Mobile tax base as a global common

If countries anticipate international Bertrand competition in tax rates, they may expend effort that makes some of their taxpayers less mobile or increases the mobility of taxpayers elsewhere. Piecemeal evidence on what activities countries use is provided. Such activities are analyzed that interact with Bertrand tax competition if the size of the groups of loyal and nonloyal citizens or investors is endogenous. Further, the implications of tax harmonization and minimum taxes for these types of nonprice competition are considered. Home attachment reduces the intensity of tax competition, but generates a strategic disadvantage for the country that invests much in such home attachment. Harmonization of taxes and high minimum taxes can intensify countries’ investment in home attachment.      

Measuring Women's Quality of Life: A Discussion of Alternative Approaches

This paper reports our experiences with the application of a number of alternative approaches to a study of women's economic circumstances and quality of life in a typical western city. The important work of, especially, Martha Nussbaum on the capabilities approach to evaluations of “quality of life” has highlighted pitfalls associated with the use of a narrow informational base in studies of women's lives and has emphasized the value of qualitative methods in these evaluations. However, to date, most discussions of the relevance of plural approaches to studies of women's lives have been conducted in the context of developing countries. This paper contributes a practical, current example of the relevance of such approaches to assessments of the lives of women in western countries as well. The research findings reported in the paper also cast further light on the importance of several, related themes in the literature on the capabilities approach, namely the importance of understanding how women's aspirations and expectations change with their economic and social experiences; and the importance of appreciating the social uses of language and how this affects the way in which women describe their lives.     

客户偏好指标和银行渠道使用对应分析研究

随着商业银行竞争的日趋激烈,银行营销渠道在其经营发展中地位日益明显。由于不同渠道其服务范围和条件、成本和效益有明显的区别,同时,客户不同的行为偏好对于不同渠道的应用也存在差异,所以,商业银行客户偏好分析就成为银行渠道发展策略的首要任务和出发点。在介绍相关理论基础上,建立商业银行客户偏好分析的框架,提出了客户偏好分析指标体系,最终利用实际调研数据对客户偏好指标和银行渠道进行分析,得到偏好指标和渠道之间的对应关系,对国内商业银行如何利用客户偏好分析方法实施差异化策略提出方法和建议。     

Preference Structures, Property Rights, and Paired Comparisons

The method of paired comparisons was used to determine the structure of survey participants' value expressions for Australian native forests. The same participants were also surveyed using the contingent valuation method (CVM). Data from the paired comparisons were used to construct preference maps which enabled identification of participants whose value expressions were structurally incompatible with economic welfare theory – in particular, those participants who expressed their values according to lexicographic preferences. For some of these participants, CVM results did not provide appropriate measures of WTP. The surveys also demonstrated the importance of allowing participants' own views on property rights to dictate the valuation context offered.     

Strategy-proof Location on a Network

We consider rules that choose a location on a graph (e.g. a road network) based on agents' single-peaked preferences. First, we characterize the class of strategy-proof, onto rules when the graph is a tree. Such a rule is based on a collection of generalized median voter rules (Moulin, 1980) satisfying a consistency condition. Second, we characterize such rules for graphs containing cycles. We show that while such a rule is not necessarily dictatorial, the existence of a cycle grants some agent an amount of decisive power, unlike the case of trees. Rules for this case can be described in terms of a subclass of such rules for trees. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D78.     

Balancing the risk of ‘Lazearian’ interrupters and the benefits of educational and social peers: tracing parental preferences for class-size reduction

Using Danish survey data from a choice experiment, parental preferences for class-size reduction are estimated. While parents with children in large classes are willing to pay for class-size reduction, parents with children in small classes are reluctant and even express negative utility for further class-size reduction. We interpret this as parents balancing the risk of ‘Lazearian’ interrupters and the benefits of educational and social peers when forming their preferences for class size.     

Combining stated and revealed choice research to simulate the neighbor effect: The case of hybrid-electric vehicles

According to intuition and theories of diffusion, consumer preferences develop along with technological change. However, most economic models designed for policy simulation unrealistically assume static preferences. To improve the behavioral realism of an energy–economy policy model, this study investigates the “neighbor effect,” where a new technology becomes more desirable as its adoption becomes more widespread in the market. We measure this effect as a change in aggregated willingness to pay under different levels of technology penetration. Focusing on hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs), an online survey experiment collected stated preference (SP) data from 535 Canadian and 408 Californian vehicle owners under different hypothetical market conditions.Revealed preference (RP) data was collected from the same respondents by eliciting the year, make and model of recent vehicle purchases from regions with different degrees of HEV popularity: Canada with 0.17% new market share, and California with 3.0% new market share. We compare choice models estimated from RP data only with three joint SP–RP estimation techniques, each assigning a different weight to the influence of SP and RP data in coefficient estimates. Statistically, models allowing more RP influence outperform SP influenced models. However, results suggest that because the RP data in this study is afflicted by multicollinearity, techniques that allow more SP influence in the beta estimates while maintaining RP data for calibrating vehicle class constraints produce more realistic estimates of willingness to pay. Furthermore, SP influenced coefficient estimates also translate to more realistic behavioral parameters for CIMS, allowing more sensitivity to policy simulations.