the role of reference prices in experimental auctions abstract we examine the role of reference prices field prices in willingness to pay studies involving experimental auctions using a 2nd price vickrey auction we find that provision of reference prices increases bid values

an experimental investigation of the hahn noll revenue neutral auction for emissions licenses abstract this paper reports on three series of laboratory experiments designed to test the performance of the hahn noll revenue neutral auction rna an alternative institution a no rebate uniform price auction upa is also examined as a benchmark in these experiments the rna markets were little different from upa markets in terms of either prices or market efficiencies the two institutions did differ in terms of the distribution of the gains from exchange and of the propensity of bidders to engage in a certain type of overbidding

green market expansion by reducing information asymmetries evidence for labeled organic food products abstract we investigate how the provision of objective information about the environmental and health impact of organic labels by policy makers can influence the willingness to pay of consumers for labeled organic apples in flanders belgium using a stated choice experiment we initially find that flemish consumers are willing to pay a positive price premium of some 33 eurocent per kilogram for labeled organic apples after the provision of information on the actual environmental and health effects of organic apple production this price premium becomes even more pronounced and increases to 57 eurocent per kilogram using a conditional logit model with covariates and a mixed logit model we find evidence of preference heterogeneity also the effect of information provision is more pronounced for certain groups of consumers such as non vegetarians infrequent buyers of organic products and members of a nature protection organization as such this paper illustrates that there is a role for policy makers and csr producers in providing more accurate and reliable information about socially responsible production processes moreover it is important to take the observed preference heterogeneity into account and tailor policies to specific consumer groups

loss aversion and individual characteristics many studies have shown that loss aversion affects the valuation of non market goods using stated choice data this paper presents an empirical investigation of how individual level loss aversion varies with observable personal characteristics and with the choice context we investigate loss aversion with respect to travel time and money and find significant loss aversion in both dimensions the degree of loss aversion in the time dimension is larger than in the money dimension and depends on age and education subjects tend to be more loss averse when the reference is well established

valuation in the lab experimental methods have proven useful to explore the power and limits to nonmarket valuation through stated preference methods we now understand better how people learn about and react to the incentives institutions and information created by surveys this paper briefly reviews topics in experimental valuation including ex ante bias corrections ex post bias calibration and examining the circumstances that strengthen or weaken the economist s presumption of rational valuation

value learning and the willingness to accept willingness to pay disparity the assumption that individual preferences are rational and consistent with standard economic theory is often appropriate but may be optimistic if consumers are uncertain about either their preferences or how the market operates both sources of uncertainty may present themselves in lab experiments exploring the well known disparity between individuals willingness to accept and willingness to pay this paper explores the role of value uncertainty in the observed disparity and finds that providing subjects with a value learning opportunity can reduce the value disparity to insignificance

preference anomalies preference elicitation and the discovered preference hypothesis there is wide ranging evidence much of it deriving from economics experiments of anomalies in behaviour that challenge standard preference theories this paper explores the implications of these anomalies for preference elicitation methods because methods that are used to inform public policy such as contingent valuation are based on standard preference theories their validity may be called into question by the anomaly data however on a new interpretation these anomalies do not contradict standard theory but are errors in stated preference that can be expected to disappear as people become more experienced in relevant decision environments we explore the evidence for this interpretation and what implications follow for preference elicitation methodology

information characteristics and errors in expectations experimental evidence we design an experiment to test the hypothesis that in violation of bayes rule some people respond more forcefully to the strength of information than to its weight we provide incentives to motivate effort use naturally occurring information and control for risk attitude we find that the strength weight bias affects expectations but that its magnitude is significantly lower than originally reported controls for non linear utility further reduce the bias our results suggest that incentive compatibility and controls for risk attitude considerably affect inferences on errors in expectations

are consumers concerned about palm oil evidence from a lab experiment abstract a lab experiment evaluates the consumers willingness to pay wtp for food products made with and without palm oil palm oil production induces environmental damages and its consumption presents a health risk however the production of alternative oils raises land use issues in the experiment successive messages emphasizing the characteristics of palm oil and palm oil free products are delivered to participants information has a significant influence on wtp when it underlines the negative impact of the related product this effect is stronger for the palm oil product than for the palm oil free product the experiment also compares the welfare effects of two regulatory instruments namely a consumer information campaign versus a per unit tax because of the respective attributes of both palm oil and palm oil free products the information campaign improves welfare with a much larger impact than the tax

extortion in the laboratory in a laboratory experiment we study a finitely repeated game t 15 under complete information in each round p demands tribute cash transfer from a a complies or refuses and after refusals p may punish a in equilibrium payoff maximization p does not punish and a refuses any positive demand in the experiment p punishes increasingly often and increasingly severely as she gains experience most as comply with p s demands the observations are compatible with linear spite in a finite mixture model the types of p and a in the subject pool are characterized an a that is resistant to extortion declines all demands is very rare and hence the threat of punishment in general is effective but all as either ignore actual punishment or react negatively to it they accept to pay tribute but they are resistant to piecemeal expropriation

testing preference formation in learning design contingent valuation using advance information and repetitive treatments policymakers have largely replaced single bounded discrete choice valuation by the more statistically efficient repetitive method double bounded discrete choice and discrete choice experiments repetitive valuation permits classification into rational and irrational preferences 1 a priori well formed 2 consistent nonarbitrary values discovered through repetition and experience 3 consistent but arbitrary values as shaped by preceding bid level and 4 inconsistent and arbitrary values policy valuations should demonstrate behaviorally rational preferences we outline novel methods for testing this in double bounded discrete choice experiments applied to renewable energy premiums in chile

market experience eliminates some anomalies and creates new ones we report two experiments which investigate whether experience of decision making in repeated markets purges behaviour of preference reversals we investigate two behavioural mechanisms that may be shaping bids in repeated auctions a tendency to adjust bids towards previously observed market prices and a tendency to reduce bids following bad market outcomes we find little support for the former but strong support for the latter also whilst just enough market exposure eliminates the typical preference reversal phenomenon continued exposure fosters the mirror image anomaly therefore although market experience shapes behaviour in our experiments it does not generally promote consistency with standard preference theory

price information and bidding behavior in repeated second price auctions examining panel data on bidding behavior in over forty second price auction markets with repeated trials we observe that i posted prices influence the behavior of the median naive bidder ii posted prices do not affect the behavior of the median experienced bidder or the bidder for familiar goods and iii anticipated strategic behavior wanes after two trials the results suggest that while affiliation might exist in auctions for new goods the repeated trial design with nonprice information removes the correlation of values and provides the experience that bidders need to understand the market mechanism

nonparametric estimates of the components of productivity and profitability change in u s agriculture recent theoretical advances in total factor productivity tfp measurement mean that tfp indexes can now be exhaustively decomposed into unambiguous measures of technical change and efficiency change to date all applications of this new methodology have involved decomposing indexes that have poor theoretical properties this article shows how the methodology can be used to decompose a new tfp index that satisfies all economically relevant axioms from index theory the application is to state level data from 1960 to 2004 in most states the main drivers of agricultural tfp change are found to have been technical change and scale and mix efficiency change

a rule of one a rule ofone one rational person is enough to make a market one irrational person is enough to break a game let me explain the power of the market as an exchange institution rests in its ability to move resources from lowto highvalued uses the market works if one person is rational enough to look for arbitrage opportunities among the other irrational players he buys low and sells high the market collects and disseminates this information such that others

an experimental investigation of entry cost effects in sealed bid dollar auctions abstract we experimentally study the effect of entry costs on bidding and entry behavior in common value auctions we find with entry costs players bid lower in first price and higher in second price auctions compared to no entry fee auctions

auctions with a buy price the case of reference dependent preferences abstract in an auction with a buy price the seller provides bidders with an option to end the auction early by accepting a transaction at a posted price this paper develops a model of an auction with a buy price in which bidders use the auction s reserve price and buy price to formulate a reference price the model both explains why a revenue maximizing seller would want to augment her auction with a buy price and demonstrates that the seller sets a higher reserve price when she can affect the bidders reference price through the auction s reserve price and buy price than when she can affect the bidders reference price through the auction s reserve price only the comparative statics properties of bidding behavior are in sharp contrast to equilibrium behavior in other models where the existence and size of the auction s buy price have no effect on bidding behavior

posted prices and bid affiliation evidence from experimental auctions in most experimental auctions researchers ask participants to bid on the same item in multiple po tentially binding rounds posting the price submitted by the top bidder or bidders after each of those rounds if bids submitted in later rounds are affiliated with posted prices from earlier rounds this practice could result in biased value estimates in this article we discuss the results of an experiment designed explicitly to test whether posted prices affect bidding behavior we find that for familiar items high posted prices lead to increased bids in subsequent rounds our results have implications for researchers conducting experimental auctions article advances the literature in several im portant ways first we report the design and results of the only study designed specifically to control for the effects of posted prices on bids in subsequent rounds we do this with the aid of confederate bidders who were instructed to bid within a certain narrow range thus we have multiple treatments that vary only by the presence or absence of confederate bidders al lowing for what we believe to be the cleanest possible test of the effect of posted prices on bidding behavior in later rounds while list and shogren 1999 model bids in round t as a function of the posted price in round t 1 through our use of confederate bidders to con trol posted prices we are able to test whether exposure to high posted prices has an effect that accumulates over the course of multiple rounds leading to a gradual increase in mean bids second our methods of analysis are more complete than previous work examining bid af filiation we not only compare summary statis tics from early and late rounds but we also use panel data analysis to understand how in dividual participants bids are affected by the presence of confederate bidders focusing on individuals rather than summary statistics al lows us to understand how individual specific characteristics influence affiliation and it also allows us to better understand the role of out liers

do anomalies disappear in repeated markets there is some evidence that as individuals participate in repeated markets anomalies tend to disappear one interpretation is that individuals particularly marginal traders are learning to act on underlying preferences which satisfy standard assumptions an alternative interpretation the shaping hypothesis is that individuals preferences are adjusting in response to cues given by market prices the paper reports an experiment designed to discriminate between these hypotheses with particular reference to the disparity between willingness to pay and willingness to accept

decomposition of productivity growth using distance functions the case of dairy farms in three european countries within an output distance function framework the total factor productivity growth index is decomposed into four components technical change technical and allocative efficiency and scale component we estimate stochastic translog output distance functions using panel data from dairy farms over the period 1991 94 for three european countries germany the netherlands and poland results indicate that the change in the productivity growth index in germany 6 and poland 5 are mainly dictated by the technical change component in contrast the productivity growth index in the netherlands 3 is influenced by allocative efficiency components

collective rent dissipation the theory of rent seeking was initiated by tullock 1967 1980 followed by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 and more recently extended in various directions by allard 1988 appelbaum and katz 1986a b c gradstein and nitzan 1989 hillman and katz 1984 1987 hillman and samet 1987 hillman and riley 1989 katz et al 1990 long and vousden 1987 ursprung 1990 and varian 1989 the purpose of this paper is to extend this theory by introducing the possibility of collective group rent seeking with voluntary individual decisions regarding their extent of participation in the collective rent seeking efforts

the opportunity criterion consumer sovereignty without the assumption of coherent preferences this paper proposes a formulation of consumer sovereignty for use in normative economics which does not presuppose individuals preferences to be coherent the fundamental intuition that opportunity and responsibility have moral value is formalised as a responsibility criterion for assessing opportunities in an economic system a model of an exchange economy is presented in which rational arbitrageurs compete to make profits by trading with non rational consumers in equilibrium this economy satisfies the responsibility criterion one interpretation of this result is that in a competitive environment the overall effects of money pumps are benign even if individuals preferences are persistently incoherent

market simulation and the provision of public goods a non paternalistic response to anomalies in environmental evaluation most normative economics assumes that individuals have coherent preferences this paper responds to growing evidence of failures of this assumption particularly in the context of stated preference methods widely used in environmental policy analysis it proposes a non paternalistic concept of consumer sovereignty that does not assume preference coherence is satisfied by competitive markets and can be applied to the provision of public goods a key implication is that decisions should reflect valuations revealed at the point of consumption such valuations which can be inferred from hedonic prices may be less susceptible to willingness to accept wta willingness to pay wtp disparities than those elicited by stated preference methods

risk averse rent seeking with shared rents this paper presents a nash equilibrium model of rent seeking behavior in which risk averse players expend resources to obtain a share of a rent as for example in contests for import quota licences results are obtained relating the equilibrium level of lobbying effort by each player to the value of the rent in particular reduced individual lobbying effort is associated with higher rents contested if players are sufficiently risk averse the question of whether the value of rents is a good measure of the resource cost of rent seeking is also considered a simple approximation involving risk and risk aversion parameters is derived for the proportion of rents dissipated in long run equilibrium risk and risk aversion are seen to reduce the rent dissipation ratio below unity copyright 1987 by royal economic society

buyer exuberance and price premium it has been demonstrated that the real estate market disciplines irrational price premiums however the persistence of price premiums begs the question of what causes price premiums in the first place this paper seeks to examine two explanations for price premiums the conventional information asymmetry explanation and the buyer exuberance explanation as motivated by behavioural studies the results show that information asymmetry explains price premiums and this finding is robust across two sub hypotheses tested namely information differences arising from market familiarity and product characteristics in addition we find that price premiums are also caused by buyer exuberance specifically exuberance arising from representativeness purchasing power and anchoring effects

field experiments on the effects of reserve prices in auctions more magic on the internet i present experimental evidence on the effects of minimum bids in first price sealed bid auctions the auction experiments manipulated the minimum bids in a preexisting market on the internet for collectible trading cards from the game magic the gathering i examine a number of outcomes including the number of participating bidders the probability of sale the levels of individual bids and the auctioneer s revenues the benchmark theoretical model is one with symmetric risk neutral bidders with independent private values the results verify a number of the predictions concerning equilibrium bidding many bidders behave strategically anticipating the effects of the reserve price on others bids

malmquist indices of productivity growth during the deregulation of norwegian banking 1980 89 productivity growth during the deregulation of the norwegian banking industry is studied within the framework of data envelopment analysis which explicitly allows for multiple outputs introducing malmquist indices for productivity growth total growth can be decomposed into frontier growth and change in each bank s distance to the frontier both the total growth index and its components can be consistently chained over time we find productivity regress at the average bank prior to the deregulation but rapid growth when deregulation took place deregulation also led to less dispersion of productivity levels within the industry

comparing open ended choice experiments and experimental auctions an application to golden rice we use two experimental valuation methods to estimate consumer demand for genetically modified golden rice the first is an open ended choice experiment oece where participants name the quantities of golden rice and conventional rice demanded at each of several price combinations one of which will be randomly chosen as binding this allows us to estimate market demand by aggregating demand across participants this estimate of market demand also allows us to estimate own price elasticity and consumer surplus for golden rice comparing willingness to pay wtp estimates from the oece with those from a uniform price auction we find that oece wtp estimates exhibit less affiliation across rounds and the effects of positive and negative information under the oece are more consistent with prior expectations and existing studies we also find that while auction wtp estimates more than double across five rounds oece wtp estimates are stable across rounds and are always roughly equal to those from the final auction round

super efficiency dea in the presence of infeasibility it is well known that super efficiency data envelopment analysis dea approach can be infeasible under the condition of variable returns to scale vrs by extending of the work of chen 2005 the current study develops a two stage process for calculating super efficiency scores regardless whether the standard vrs super efficiency mode is feasible or not the proposed approach examines whether the standard vrs super efficiency dea model is infeasible when the model is feasible our approach yields super efficiency scores that are identical to those arising from the original model for efficient dmus that are infeasible under the super efficiency model our approach yields super efficiency scores that characterize input savings and or output surpluses the current study also shows that infeasibility may imply that an efficient dmu does not exhibit super efficiency in inputs or outputs when infeasibility occurs it can be necessary that i both inputs and outputs be decreased to reach the frontier formed by the remaining dmus under the input orientation and ii both inputs and outputs be increased to reach the frontier formed by the remaining dmus under the output orientation the newly developed approach is illustrated with numerical examples

choice experiments are not conducted in a vacuum the effects of external price information on choice behavior abstract consumers carry a wealth of external knowledge and experience into a study that may affect choices in even the most well crafted experiment we derive a conceptual model showing how the level and variability of price perceptions outside the task at hand might affect choice behavior and we conduct an experiment to test the model by manipulating information provided to respondents in a way to alter the outside the experiment perceptions mixed logit error component models show that reference dependent models best describe the choice data and we find that consumer choice is significantly affected by the experiment manipulations the predictions of the model are borne out in the data as expected price sensitivity is generally higher for price changes above a price reference point than below also as predicted exogenously increasing external reference prices and exogenously reducing the variability in references prices both serve to increase the probability of making a purchase and reduce the probability of choosing none these results have important implications for the design and practice of choice experiments as they show that consumer choice is affected by perceptions of the level and variability of prices outside the experiment more generally the results highlight the need to understand the formation and distribution of reference prices when predicting consumer choice

total factor productivity growth in agriculture a malmquist index analysis of 93 countries 1980 2000 in this paper we examine levels and trends in agricultural output and productivity in 93 developed and developing countries that account for a major portion of the world population and agricultural output we make use of data drawn from the food and agriculture organization of the united nations and our study covers the period 1980 2000 due to the non availability of reliable input price data the study uses data envelopment analysis dea to derive malmquist productivity indexes the study examines trends in agricultural productivity over the period issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity in agriculture are examined within a global framework the paper also derives the shadow prices and value shares that are implicit in the dea based malmquist productivity indices and examines the plausibility of their levels and trends over the study period

coping with preference anomalies in cost benefit analysis a market simulation approach this paper proposes a methodological strategy for cost benefit analysis cba which does not require the assumption that individuals preferences satisfy standard coherence conditions and so renders cba immune to the problems generated by preference anomalies the proposal treats cba as an exercise in market simulation based on the measurement of surplus anomalies occur when surplus measurements vary according to the hypothetical payment mechanism used in such cases the mechanism that is the closest market analogue should be used this approach is used to resolve problems associated with some familiar anomalies including inconsistencies between citizen and consumer valuations and endowment effects

the empirical measurement of rent seeking costs this survey focuses on the efforts carried out mainly by public choice scholars to measure the social cost of rent seeking the concept introduced by gordon tullock in 1967 and coined by anne krueger in 1974 is well known and accepted by the profession but its empirical measurement has fallen behind with respect to its theoretical formulation an often criticized lack in the literature although there are good general surveys none has specifically focused on reviewing the empirical efforts made to measure the phenomenon the purpose of this paper is to provide such a survey it could be said that the rent seeking concept has been fully integrated into economic jargon it is commonly used when some agent seeks to obtain an artificial transfer usually from government and covers all the actions efforts or expenses that the agent has to carry out to obtain the prize the key issue however is the possible social waste that arises in these situations the empirical efforts to measure such waste constitute the main purpose of this survey the concept of rent seeking was introduced by tullock 1967 although the term was first coined by krueger 1974 in a paper not related to the former in a recent paper tullock himself wrote of the history of the concept and the intellectual context within which it arose tullock 2003 starting with the pioneering work by harberger 1954 several studies were conducted during the 1950s in which the calculation of the social cost of monopolies and tariffs always gave the result of very modest figures the first response to these results was made by leibenstein 1966 and his x efficiency which refers to a hypothetical loss in efficiency due to the absence of competition shortly after leibenstein s paper appeared tullock argued that the deadweight costs of monopoly and tariffs understate the true social cost because the expenditures made to capture related rents have to be included so rectangles as well as harberger s triangles have to be included in the calculations let us see this argument once more figure 1 depicts the iconic tullock graphic analysis of rent seeking it represents the demand schedule d for a monopolized good where pm is the monopoly

changes in budgetary allocations and international comparisons of the social cost of rent seeking a critical note the katz rosenberg measure of rent dissipation across countries fails to encompass the consequences of different political systems wherein allocations are made observations about fiscal federal structures and the particular political structures of different countries affect political discretion in allocating government transfers owing both to the absence of these considerations which are indeed self evident and some other considerations regarding the measure the cross country rankings that katz and rosenberg present are meaningless at best and at worst misleading

do markets reveal preferences or shape them we contrast the proposition that markets reveal independently existing preferences with the alternative possibility that they may help to shape them using demand revealing experimental market institutions we separate the shaping effects of price cues from the effects of market discipline we find that individual valuations and prevailing prices are systematically affected by both exogenous manipulations of price expectations and endogenous but divergent price feedback these effects persist to varying degrees in spite of further market experience in some circumstances market experience may actually consolidate them we discuss possible explanations for these effects of uninformative price cues on revealed preferences

rent seeking for pure public goods in this paper we present a formal analysis of rent seeking for public goods by two or more groups with different numbers of individuals we begin by considering equally wealthy groups under risk neutrality a case which constitutes our basic model several surprising and interesting results emerge from the analysis of this basic case the problem is then extended to deal with a groups with different wealth levels and b risk aversion this last extension brings about a further crop of interesting and useful results

the impact of experience on risk taking overconfidence and herding of fund managers complementary survey evidence abstract empirical research has shown that inexperienced fund managers yield significantly higher returns than their more experienced colleagues if the portfolios of inexperienced are not more risky this result would contradict the hypothesis of market efficiency therefore it is an important question whether inexperienced fund managers tend to taker higher risks higher risk taking may be explained by a higher degree of overconfidence less herding behavior or a lower degree of risk aversion since the results concerning the relationship between experience and risk taking in previous studies are rather contradictory we provide complementary survey evidence of 117 german fund managers which can improve our understanding in this field in line with the results of previous studies we find that herding is decreasing with experience while the evidence concerning risk taking and overconfidence is mixed nevertheless our results provide some support for the hypothesis that inexperienced managers do indeed take higher risks

risk averse rent seekers and the social cost of monopoly power there is now quite general recognition that the social cost of monopoly power encompasses the resources expended by individuals seeking to become the beneficiaries of monopoly rents however since the activity of rent seeking is generally not observable direct estimates of resources expended in quests to acquire monopoly power are usually impossible to come by 1 as a consequence the indirect approach of taking the observed value of monopoly rents as indicative of the unobserved value of the resources expended in rent seeking is quite generally adopted in approaches to evaluation of the social cost of such activity

scientific numerology preference anomalies and environmental policymaking recently an abundance of experimental evidence has been gathered that is consonant with the notion that individual preferences are inconsistent and unstable these empirical results potentially undermine the theoretical foundation of welfare economics as the degree of preference lability claimed suggests that perhaps no optimization principles underlie even the most straightforward of choices yet policymakers in the environmental arena continue to prescribe policies based on economics based methods that are constructed on the very principles that have been directly refuted are policymakers creatures of habit that move at glacial speed or is there something deeper behind their inertness in this study i explore this issue within the u s context and argue that there is some rationality behind current public policy decisionmaking i then explore whether the empirical evidence supports the view that policymakers should take preference anomalies seriously as a case study i focus on some of my recent findings on preference inconsistencies in the marketplace

rent seeking with non identical sharing rules the primary object of this paper is to examine the role of differential sharing rules within a collective rent seeking setting on the possible non existence of nash equilibrium focusing on groups that distribute part of the rent equally among their members and the residual according to relative effort we show that in rent seeking societies applying the two polar sharing rules equilibrium never exists in the general case where groups apply different but not necessarily the polar sharing rules we study the relationship between group variability in distributing rents and the problem of non existence of equilibrium in the rent seeking game

developments in non expected utility theory the hunt for a descriptive theory of choice under risk this article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways considerable research effort has now been devoted to the project of developing a superior descriptive model following an overview of non expected utility theories which distinguishes between conventional and non conventional approaches the paper seeks to assess these alternative models in terms of empirical success using laboratory and field data and theoretical usefulness the closing sections reflect on some new directions emerging in this literature

experimental evidence on varying uncertainty and skewness in laboratory double auction markets abstract we investigate the influence of skewness in asset fundamentals on asset prices under different states of uncertainty in double auction markets three different types of assets are considered risky assets ambiguous assets and assets where the fundamental value distribution can be learned by repeated sampling of realizations we show that market prices for skewed assets initially differ from those of non skewed assets for risky as well as for ambiguous assets because of learning the difference in market prices mostly disappears towards the end of trading when fundamentals are learned by experience sampling prices of all assets irrespective of skewness are very efficient from the beginning thus when probabilities are not described but experienced subjects are better able to estimate the fundamental value of an asset

food choice health information and functional ingredients an experimental auction employing bread abstract in this paper we present the results of an experimental auction conducted to examine the influence of health and nutritional information on food choice and in particular estimate consumer willingness to pay wtp for bread that contains functional ingredients employing a sandwich we find that consumers are wtp more for a whole grain and whole grain granary bread sandwich than other bread types including white bread that contains a functional ingredient we also find that consumers react positively to the provision of nutritional and health benefit information but that this effect occurs regardless of whether we supply specific or non specific health benefit information we discuss information provision and health policy implications that emerge from our analysis for bread products in the sandwich market

the measurability of budget related rent seeking it has been suggested that the extent of rent seeking expenditures arising from attempts to influence budget allocations should be estimated by the absolute magnitude of the observed changes in allocation instead we argue that it is the extent of theex ante prospective changes that determine the level of rent seeking and that in the presence of countervailing activity these may be quite unrelated to the ex post observed values we further argue that the traditional rent seeking model of competition for a pre specified rent is inappropriate in this context

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

causes and consequences of lexicographic choices in stated choice studies abstract stated choice sc methods and other choice experiments are now becoming increasingly popular for the valuation of environmental goods this paper shows that lexicographic choices lcs in an sc task or other types of choice experiments do not imply that the respondent has lexicographic preferences lcs may be a result of i study designs where differences between the alternatives are too great and ii simplification of the choice task a traditional approach that investigates motives for lexicographic choices mainly as a result of lexicographic preferences may therefore fail to reveal the whole motive range study designs that cause lcs whether such choices actually are based on non compensatory choices i e genuine lexicographic preferences or strategic behaviour or compensatory choices provide less information about preferences however providing they are not totally dominant such choices are not normally a serious modeling problem it is argued that simplification is a consequence of respondents differing abilities to choose such lcs contribute to the larger variances of sc data relative to less cognitively demanding valuation methods and might therefore have a significant impact on the implied valuation of non market goods if they are not handled in the analysis in data collection we should use survey designs that collect more signals and less noise and in data analysis we should use models that can separate signals from noise however there is obviously a limit to the amount of noise which can be separated from signals in a model and therefore how much noise such models can tolerate and still produce useful valuation estimates for the goods under consideration for further investigation of such limits a direct test procedure that can investigate whether each respondent has completed the task in a compensatory manner like the one presented in the current study is valuable

rent seeking for budgetary allocation preliminary results for 20 countries in this paper we present quantitative measures of the proneness of different countries to respond to pressure groups in determining the composition of their spending these in turn help us to derive simple measures of the rent seeking done in relation to the government s spending pie

the cross price effect on willingness to pay estimates in open ended contingent valuation abstract previous literature has shown that potential buyers use a reference price or product to form their opinion about the value of a new product therefore the pricing decision is an interactive process we investigate the two generalizations of the cross price effect the neighborhood price effect and the asymmetric price effect on consumer willingness to pay wtp for multiple similar products in an open ended contingent valuation context results show that the cross price effect on wtp is prominent with the neighborhood price effect holding in contingent valuation no conclusions are reached about the asymmetric price effect

productivity technical efficiency and technological change in french agriculture during 2002 2015 a fare primont index decomposition using group frontiers and meta frontier the objective of the article is to assess productivity change in french agriculture during 2002 2015 namely total factor productivity tfp change and its components technological change and ef