axiomatizing ordinal welfare egalitarianism when preferences may vary abstract this paper formulates the principle of ordinal welfare egalitarianism in a general model of collective choice where both the feasibility constraints and the preferences may vary an axiomatization of all choice rules satisfying this principle is presented the key axiom is a solidarity property with respect to changes that may occur possibly jointly in the feasibility constraints and the preferences solidarity with respect to changes in the feasibility constraints and solidarity with respect to changes in the preferences together imply only a weaker form of egalitarianism journal of economic literature classification numbers d63 d70

impartiality priority and solidarity in the theory of justice the ethic of priority is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of welfare equality and the needs blind ethic of income equality we propose an axiom of priority and characterize resource allocation rules that are impartial prioritarian and solidaristic they comprise a class of rules which equalize across individuals some index of resources and welfare consequently we provide an ethical rationalization for the many applications in which such indices have been used e g the human development index index of primary goods etc

modeling hidden alternatives in random utility models an application to don t know responses in contingent valuation wedevelop a multinomial logitmodel with missing information that can be used to test for hidden alternatives in random utility models and contingent valuation analysis to illustrate our latentchoice technique we focus on the don t know responses in dichotomous choice contingent valuation questions in this version of the latent choice model we probabilistically reassign don t know responses to either the yes or no categories or leave them in the don t know category if indicated by the data we find that in our two studies a statistically significant number of the don t know responses are actually no responses

comparing regional technical efficiency in uk manufacturing plants the case of northern ireland 1974 1995 this paper uses estimates based on the stochastic frontier production function approach applied to more than 200 four digit uk manufacturing industries covering the period 1974 95 it is shown that manufacturing plants in northern ireland on average operated at lower levels of technical efficiency when compared to their counterparts in other regions of the uk and especially plants located in south east england this lower level of efficiency in the province is analysed both at the aggregate level and the industry level at the industry level the province has fewer plants exhibiting the highest levels of efficiency within most industries and too few plants open and close to cleanse manufacturing of the worst plants and those plants that do open and close often do not have efficiency levels such as to bring about improvements to the aggregate efficiency level the major conclusion is that northern ireland needs to reduce the long tail of weaker plants that tend to drag down average efficiency one w

treatment of don t know responses in contingent valuation surveys a random valuation model abstract this paper provides a utility theoretic interpretation of don t know dk responses in contingent valuation surveys using a referendum elicitation procedure the random valuation model in this paper assumes that each respondent of a contingent valuation survey has an implicit valuation distribution rather than a single true value as traditionally assumed in his her mind if an offered referendum bid is not clearly different from the mean value of one s valuation distribution the respondent may give a dk answer to the cv referendum question based on this model a maximum likelihood procedure is proposed for estimating respondents willingness to pay for a nonmarket good with referendum contingent valuation data which include dk responses an empirical illustration of this estimation procedure is also provided

treating respondent uncertainty in contingent valuation a comparison of empirical treatments this research examines the impact of uncertainty on contingent valuation responses using 1 a survey of canadian landowners about willingness to accept compensation for converting cropland to forestry and 2 a survey of swedish residents about willingness to pay for forest conservation five approaches from the literature for incorporating respondent uncertainty are used and compared to the traditional random utility model with assumed certainty the results indicate that incorporating uncertainty has the potential to increase fit but could introduce additional variance while some methods for uncertainty can be an improvement over traditional approaches it is imperative to exercise caution when making systematic judgments about the effect of uncertainty on contingent valuation responses

does don t know mean no analysis of don t know responses in dichotomous choice contingent valuation questions the don t know response option in contingent valuation dichotomous choice questions is analysed using data from both willingness to pay and willingness to accept studies an empirical analysis is conducted to determine whether respondents are stating a response similar to yes or no responses or a middle response it is found that don t know responses are similar to no responses in the willingness to pay study in the willingness to accept study it is found that the don t know responses are similar to a middle response it is further suggested that researchers consider calculating ambivalence bounds when a don t know response is a middle response

labour use efficiency in swedish social insurance offices this paper considers the estimation of frontier production functions in panel data models it proposes a multi stage method to obtain estimates of 1 the parameters of a flexible input requirement function and 2 technical inefficiency decomposed into time invariant firm specific time varying and the residual components the proposed method is used to analyse labour use efficiency of swedish local social insurance offices on the basis of a large panel of observations during the time period 1974 84 empirical results show 1 substantial variations in labour use efficiency among these offices with the mean efficiencies declining over time 2 presence of economies of scale thereby meaning that most of the offices were of suboptimal size

estimation of technical inefficiency in panel data models with firm and time specific effects abstract this paper uses a panel data model and develops methods to estimate production function parameters and technical inefficiency the model distinguishes technical inefficiency from firm and time specific effects determinants of technical inefficiency is introduced by allowing its mean to be a function of exogenous variables both random and fixed effects treatment of firm and time specific effects are considered in estimation

endogenous regional agricultural production technologies technical relationships between six productive factors for ten agricultural produvction regions in the continental united states are examined the applied methodology provides a departure from conventional production methodologies contained in the literature by allowing aggregate technical relationships to be endogenized within the economic system

a core selection for regulating a single output monopoly we consider a single output production economy in which all coalitions of agents have access to the technology under increasing returns to scale the corresponding cooperative game without side payments is convex and hence has a large core we propose a core selection that is obtained by considering the lowest price of output relative to input such that the corresponding vector of indirect utilities is feasible the constant returns equivalent allocation is feasible and achieves this utility vector it satisfied the property of technological monotonicity when the production possibility set expands no agent faces a utility loss technological monotonicity and the core property together characterize the constant returns equivalent solution

public ownership of the external world and private ownership of self liberal political philosophy represented classically by john locke and today by libertarians defends great inequality of economic outcome on the basis that people own themselves and are entitled to establish private property in the external world by virtue of that self ownership contemporary nonlibertarian political philosophers such as john rawls and ronald dworkin achieve their relatively egalitarian conclusion by effectively denying self ownership as a premise an alternative challenge to liberalism which does not take the radical starting point of denying self ownership is to declare that while certain rights to benefit by virtue of superior skill should be protected a degree of self ownership productive assets in the external world be viewed as publicly owned and not privately appropriable what allocation mechanisms on a space of possible economies satisfy axioms that are necessary to guarantee both private ownership of self and public or joint ownership of the external world we propose a

distributional properties of the uniform rule in economies with single peaked preferences abstract we investigate the distributional properties of the uniform rule for the problem of allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among a group of agents with single peaked preferences first we show that the uniform rule is the only subsolution of the convex no envy and pareto solution next we show that the uniform rule offers the greatest upper bound when there is too little of the commodity and the least lower bound when there is too much of the commodity

egalitarianism under earmark constraints agents with single peaked preferences share a resource coming from different suppliers each agent is connected to only a subset of suppliers examples include workload balancing sharing earmarked funds and rationing utilities after a storm unlike in the one supplier model in a pareto optimal allocation agents who get more than their peak from underdemanded suppliers coexist with agents who get less from overdemanded suppliers our egalitarian solution is the lorenz dominant pareto optimal allocation it treats agents with equal demands as equally as the connectivity constraints allow together strategyproofness pareto optimality and equal treatment of equals characterize our solution

alternative approaches for incorporating respondent uncertainty when estimating willingness to pay the case of the mexican spotted owl abstract this paper explores the sources and patterns of respondents uncertainty regarding their willingness to pay wtp and presents alternative approaches for incorporating this uncertainty into estimation of the logit model recently proposed approaches are compared to methods proposed in this paper which allows for incorporation of uncertainty regarding both yes and no responses these approaches are evaluated by comparing the goodness of fit and variability of mean wtp extreme recoding of uncertain yes responses as no responses reduces the logit goodness of fit and the precision of the wtp estimate incorporating the degree of uncertainty of yes responses results in the highest goodness of fit and the smallest variability of mean wtp among the various models addressing uncertainty a regression model is used to determine the significant determinants of respondent uncertainty

a comparison of alternative certainty calibration techniques in contingent valuation abstract a field test of two types of certainty calibration techniques in contingent valuation of public lands indicated that a 10 point certainty scale reduced wtp estimates by about half adjusting for uncertainty via a not sure option did not reduce wtp estimates but the variance increased there are several differences between these two ways of accounting for respondents uncertainty which may suggest why they provide different wtp value estimates and variances

estimating input mix efficiency in a parametric framework application to state level agricultural data for the united states this paper contributes to the productivity literature by demonstrating novel econometric methods to estimate input mix efficiency ime in a parametric framework input mix efficiency is defined as

testing efficiency hypotheses in joint production a parametric approach n recent years a great deal of research has been directed to the modelling and measurement of technical and allocative efficiency in production with few exceptions this research has been restricted to single product firms however recent developments in duality theory have facilitated the extension of this research to multi product firms the main purpose of this paper is to develop a model of the multiproduct firm in which the possibilities of both technical and allocative inefficiency are incorporated in an econometrically useful way the first model we develop includes a nonneutral2 type of technical inefficiency and three distinguishable types of allocative inefficiency output mix input mix and scale each type of inefficiency is costly to the firm in the sense that each causes a reduction in profit beneath the maximum value attainable under full efficiency the cost of each type of inefficiency depends on the magnitude of the inefficiency and the structure of the underlying production technology in the second model we develop technical inefficiency remains nonneutral but allocative inefficiency is not generally decomposable into output mix input mix and scale components however both technical and allocative inefficiency remain costly to the firm the cost of each type of inefficiency depending on its magnitude and the structure of the underlying production technology we model the technology of a competitive profit maximizing multi product firm with the dual profit function this enables us to use hotelling s lemma to generate a system of profit maximizing output supply and input demand equations these equations are then modified to allow for the possibility of technical and three types of allocative inefficiency a virtue of using the profit function to represent production technology is that it permits a straightforward comparison of maximum profit under full efficiency with actual profit and with the profit that would result from any combination of the four types of inefficiency this enables us to allocate the cost of inefficiency to each of four components our model of inefficiency is parametric and is embedded in a generalized leontief profit function although any flexible specification of the profit function can be used the model is developed in sections ii iv estimation of the model is considered in section v an empirical example designed to illustrate the workings of the model is discussed in section vi section vii concludes

division rules and migration equilibria abstract fair division rules are examined in a framework consisting of local environments with fixed non disposable perfectly divisible endowments and possibly different division rules individuals have single peaked preferences and are free to choose the environments where they live given that the rules satisfy various desirable properties such as efficiency strategy proofness or envy freeness the extent to which individuals have incentives to migrate to other environments is explored journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d50 d60

the role of question format for the support for national climate change mitigation policies in germany and the determinants of wtp this contingent valuation survey examines the willingness to pay wtp for climate change mitigation in germany willingness to pay is assessed by using a classic dichotomous choice referendum format and a two way payment ladder in a split sample design we find that mean wtp under the referendum format is more than twice the wtp in the payment ladder format but median wtp does not differ moreover we test the possible effect of different determinants on wtp determinants that considerably influence wtp are personal norm climate change scepticism agreement with the german renewable energy law and individualistic cognition income and gender are also important predictors

flexible mixture distribution modeling of dichotomous choice contingent valuation with heterogenity abstract this paper considers the performance of a model of mixture normal distributions for dichotomous choice contingent valuation data which allows the researcher to consider unobserved heterogeneity across the sample the model is flexible and approaches a semi parametric model since the normality assumption can be removed by augmenting the number of mixture distributions bayesian inference allows for simple estimation of the model and is particularly appropriate for conducting inference with finite data sets the proposed model is compared with other semi parametric and parametric approaches using monte carlo simulation under alternative assumptions regarding heteroskedasticity and heterogeneity in sample observations it is found that the mixture normal model reduces bias and improves performance with respect to an alternative semi parametric model particularly when the sample is characterized by heterogeneous preferences the application of the model to empirical data on the recreational value of natural areas in the canary islands confirmed the expected results

reward patterns of fair solutions abstract the solutions proposed in the literature on fair allocations are sensitive to the preference profiles of the agents as a consequence each of them displays a specific distribution pattern which may be interpreted as rewarding certain kinds of preferences at the expense of others in the basic models with private goods and decreasing returns the equal income competitive equilibrium tends to favor the eccentric preferences whereas most egalitarian equivalent solutions tend to reward the agents who like particular resources the identification of the rewarding pattern of each mechanism sheds light on its ethical content and may help select the adequate solution in concrete applications in this analysis a preference monotonicity property turns out to be satisfied by many solutions

referendum design and contingent valuation the noaa panel s no vote recommendation this paper considers the effects for offering a would not vote option in contingent valuation cv questions framed using the referendum format this approach arises from a suggestion made by the national oceanic and atmospheric administration s noaa panel on contingent valuation the noaa panel was asked to evaluate the use of this method for estimating the economic value of nonmarketed environmental resources in the context of natural resource damage assessments this test used the cv questionnaire developed for the study of the exxon valdez oil spill conducted by the state of alaska with in person interviews the findings suggest that when those selecting the would not vote response are treated as having voted against the program a conservative coding offering this option does not alter 1 the distribution of for and against responses 2 the estimates of willingness to pay derived from these choices or 3 the construct validity of the results

modelling technical and allocative inefficiency in a translog production function abstract this paper develops a method of estimating technical and allocative inefficiency for each firm using a translog production function based on expected profit maximization hypothesis the method uses the production function and the first order conditions as the basis of parameter estimation

excess input expenditure estimated by means of an input distance function the case of public railways the input distance function is used to estimate excess input expenditure with reference to four european public railways this technique exploits the properties of the input distance function and allows excess input cost to be estimated over a minimum level rather than excess input usage this simplifies the computation of the cost of allocative inefficiency making the estimations easier and more reliable the results for the four railway systems reveal a substantial and statistically significant input expenditure in excess over the minimum level when evaluated over the whole sample period 1971 87 however differences between the four systems reduce over time all of the public railway systems show a clear tendency towards the reduction of inefficiency independent of dimension

a generalized production frontier approach for estimating determinants of inefficiency in u s dairy farms this article investigates farm level efficiency of u s dairy farmers by estimating their technical and allocative efficiency technical inefficiency is assumed to be composed of a deterministic component that is a function of some farm specific characteristics and a random component by doing this we extend the stochastic frontier methodology in which determinants of technicial inefficiency are explicitly introduced in the model given the inputs variations in efficiency of farms are then explained by both deterministic and random components of technical inefficiency the empirical results indicate that a levels of education of the farmer are important factors determining technical inefficiency and b large farms are more efficient technically than small and medium sized farms both technical and allocative inefficiency are found to decrease with increase in the level of education of the farmer

the replacement principle in public good economies with single peaked preferences abstract we study the implications for a simple public good model with single peaked preferences of a replacement principle we apply the principle to situations when the preferences of one of the agents may change then the principle results in a condition used by moulin in the context of binary public decision as a consequence of the replacement all other agents should be affected in the same direction they all gain or they all lose we characterize the family of efficient solutions satisfying the property it is a subfamily of the family of strategy proof solutions introduced by moulin under the name of generalized condorcet winner solutions

the replacement principle in economies with single peaked preferences abstract our objective is to investigate the implications of the replacement principle for the fair allocation of an infinitely divisible commodity among agents with single peaked preferences the principle says that when one of the components of the data entering the description of the problem to be solved changes all of the relevant agents should be affected in the same direction they all gain or they all lose we apply it to situations in which the preferences of one of the agents may change under the name ofwelfare domination under preference replacement we show that there is no selection from the no envy and pareto solution satisfying it then we weaken it by limiting its application to situations in which the change is not so disruptive that it turns the economy from one in which there is too little of the commodity to one in which there is too much or conversely we show that there is only one selection from the no envy and pareto solution satisfying this property andreplication invariance it is the uniform rule a solution that has played a central role in previous analyses of the problem journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d51 d63 d70

protest beliefs in contingent valuation explaining their motivation abstract the definition and treatment of protest responses in contingent valuation cv can have a significant influence on the estimated values of the good in question if these responses are censored in order to understand how protest responses are motivated in a cv about forest biodiversity in germany we used an item battery to identify respondents protest beliefs the items were measured for all respondents irrespective of their willingness to pay wtp in principle then a scale based on these beliefs is taken as a dependent variable of regression analyses in addition to environmental concern we used norms the warm glow of giving and dilemma concern as further explanatory variables the latter focuses on cooperation problems in protecting the environment our results show that protest beliefs are significantly influenced by the explanatory factors furthermore the protest beliefs themselves have a significant effect on the decision to be wtp as well as on the amount of money stated by those who are wtp the censoring of protest responses may therefore be indefensible

preference uncertainty in non market valuation a fuzzy approach in this article we consider uncertain preferences for non market goods but we move away from a probabilistic representation of uncertainty and propose the use of fuzzy contingent valuation we assume that a decision maker never fully knows her own utility function and we treat utility as a fuzzy number the methodology is illustrated using data on forest valuation in sweden fuzzy contingent valuation provides estimates of resource value in the form of a fuzzy number and includes estimates obtained using a standard probabilistic approach

dichotomous choice contingent valuation with dont know responses and misreporting a new approach is presented that simultaneously deals with misreporting and don t know dk responses within a dichotomous choice contingent valuation framework utilising a modification of the standard bayesian probit framework a gibbs with metropolis hastings algorithm is used to estimate the posterior densities for the parameters of interest several model specifications are applied to two contingent valuation datasets one on wolf management plans and one on the us fee demonstration program we find that dks are more likely to be from people who would be predicted to have positive utility for the bid therefore a dk is more likely to be a yes than a no we also find evidence of misreporting primarily in favour of the no option the inclusion of dk responses has an unpredictable impact on willingness to pay estimates since it impacts differently on the results for the two datasets we examine copyright c 2009 john wiley sons ltd

discrete choice under preference uncertainty an improved structural model for contingent valuation abstract this paper is concerned with discrete choice contingent value estimation in the presence of response errors we attempt to extend the theoretical frameworks developed by hanemann 1984 amer j agric econom 66 332 341 and cameron 1988 j environ econom management 15 355 379 by introducing preference uncertainty with individual respondents we assume that respondents have incomplete knowledge about their true valuation of a nonmarket resource and thus may give wrong yes no answers on whether or not to pay a given bid amount for the resource a post decisional confidence measure for each observed yes no answer is elicited for characterizing the degree of preference uncertainty with the help of this confidence measure we develop an improved structural model for deriving value estimates data from a forest environment valuation survey are used for the empirical estimations

equality of resources implies equality of welfare if one is an egalitarian should one try to equalize resources available to agents or to equalize their welfares with a suitably general conception of what resources are these two conceptions cannot be distinguished an allocation mechanism is defined on a space of economies and is required to satisfy various axioms that are necessary conditions for equalizing resources among a population the unique mechanism satisfying these axioms on a large domain of economies is the one that allocates commodities so as to equalize utilities of the agents methodologically the theorem is a generalization of bargaining theory because the mechanisms are defined on commodity space

on the estimation of technical and allocative inefficiency using stochastic frontier functions the case of u s class 1 railroads in this paper the author considers specification and estimation of technical and allocative inefficiency in a cost minimizing framework using panel data some distinguishing features of the model are 1 the functional form of the production technology is flexible enough to allow elasticity to vary across firms 2 allocative inefficiency coming from managerial errors ou t of inertia ignorance etc are separated from random errors in optimization 3 the panel nature of the data allows the estimation of input and firm specific allocative inefficiency together with technical inefficiency and 4 subdivision of the sample period allows one to make efficiency comparisons of each firm over the subperiods and to check the stability of the parameter estimates copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

solidarity in preference aggregation improving on a status quo abstract working in the arrowian framework we search for preference aggregation rules with desirable solidarity properties in a fixed population setting we formulate two versions of the solidarity axiom welfare dominance under preference replacement although the stronger proves incompatible with efficiency the combination of efficiency and our second version leads to an important class of rules which improve upon a status quo order these rules are also strategy proof which reveals a further connection between solidarity and incentive properties allowing the population to vary we again characterize the status quo rules by efficiency and a different solidarity axiom population monotonicity this extends a similar characterization of a subclass of these rules by bossert and sprumont 2014

egalitarian equivalent cost sharing of a public good in an economy with one public and one private good egalitarian equivalent cost sharing consists of finding the highest public good level x such that consuming x for free yields a feasible utility distribution the corresponding feasible allocation typically unique called egalitarian equivalent is in the core of the economy conversely any cost sharing method satisfying pareto optimality cost monotonicity nobody suffers a utility loss if the production technology improves upon ceteris paribus and individual rationality no single agent coalition objects or no private transfers no agent receives a positive amount of private good must select an egalitarian equivalent allocation in every economy copyright 1987 by the econometric society

efficiency estimation in a profit maximising model using flexible production function abstract this paper uses a flexible translog production function to estimate efficiency of 227 farms from west bengal india we consider estimation of technical and allocative inefficiencies using a profit maximising framework which accommodates both endogenous and exogenous inputs the maximum likelihood method of estimation developed in this paper is based on the production function and the first order conditions of profit maximisation farm specific technical and allocative inefficiencies are also estimated empirical results show that the mean level of technical efficiency is 75 46 while the best farm is 85 87 efficient technically so far as allocative efficiency is concerned the majority of the farms are found to be under users of the endogenous inputs viz fertiliser manure human and bullock labour

the determinants of efficiency and productivity in european railways this article evaluates the economic performance of european railways over the period 1972 to 1999 the cost structure of the railway industry is analysed using a stochastic frontier approach estimated within the framework of a translog cost system the results confirm that european railways experience significant cost increases due to inefficient behaviour in contrast to previous studies however the estimates indicate a much greater role for allocative rather than technical inefficiency overall inefficiencies can essentially be explained by the supply of excess capacity and by the over employment of labour inputs regarding productivity it appears to be technological progress and not levels of efficiency or scale economies that provide the most convincing explanation for variance in growth rates within the sample

the measurement and sources of technical inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry production function models are estimated with a time series of cross section data on indonesian weaving establishments the sources of technical inefficiency are investigated three firm attributes are identified as being potentially related to firm efhciency tbey are firm ownership age and size the importance of these attributes as sources of inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry is investigated and the implications of the find ings discussed

a comparative analysis of european railroads efficiency a cost frontier approach the paper analyses the issue of cost efficiency for eight main european railroads in a sample period of 17 years measures of technical and allocative efficiency are obtained from a stochastic cost frontier model with minimal cost described by a translog cost system in the model the cost of allocative inefficiency is estimated simultaneously from the shares errors whereas technical inefficiency is modelled by a half normal positive departure from the cost frontier results show a negligible effect of allocative inefficiency on firms costs whereas the cost of technical inefficiency appears to be significant

the pure compensation problem egalitarianism versus laissez fairism a binary choice problem with side payments and quasi linear utilities is considered we study two compensation rules called social choice functions the egalitarian rule divides equally the surplus above the average utility level the laissez faire rule chooses an efficient decision but performs no transfer egalitarianism is characterized by a monotonicity axiom called agreement no two agents ever disagree in comparing two distinct preferences of a third one laissez fairism is characterized by the no subsidy axiom a coalition would not be worse off if the other agents were not present

a contingent valuation estimate of the benefits of wolves in minnesota in this paper we estimate the willingness topay for a wolf management plan and a wolfdamage plan in minnesota using the contingentvaluation method the theoretical definition ofwillingness to pay for wolf protection iscomposed of use and non use values weincorporate a don t know response option in thedichotomous choice valuation questions a largenumber of respondents answered don t know themultinomial logit model is used todifferentiate between don t know and noresponses non use motives are importantfactors that explain willingness to pay we usethese benefit estimates in combination with twoalternative cost estimates to consider theefficiency of the wolf management and damageplans both plans have estimated benefitsgreater than costs