Does reputation enhance response rates?

Declining response rates and the potential for deterioration in the quality of survey data require reconsideration of the role of incentives to participate in interviews. This article argues that the strategies associated with linking public goods to private goods to establish reputation effects for the private goods involved can also be used to enhance confidence in the objectives of the request for an interview. In this literature, an assured reputation is established for those selling products by offering to contribute some of the proceeds of a sale to charity. The results of our field experiment indicate that combining charity with financial incentives appears to increase confidence in survey objectives for those familiar with the interview process.     

Female images in advertising: the implications of social comparison for marketing

Does advertising create insecurities and dissatisfaction with the self? This exploratory study investigated how British women consumers, aged 24–50, responded to a range of ideal images presented in fashion magazines. Congruent with previous research, British women compared themselves with idealised advertising images. However, consumers actively and selectively interpreted the meanings of idealised images represented in advertising stimuli. Although some women raised their standards of comparisons and lowered their own self-assessments after viewing the ideal images, there was also evidence that women employed a variety of strategies when consuming the idealised images portrayed in fashion advertising, depending on the goal of the social comparison process. These strategies are interpreted in the context of social comparison theory, and the implications for integrated marketing communication strategies are discussed.     

The GDP Value of Twentieth‐Century Health Improvements in Developed Economies: Initial Estimates for England

Economists are aware that conventional measures of national income do not capture everything that is important to individuals. In particular, the value of huge improvements in health over the twentieth century has gone uncalculated. Usher and Nordhaus have emphasized the virtues of including mortality improvements in some form of extended national income measure. This article therefore sets out a methodology that can be used to calculate the value of mortality and morbidity improvements. The results for England indicate that the value of health improvements in developed economies have added at least 0.3 percent per annum to twentieth‐century GDP growth rates. The results demonstrate that those interested in understanding improvements in economic welfare need to pay much more attention to improvements in health.     

Economic Analysis for Ecosystem Service Assessments

The paper seeks to contribute to the expanding literature on ecosystem service assessment by considering its integration with economic analyses of such services. Focussing upon analyses for future orientated policy and decision making, we initially consider a single period during which ecological stocks are maintained at sustainable levels. The flow of ecosystems services and their contribution to welfare bearing goods is considered and methods for valuing resultant benefits are reviewed and illustrated via a case study of land use change. We then broaden our time horizon to discuss the treatment of future costs and benefits. Finally we relax our sustainability assumption and consider economic approaches to the incorporation of depleting ecological assets with a particular focus upon stocks which exhibit thresholds below which restoration is compromised.     

Terrorist threats,information disclosures,and consumer sovereignty

This paper proposes the use of consumers’ preferences in formulating policies for keeping secret information about terrorist activities and threats that might compromise future security. We report the results from two surveys indicating that support for government secrecy varies across situations depending on the threat and context. A majority of respondents preferred full disclosure of some information related to terrorist threats regardless of the consequences for specific industries or future threats, in particular threats involving attacks on commercial airlines. However a majority of respondents were willing to allow government authorities to withhold information about the details of threats to the financial system and to buildings if revealing the information might compromise future investigations. While the public generally recognizes the importance of keeping some information secret, a democratically elected government should seek to understand the preferences of its citizens on important policy issues related to public safety and security.     

UV喷射墨技术与市场探视

尽管在喷墨印刷中采用UV喷射墨技术的印刷厂商还是凤毛麟角,但UV喷墨印刷却早已在多个市场领域得到了广泛应用,其中目前应用最多的领域就是大幅面印刷市场.     

A Diagrammatic Exposition of Weak Complementarity and the Willig Condition

This article provides a graphical explanation for one of the most important restrictions to utility functions used in revealed preference approaches for measuring the demand for public goods and product quality—weak complementarity. It also describes how the Willig condition is an important element along with weak complementarity in measuring Hicksian consumer surplus for changes in public goods or quality using Marshallian demand curves.     

Incomplete markets and individual risks

Summary This paper studies the incomplete markets model with financial assets when the only missing markets are for individual risks. There are no aggregate risks in the economy. Assuming the individual risks are only privately observable, the only equilibria that are implementable by anonymous mechanisms are those in which prices do not vary across states of the world. Such equilibria always exist. Generically, they are locally unique and depend continuously on the parameters of the economy, just like complete-markets equilibria. Generically, there is also an infinite-dimensional manifold of equilibria in which prices do vary across states of the world. These equilibria are isomorphic to sunspot equilibria.I am grateful to Dave Cass for several helpful discussions and to Darrell Duffie for his comments on an earlier draft.     

Taxes and dividend policy under alternative tax regimes

This paper examines changes in corporate dividend policy around the introduction of a dividend imputation tax system. This represented a significant change to the Australian tax framework and allows us to test the effect of differential taxation on corporate dividend policy. Consistent with the tax preference for the distribution of dividends, we find dividend initiations, all dividend payout measures and dividend reinvestment plans increased with the introduction of dividend imputation. Similarly we find that gross dividend payouts are more volatile under dividend imputation. Finally, we find that the increase in dividend payout and initiations differs across firms. In particular, we find that the higher the level of available franking tax credits the higher the firm's gross dividend payout and the more likely the firm is to initiate a dividend.     

‘Radiant with possibility’: Involving young people in creating a vision for the future of their community

This paper argues that young people need to be given the opportunity to recognise the interaction between their own understandings of the world as it is now and the vision of what it might become. To support this argument, we discuss an urban planning project, known as the Lower Mill Site Project, which involved active participation of high school students from the local community. The outcomes of this project demonstrate the positive contributions young people can make to the process of urban redevelopment, the advantages of using a participatory design approach, and the utopian possibilities that can emerge when young people are invited to be part of an intergenerational community project.