Exploring the future of ecological genomics: Integrating CTA with vision assessment

Interactive approaches to technology development provide opportunities for the development of innovative technologies which clearly connect with social practices and address the positive and negative effects as perceived by relevant actors. The challenge is to start an interactive approach early in the development of new technologies, when many options are still open for exploration and there are good possibilities for steering. Early involvement of societal actors is, however, challenged by the absence of concrete applications on which they can develop their own visions from the perspective of their own needs, interests, norms and values. Integrating Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA) with vision assessment is proposed as an approach to overcome this dilemma in the field of ecological genomics and bridge the knowledge gap between parties closely involved with ecogenomics research and other relevant actors. We present, evaluate and discuss the process of identifying guiding visions of the technology developers as a first step in this approach and end with some suggestions on how desirable futures for ecogenomics can subsequently be assessed from the perspectives of different actors.     

FINANCING AND HOUSE PRICES

Recent empirical evidence on the effect of below-market financing on house prices has suffered from estimation and interpretation problems. In this paper, a methodology is developed to solve these problems. Using data for mortgage revenue bonds, the methodology is tested with results indicating that all financing subsidy is capitalized into house prices.     

Freia and Kompas,The Central Planning Bureau's new generation of macro-economic policy models: A review article

Summary On the eve of the 50th anniversary of macro-economic model building in the Netherlands, the Central Planning Bureau introduced two new models for policy analysis, the annual model FREIA and the quarterly model KOMPAS. The main novelty of these models as compared to their predecessors is a fully fledged submodel of the financial sector. This review article highlights some features of both models and compares their properties with those of other models and with results from the literature. The models have been explicitly constructed for practical use and therefore do not reflect any theoretical approach in particular.Critical comments on a previous version of this article by the Department's colleagues and a referee are gratefully acknowledged.     

PARTIAL IDENTIFICATION OF COUNTERFACTUAL CHOICE PROBABILITIES*

This article shows how to predict counterfactual discrete choice behavior when the presumed behavioral model partially identifies choice probabilities. The simple, general approach uses observable choice probabilities to partially infer the distribution of types in the population and then applies the results to predict behavior in unrealized choice settings. Two illustrative applications are given. One assumes only that persons have strict preferences. The other assumes strict preferences and utility functions that are linear in attribute bundles, with no restrictions on the shape of the distribution of preference parameters.     

On the System Setup and the Scheduling Problem in a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS)

In this paper we present a model which unifies several existing models with respect to two phases of the planning process of a Flexible Manufacturing System. These phases are the system setup phase and the scheduling phase and in literature they usually are considered separately. We give a mathematical formulation encompassing both phases. From this formulation several existing approaches can be deduced. We also describe some heuristic methods for our model and present the computational results.