eliciting preferences for collectively financed health programmes the willingness to assign approach improving public involvement in health system decision making stands as a primary health policy goal however still limited guidance is available on how best to elicit preferences for health care programmes this study examines a contingent choice technique to elicit preferences among health programmes and named willingness to assign wtas wtas reveals relative monetary based values of a set of competing public programmes under a hypothetical healthcare budget assessment experimental evidence is reported from a deliberative empirical study valuing ten health programmes in the context of the catalan health service evidence from this experimental study reveals that within the context of multiple programmes preferences are internally more consistent and slightly less affected by preference reversals as compared to values revealed from an adapted technique eliciting the willingness to pay wtp extra taxes another finding suggests that although programmes promoting health received the higher rel

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

endogenous consequentiality in stated preference referendum data the influence of the randomly assigned tax amount recent empirical and theoretical research stresses it is important for survey respondents to believe that survey votes are consequential meaning their votes can potentially influence whether a proposed policy is undertaken we test the effect of a randomly assigned referendum tax on consequentiality using a survey about water conservation in western north carolina we find that consequentiality is endogenous to hypothetical referendum responses specifically as the assigned tax amount increases respondents are less likely to find the survey consequential as in related studies respondents who self report they perceive the survey to be consequential have a higher willingness to pay

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

using game theory to resolve the chicken and egg situation in promoting cellulosic bioenergy development abstract the renewable fuel standard rfs requires production of cellulosic biofuel such as ethanol produced from switchgrass however the bioenergy industry faces a well established chicken and egg conundrum where biorefineries cannot be built until adequate farmers participation in cellulosic biomass production is ensured on the other hand farmers will not commit to growing cellulosic biomass until a market is established we assume that individual farmers in a future biofuel market are boundedly rational and will endure the risk of growing switchgrass if they are likely to receive a better payoff in the future after the number of switchgrass farmers reaches a certain threshold sufficient biomass can be procured to build an economically viable biorefinery if a biorefinery is built in a region the reductions of logistics costs and economies of scale lead to the realization of a public good and all farmers can be benefited from it otherwise the efforts of early switchgrass adopters could be unsuccessful in this paper an appropriate biorefinery capacity and the corresponding incentives provided to the farmers are determined by balancing the impact and the risk of the public good our incentive model is more efficient than a program that incentivizes all switchgrass growers equally

accounting activities security prices and class action lawsuits abstract provisions in the securities acts provide incentives to purchasers of common stocks to initiate class action lawsuits when stock prices decline at and preceding announcements that directly reduce or imply a reduction in previously reported accounting book values reported common stock returns associated with alleged misrepresentations in financial statements are consistent with incentives provided by the law classification of misrepresentations based on hypothesized relations between announcements and security returns results in observed differences in the association between litigated accounting announcements and common stock returns

a game theory analysis of market incentives for us switchgrass ethanol the renewable fuel standard 2007 set aggressive cellulosic biofuel goals that have not been realized corn ethanol dominates the market and penetration of cellulosic ethanol is unlikely in the near term due to economic and technical barriers this paper uses game theory to model biomass and ethanol production decisions and calculate the incentives that would be necessary to drive the industry to obtain the cellulosic ethanol goals after identifying the desired performance of a cellulosic ethanol supply chain a nonlinear optimization model is developed to analyze two major scenarios that estimate conservative and optimistic technological improvements in cellulosic biomass and ethanol production a potential carbon market is explored to determine its efficacy as an incentive mechanism results indicate that a carbon market would only be sufficient to incentivize a cellulosic ethanol industry under the optimistic improvement scenario with the highest switchgrass price for all other scenarios the carbon price needed to incentivize the industry would exceed the reasonable range and additional incentives would be needed to achieve the production goals of the renewable fuel standard

ex ante willingness to pay with supply and demand uncertainty implications for valuing a sea turtle protection programme it is argued that ex antewillingness to pay is appropriately measured as a function of subjective supply and demand probabilities an exploratory case study of a loggerhead sea turtle protection programme is used to show how estimates of these probabilities can be obtained from a sample survey and how a change in probabilities determines contingent choice empirical results confirm that subjective probabilities are important when explaining ex antewillingness to pay attempts to estimate the determinants of ex antewillingness to pay without controlling for subjective probabilities will result in specification bias it is important that subjective probability information is gleaned from contingent valuation survey respondents and included in empirical models of contingent choice

contingent valuation experiments for strategic behavior abstract the existence and extent of strategic disclosures in field contingent valuation surveys have been debated but few empirical studies are available this paper summarizes the results of an experiment to identify strategic behavior using alternative disclosure mechanisms with closed ended and open ended formats in addition the experiment examined the effect of mechanism design on respondent s ability and willingness to disclose their personal valuation statistical results using censored discrete regression analysis and nonparameteric means tests provide some evidence of systematic differences due to strategic behavior but the comparisons are inconclusive due to the significant influence of sample selection on valuation results using closed ended formats and the inherent limitations of comparative means test procedures evidence from this analysis cannot refute the hypothesis that respondents try to the best of their ability to provide truthful information but the procedures used to interpret this information can have a significant effect on aggregate valuation results

income treatment effects in contingent valuation the case of the swedish predator policy this paper provides case study evidence on two relevant issues in estimating the relationship between wtp and income using contingent valuation 1 the choice of income measure and 2 the modelling choice addressing these issues a sensitivity analysis is performed on a dataset concerning implementation of the swedish predator policy the results show that the estimated income elasticity of wtp varies between 0 12 and 0 40 for the models estimated the main conclusion drawn from the analysis is that controlling for the number of adults in the household is important for finding a significant income effect when the household income measure is used besides this finding the empirical analysis finds little support for the hypothesis that the choice of income measure and modelling assumptions significantly influence the overall model fit

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

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

enhanced models and improved solution for competitive biofuel supply chain design under land use constraints abstract this paper studies the effect of government regulation on farmland use to balance food and energy production in a competitive biofuel supply chain design framework we propose a stackelberg nash game model with a direct land use constraint that captures farmland food and fuel market equilibrium to provide farmers with incentives to comply with the land use regulation we implement the land use constraint through a cap and trade mechanism which we show attains equivalent land use patterns we further prove the existence of optimal solutions of the two equivalent discretely constrained mathematical program with equilibrium constraints dc mpec models two adaptive relax and tighten schemes integrality and lagrangian duality based relaxation are proposed to handle the binary variables in a mixed integer formulation of the models the proposed methodology is tested in a case study for the state of illinois the computational results demonstrate the superiority of our customized algorithms to publicly available solvers for solving problems with realistic sizes finally the efficiency of the cap and trade mechanism is demonstrated through comparisons of scenarios with and without regulation as well as a sensitivity analysis on the cap and trade level the cap and trade policy is found to effectively reduce biomass farmland use and profits of the biofuel industry it may have different impacts on social welfare depending on problem settings and market parameters cap and trade levels also affect system behavior and thus should be carefully selected

split sample tests of no opinion responses in an attribute based choice model researchers using questionnaires to elicit preferences must decide whether to include response options that allow respondents to express no opinion using a split sample design we explore the implications of alternative answer formats including and not including no opinion responses in an attribute based choice experiment the results indicate that using multiple no opinion responses may enable researchers to differentiate between respondents who choose no opinion options due to satisficing and those expressing utility indifference existing literature suggests no opinion responses may be treated as no but our results show treating no opinion responses as no can yield substantially disparate preference estimates

no choice options within a nested logit model one model is insufficient we examine the impact of providing a no choice option in attribute based valuation experiments the aim of the experiment was to assess monetary values of cockle fishery management practices in the dutch wadden sea for different stakeholder groups namely dutch citizens local residents and tourists the current policy debate about the management of the wadden sea stresses the fact that individual preferences with respect to cockle fishery differ the aim of this article is to analyse the individual preferences in a objective way special attention is given to the influence of including a no choice option which is analysed using a nested logit model we test whether the full set of options can be considered as close substitutes the estimation results show that the influence of including the no choice option differs among the stakeholders considered

a game theory framework for cooperative management of refillable and disposable bottle lifecycles abstract firms engaged in industrial ecology hope to reduce environmental impacts and costs improve resource efficiency and create symbiotic relationships that reduce transaction costs and enhance information flow however current lca tools do not explain firms incentives to implement the principles of industrial ecology or how an individual or firm can affect the products and processes at other firms game theory on the other hand allows investigation of the willingness of producers and consumers to seek strategies that promote the common interest of the system while not harming their own interests this paper applies game theory to the lifecycle of bottle packaging and presents a framework for analysis of the choice between refillable and disposable bottles although refillable bottles may be more cost effective in the long run bottlers only have incentive to use refillable bottles when they are sure that consumer return rates will be reasonably high it has been found that consumers who keep or dispose of refillable bottles or respond to deposit refund return incentives by reducing their demand may drive costs up and encourage adoption of disposables a simple model is provided which finds the optimal bottler strategy as a function of the bottler s expectations for consumer cooperation

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

willingness to pay for antihypertensive therapy further results a measurement experiment regarding willingness to pay for antihypertensive therapy is reported a new type of binary willingness to pay question is used that allows for different degrees of certainty with respect to the responses mean willingness to pay is derived from a simple expected utility model and estimated using maximum likelihood methods the estimated parameters are highly significant with predicted signs and imply a mean willingness to pay of about sek 800 130 per month the explanatory power of the equation that only includes certain yes no responses is as expected much higher than that of the equation where only uncertain responses are included

empirical assessment of the impact of auditor quality on the valuation of new issues abstract this paper reports empirical tests of an hypothesized positive relation between audit quality and firm specific risk that is predicted by datar feltham and hughes 1991 theoretical analysis of auditor choice when firms go public three types of proxies for ex ante firm specific risk are used to test this relation regression coefficients that theory relates to the firm specific risk ex ante proxies available from prospecti and ex post variances in returns results from the first are moderately consistent with our hypothesis while those from the latter two are either mixed or contrary

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