Identifying resident preferences for bus-based and rail-based investments as a complementary buy in perspective to inform project planning prioritisation

Much of the debate associated with the development of new public transport infrastructure appears to have an emotional bias with communities in favour of one mode, especially rail. This, in turn, carries much sway at the political level as if there is no budget constraint or consideration of value for money and coverage. This paper presents a stated choice experiment to investigate this context as two unlabelled options described by 20 potential drivers of community preferences for improved public transport. Each choice scenario is conditioned on a given route length but with different costs, reflecting different modal investment options for the same route length. To establish whether a modal bias exists within and between geographical jurisdictions, the choice scenario is followed by a labelling of each investment option to reveal whether the option is bus rapid transit (BRT) or light rail transit (LRT). Data from all eight capital cities of Australia, collected in mid-2014, form the empirical setting. Mixed logit random regret models provide new evidence on the nature and extent of community modal bias in this choice setting. The paper also proposes a complementary tool to benefit-cost analysis that uses the residence preferences model to show, through scenario analysis, the potential gains in public support for BRT over LRT. The results suggest that BRT should be in the mix of candidate projects if more than one mode is considered and not ignored, as is so often the case in developed economies.     

购后情境下促销类型对顾客购买的影响

随着移动电子商务的发展,商家的促销方式越来越多,消费者也每时每刻都在接触到各种促销信息,现有研究大多关注促销对潜在顾客的影响,较少关注新的促销活动对已购顾客态度的影响。本文试图探讨不同的促销类型对于已购顾客的购后后悔的形成有何差异以及其形成的内在机制。研究发现促销类型对已购顾客后悔产生影响,相比于非货币型促销,货币型促销能够使已购顾客产生更为强烈的后悔,交易效用损失起到中介作用。心理折旧对促销类型与交易效用损失之间的关系起到调节作用。在较低的心理折旧水平内,不同促销类型对已购顾客的后悔程度影响显著。在较高的心理折旧水平内,不同的促销类型对已购顾客的后悔程度影响较低。促销频率对交易效用损失和顾客后悔之间起到调节作用。当促销频率较高时,不同的促销类型对已购用户的后悔程度影响显著。当促销频率较低时,不同的促销类型对已购用户的后悔程度影响较低。     

Decision theories and probabilistic insurance: an experimental test

This paper reports the results of an experiment in which probabilistic insurance, as proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), is compared both with full insurance and no insurance. The experimental results conform to the intuitive prediction that risk-averse agents who are indifferent between full insurance and no insurance, will prefer full insurance to probabilistic insurance and probabilistic insurance to no insurance. The first conclusion is incompatible with the predictions of expected utility theory, and the second with Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory. We also show that Loomes and Sudgen's regret theory can easily accommodate these intuitive results. JEL Classification: C91, D81. We are most grateful to Graham Loomes and two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments. Financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, under project BEC2001-0535, and from the Generalitat Valenciana under project GRUPOS03/086, is gratefully acknowledeged.     

Regret in health insurance post‐purchase behavior

Unlike other forms of insurance, individuals with health insurance generally expect to make claims through the policy period. Selecting an appropriate level of cost‐sharing is difficult and individuals may, ex‐post, regret the choice of a less‐than‐suitable coverage amount. Using a national health insurance survey of private market consumers from 2013 to 2017, we evaluate the potential for post‐purchase regret in the health plan purchasing decision. We employ an ordered logistic model and find that consumers whose plan choices were likely financially dominated by a foregone alternative are significantly more likely to express regret through reporting significantly lower likelihood of renewal, even when controlling for confounding considerations including affordability, self‐assessed risk, and satisfaction with the plan.     

Experiential regret in service failure: The role of service justices

ABSTRACT

Regret is so common as to be the second most frequently named emotion in a study of the use of emotions in everyday language (Shimanoff, 1984 Shimanoff, S. B. (1984). Commonly named emotions in everyday conversations. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 58, 514. doi:10.2466/pms.1984.58.2.514[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Regret is a negative, cognitively based emotion that we experience when realizing or imagining that our present situation would have been better had we acted differently (Zeelenberg, 1999 Zeelenberg, M. (1999). The use of crying over spilled milk: A note on the rationality and functionality of regret. Philosophical Psychology, 12, 325–340. doi:10.1080/095150899105800[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Meanwhile, complaint handling takes an important role in raising the retention rate of the customers who experience service problems (Hart, Heskett, & Sasser, 1990 Hart, C. W. L., Heskett, J. L., & Sasser, W. E., Jr. (1990). The profitable art of service recovery. Harvard Business Review, 68(4), 148–156.[PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Customers anticipate that enterprises will remedy their service failure. The complaining process enhances the relationship between dissatisfied customers and enterprises (Chebat & Slusarczyk, 2005 Chebat, J. C., & Slusarczyk, W. (2005). How emotions mediate the effects of perceived justice on loyalty in service recovery situations: An empirical study. Journal of Business Research, 58, 664–673. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2003.09.005[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). One of the strategies to retain customers is to recover justice from failures (Blodgett, Hill, & Tax, 1997 Blodgett, J. G., Hill, D. J., & Tax, S. S. (1997). The effects of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice on postcomplaint behavior. Journal of Retailing, 73(2), 185–210. doi:10.1016/s0022-4359(97)90003-8[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). This study intended to explore the impact of customers’ experiential regret in service failure on customers’ behavioral intention and investigate whether the service justice perceived by customers moderates the relationship between these two.     

要他们道歉真的好难——谈“regret”，“sorry”和“apologize”的政治语辞区别

道歉是违背国际法义务的国际法主体对受害方的损害予以精神上的补偿所采取的法律责任形式。《奥本海国际法》指出：“不法行为者方面的正式道歉通常是必要的。”然而，自诩“文明世界”的美国却对其屡屡损害他国及其人民的权利和利益的行为拒不作出道歉。同样，其国民彬彬有礼的日本至今仍迟迟不对其侵略亚洲的历史事实作出诚恳的正式书面道歉。从美国对其他主权国家及人民的侵害并拒绝为之道歉的案例和日本对其侵略史所采取的否定、美化、甚至是颠倒黑白的态度与言行看美国、日本在对待其造成的对他国主权和人民利益受损的问题上难得作出道歉的个中缘由。     

Reference prices and consumers' feeling of regret: an investigation of consumers' use of an online price‐bidding method

The purpose of the research was to provide a better understanding of the impacts of relevant information on consumers' emotions when bidding their prices through an online Name‐Your‐Own‐Price method. Specifically, based on the tenets of the Decision Justification Theory, the study examined whether participants felt more regret about a negative outcome when reference prices were available. The research hypotheses were tested in two experiments. The results indicated that the availability of reference prices significantly affected participants' feelings of regret about a negative outcome.     

Spectral calibration of exponential Lévy models

We investigate the problem of calibrating an exponential Lévy model based on market prices of vanilla options. We show that this inverse problem is in general severely ill-posed and we derive exact minimax rates of convergence. The estimation procedure we propose is based on the explicit inversion of the option price formula in the spectral domain and a cut-off scheme for high frequencies as regularisation.     

Coalitional stability in the location problem with single-dipped preferences: An application of the minimax theorem

This study considers a situation in which agents choose the location of a public facility from a street according to a given mechanism. Agents have single-dipped preferences over a set of feasible locations. We analyze coalitional behavior for any given mechanism for this situation. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition for a mechanism to possess a strong Nash equilibrium by applying the minimax theorem of von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). We introduce a class of core solutions and show that these solutions are characterized by strong Nash implementability. As a byproduct of these results, we propose a simple mechanism that implements any core solution in strong Nash equilibria.     

Classical decision rules and adaptation to climate change*

One approach to rationalising policies for addressing potentially catastrophic climate change when such policies may prove unnecessary is to suppose the policies provide a form of social insurance even in the presence of pure uncertainty. Then, provided the policies are effective, such insurance can be justified as a precautionary or minimax response. Even if the policies are potentially ineffective however, intervention can be justified as an attempt to minimise the regret experienced by future generations. This reasoning extends to justify ‘all weather’ policies provided such policies always reduce policy costs. If, however, policy decisions provide ‘all weather’ benefits in only certain states of the world, this rationale breaks down. Minimising regret can establish a case for ‘mixed’ policy responses provided adopting a policy mix precludes the chance that intervention will fail altogether. Precautionary policies and policies which minimise regret are computed for a simple, dynamic, adaptive climate change planning problem and sufficient conditions for policy maker pessimism provided.