a decision tree model for addressing cross-cultural ethical conflicts. The model is intended to provide an ethically sound yet pragmatic tool for decision makers facing such situations. This paper presents the results of an empirical test of the model in an educational setting with a sample of business students. Students trained to use the model demonstrated significantly more flexibility and appropriateness in their decisions on case scenarios than those who were not trained. The implications for use of the model in educational settings and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Are auction revenues affected by rising art buyers’ premia? The case of early American art

The steady rise in the premiums charged to art buyers at auction (above hammer price) has been underway since 1992. This article, using a stable and bounded sample of repeat purchase of American works created before 1950, reveals that this tact has reduced hammer prices for that art. However, renewed and hyper-competitive efforts to bring more and higher quality art to market by the two main houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have resulted in general profitability. Nevertheless, we calculate that a rise in buyers’ premia at Sotheby’s, a publically traded company, has reduced revenues and profits below their potential in the absence of such increases.     

The World Trade Organisation's Doha Cotton Initiative: A Tale of Two Issues

Four West African nations have demanded that the WTO's Doha Development Agenda include a Cotton Initiative that involves two issues: cutting cotton subsidies and tariffs, and assisting farm productivity growth in Africa. This paper provides estimates of the potential economic impacts of (a) complete or partial removal of cotton subsidies and import tariffs globally and (b) cotton productivity growth through the adoption of genetically modified (GM) cotton varieties. Use is made of the GTAP database and global economic model to address both these issues. On Doha, our results confirm that for cotton – unlike for other agricultural subsidies and tariffs – it is subsidy reductions rather than tariff cuts that would make by far the largest impact. For Sub‐Saharan Africa the potential gains are huge relative to the effects on that region of reforming other merchandise trade policies. And they could be more than doubled if that reform provided the cash for farmers to take advantage of the biotechnology revolution and adopt GM cotton varieties. But those potential gains, and the affordability of switching to costly GM seed, depend crucially on the extent to which high‐income countries are willing to lower domestic support to their cotton farmers.     

Influence Allocation Methods in Group Decision Support Systems

Influence allocation processes are voting and opinion aggregating methods that allow members to distribute some or all of their decision making influence to others in the group in order to exploit not only the group's knowledge of the alternatives, but its knowledge of itself. Only with the common use of group decision support systems (GDSS) has their use become practical. In this paper we reconsider SPAN, an influence allocation process introduced by MacKinnon (1966a). Experimental comparison shows SPAN to be significantly better at selecting a correct option from a set of options than two common voting methods. An alternative influence allocation process that we call RCON (Rational Consensus), is based on a weighting method proposed by DeGroot (1974) and has been explicated as a normative standard for combining opinion by Lehrer and Wagner (1981). The judgmental inputs to SPAN would appear to be logically related to those for RCON. Submitting the SPAN inputs from the experiment, transformed in this logical way, to the RCON process results in somewhat better performance than with SPAN. However, evidence indicated that the two methods are conceptually and psychologically sufficiently different that an experimental comparison is needed between them.     

AIDS Home- and Community-Based Waivers: Effects on Use of Services,Expenditures, and Survival

State Medicaid home- and community-based waiver programs for persons with AIDS (PWAs) were implemented with the expectation that PWAs would use these services in lieu of more expensive hospital-based care. If so, Medicaid spending per PWA should decline, and program costs fall. We analyze Florida Medicaid claims data for PWAs from December 1995 through December 1997 to determine how participation in the waiver program affects the use of inpatient services, the receipt of antiretroviral combination therapies (available to Medicaid recipients throughout the study period), monthly expenditures, and survival of PWAs. We find that waiver participants are more likely to receive combination therapies but less likely to use hospital-based care than nonparticipants; white men and sicker patients are more likely to join the waiver program than other eligible PWAs; monthly expenditures for waiver participants are 52% lower than for nonparticipants; and waiver participation does not affect survival.     

Food Price Policy in East Asia

The primary objective of this survey is to examine the extent to which the available empirical literature suggests that economies of East Asia are following the policy trend of earlier industrialising economies in gradually changing from taxing to assisting food producers in the course of their economic development. More specifically, the survey attempts (a) to summarise the trends in agricultural incentives in East Asia; (b) to examine briefly the literature on motivations for those policy trends; and (c) to mention some of the future trade and policy implications.     

MORE ON WELFARE GAINS TO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES FROM LIBERALIZING WORLD FOOD TRADE

The common presumption that food-importing developing countries would be harmed by a liberalization of world food trade is questioned in this paper. Both theory and new empirical modelling evidence suggest the possibility of the opposite conclusion. Even if just advanced industrial countries were to liberalize their food trade, the present empirical analysis (using a model of world food markets) suggests that economic welfare and net foreign exchange earnings from food trade could improve for the vast majority of developing countries. The extent to which that gain would be greater if developing countries also were to liberalize their policies affecting food markets is shown as well. The analysis helps to reconcile differences between previous results using partial-equilibrium models and those derived from computable general equilibrium models.