design and analysis of simulated consumer choice or allocation experiments an approach based on aggregate data the authors integrate concepts in conjoint analysis and discrete choice theory in econometrics to develop a new approach to the design and analysis of controlled consumer choice or resource allocat

modelling heterogeneity in response behaviour towards a sequence of discrete choice questions a probabilistic decision process model there is a growing body of evidence in the non market valuation literature suggesting that responses to a sequence of discrete choice questions tend to violate the assumptions typically made by analysts regarding independence of responses and stability of preferences decision processes or heuristics such as value learning and strategic misrepresentation have been offered as explanations for these results while a few studies have tested these heuristics as competing hypotheses none has investigated the possibility that each explains the response behaviour of a subgroup of the population in this paper we make a contribution towards addressing this research gap by presenting a probabilistic decision process model designed to estimate the proportion of respondents employing defined heuristics we demonstrate the model on binary and multinomial choice data sources and find three distinct types of response behaviour the results suggest that accounting for heterogeneity in response behaviour may be a better way forward than attempting to identify a single heuristic to explain the behaviour of all respondents

an ideal point probabilistic choice model for heterogeneous preferences this paper presents a new ideal point probabilistic choice model unlike the model suggested by cooper and nakanishi cooper l g m nakanishi 1983 two logit models for external analysis of preferences psychometrika48 4 607 619 which attempts to capture choices via a single ideal point the proposed model though based on aggregate data allows for heterogeneity in preferences by estimating a distribution of ideal points the model accounts for substitutability among choice alternatives and alleviates one of the major sources for the violation of the independence from irrelevant alternatives property it is demonstrated that the final form of the model is a multinomial probit with a covariance matrix that depends on the relative position of the choice alternatives an empirical application is provided and the resulting parameters are compared to the distributions of ideal points and attribute weights obtained via linmap at the individual level and via both the logit and probit versions of the model proposed by cooper and nakanishi at the aggregate level

monetary policy and inventory investment in greek manufacturing industry the paper reports an attempt to estimate the role of greek monetary policy in inventory investment in manufacturing interest and inflation rate expectations exercise a significant influence expected fluctations in the exchange rate for the first time examined are of major importance especially for stocks of raw materials which are mostly imported being strongly affected by monetary variables inventory investment can play a major role as a transmission channel of monetary policy changes to the greek economy

electric and plug in hybrid vehicle demand lessons for an emerging market understanding demand in the new plug in hybrid electric vehicle phev market is critical to designing more effective adoption policies we use stated preference data from an innovative choice experiment to estimate demand for phevs relative to battery electric vehicles bevs and to explore heterogeneity in demand for these vehicles we find the gap between willingness to pay for phevs and their price premium over conventional vehicles is on the order of current subsidies while that of bevs is an order of magnitude larger we use a latent class model to show phevs draw a different consumer segment into the market jel q5 r41

inventories and interest rates a critique of the buffer stock model economists generally test for the effect of interest rates on inventories by including some measure of the real interest rate in a standard flexible accelerator buffer stock model this paper presentsseveral reasons for concluding that this approach is incorrect and demonstrates how interest rate effects can be introduced into decisionrules derived under the assumption of optimizing behavior by firms decision rules for finished good inventories output and price are estimated using monthly observations on the food and kindred product industry the results generally conform to the predictions of the theory copyright 1986 by american economic association

achieving representativeness of the observable component of the indirect utility function in logit choice models an empirical revelation although probabilistic discrete choice models such as multinomial logit are widely used little consideration has been given to the appropriateness of the assumption of a representative utility function the use of socioeconomic variables as proxies for unobserved attributes directly influencing choice when a single cross section of data is used has not been adequately tested in this paper experimental design enables us to obtain repeated observations on each individual and to investigate the extent to which taste variation in a population can be explained by socioeconomic differences in the population we show empirically that individual specific coefficients result in a better model for product positioning but that a group model is preferable for predicting overall market share because it produces results as good as the individual specific models at a substantially lower cost a

off season tourists and the cultural offer of a mass tourism destination the case of rimini abstract this paper assesses the potential implications on off season tourism of enhancing the cultural offer of rimini a popular italian seaside holiday destination hosting about 12 million overnight stays per year since more than 9 million of these stays are concentrated in the summer season in the last 20 years rimini has been undergoing a policy of seasonality smoothing which mainly pivots around business and cultural tourism this assessment has been carried out through discrete choice experiments submitted to a sample of about 800 tourists who visited rimini outside the summer months since tourism can be viewed as a composite good which overall utility depends on how the component characteristics are arranged the choice experiments allow to disentangle the importance and the willingness to pay of tourists for different attributes of the holiday the choice model incorporates a number of possible changes to actual tourism features which are also the subject of public debate including them in hypothetical alternative holiday packages the conditional logit analysis of the choice experiments can highlight any synergy or trade off between cultural and business tourism results suggest that business and leisure tourists share many features related to the use of the territory while there are important trade offs between these two groups and cultural tourists since business tourists have a higher willingness to extend their stay a softer budget and their demand is also complementary to the demand of summer tourists brau scorcu vici 2009 from the destination point of view investing in this market segment would be the best option although a second best however cultural tourists share with the local population of rimini many aspects of the demand of territory figini castellani vici 2009 hence cultural tourism can play a fundamental role in the intermediate season as a tool for smoothing seasonality to diversify investments and to give value to the city s cultural heritage

household biomass energy choice and its policy implications on improving rural livelihoods in sichuan china abstract it is widely known that a switch from traditional biomass energy to modern clean safe and efficient energy could improve local rural livelihoods by enhancing the access to high quality energy and reducing the negative impacts of traditional biomass energy on health environment and living standards hence in this paper we used alternative specific conditional logit model asclm to examine the rural household energy choice behaviors in sichuan province of china from the perspective of revealed and stated preferences the results show that the fuel switching in our study region is not a simple unidirectional process from traditional biomass energy to modern fuels as incomes improve household energy choice behaviors could be not only affected by energy specific characteristics such as fuel price smoky level and safety risk but also influenced by household specific factors such as income level age and educational level of the decision maker household demographic structure number of people frequently eating at home distance to the nearest biomass collecting spot and household location suggesting that government should attach more importance to simultaneously improve energy quality control energy price and enhance household socio economic status

existence and determination of competitive equilibrium in unit commitment power pool auctions price setting and scheduling alternatives the existence determination and effects of competitive market equilibrium for unit commitment power pool auctions are investigated in this paper when an equilibrium does not exist under specific situations conflictive multiple optimal primal solutions may exist when an equilibrium exists multiple primal solutions do not represent conflicts of interest the existence or nonexistence of competitive equilibrium can be determined if the dual problem is solved to optimality if equilibrium does not exist there is excess supply at the optimal dual solution which can be used to define priority orders and price setting alternatives to determine a final schedule and avoid the conflicts of interest and revenue deficiency under disequilibrium the optimal dual variables are not market clearing prices a nonuniform pricing rule that avoids the flaws and complications of other pricing rules such as maximum average cost and price minimization auctions is proposed in the paper the proposed scheduling and price setting alternatives show that unit commitment models can be used in a market environment

an oligopolistic model of an integrated market for energy and spinning reserve in this paper a model for oligopolistic competition in electricity markets is presented most previous proposed models have been static and focused only on the energy market incentives for strategic behavior in contrast in this paper a multiperiod market for energy and spinning reserve sr is considered by including such factors the competition among participants is modeled with more realism competition in the energy market is modeled by means of conjectured supply functions while conjectured reserve price response functions are used to consider the generators ability to alter the sr prices the resulting equilibrium problem is modeled in terms of complementarity conditions based upon a complementarity model the opportunity cost between the energy and sr markets is derived for oligopolistic markets the proposed model is illustrated by a six node network using a dc approximation

the production and inventory behavior of the american automobile industry understanding inventory movements is central to an understanding of business cycles this paper presents an empirical study of the behavior of inventories in the automobile industry it finds that inventory behavior is well explained by the assumption of intertemporal optimization with rational expectations the underlying cost structure appears to have substantial costs of changing production as well as substantial costs of being away from target inventory thelatter being a function of current sales given this cost structure whether inventory behavior is stabilizing or destabilizing depends on the characteristics of the demand process in the automobile industry inventory behavior is destabilizing the variance of production is larger than the variance of sales

combining revealed and stated data to examine housing decisions using discrete choice analysis abstract this paper uses stated preference and revealed preference data separately and jointly to examine individuals housing choices in particular it combines an established revealed preference approach discrete choice analysis of actual housing purchases and a relatively new stated preference approach choice based conjoint analysis of hypothetical housing purchases to provide us with a better understanding of the factors driving housing decisions these methods are appropriately combined since they reflect the same decision process households select the dwelling that provides the best combination of attributes from the feasible set of alternatives in total this paper analyzes three data sets only actual housing purchases only hypothetical housing purchases and both types of purchases combined analysis finds that actual and hypothetical housing purchases are similar decision processes with respect to some attributes yet are dissimilar with respect to other attributes nevertheless combining the two types of data improves identification of both categories of attributes journal of economic literature classification number r21

inventories and the structure of macro models the message of this paper can be summed up in two words inventories matter they matter empirically in the sense that inventory developments are of major importance in the propagation of business cycles and they matter theoretically in the sense that recognition of their existence changes the structure of a variety of theoretical macromodels in some fairly important ways this paper is mainly about the implications of inventories for the structure of theoretical macro models but i begin by demonstrating the empirical importance of inventories in business fluctuations this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

artificial power markets and unintended consequences administrative pricing rules that try to mimic economic equilibria often fail to capture the complexity of real markets and in that failure can distort incentives as much as or more than cost based pricing in this paper the authors provide three examples of the failure of administrative mechanisms meant to mimic a market two of those examples are very relevant to current debates over industry restructuring in each case the pricing rule fails to maximize social welfare even though in the last two examples production cost is minimized

the influence of distance and prices on the choice of tourist destinations the moderating role of motivations abstract the literature of tourist destination choice pays great attention to the direct impact of the attributes of distance to the destination and prices of the destination but does not reach any consensus around them regarding their inhibitory or attraction effect alternatively our study proposes that the effects of distance and prices are moderated by tourist motivations at the moment of choosing a destination which leads us to make hypotheses to explain this decision through the interaction between destination attributes and the personal motivations of the individual tourists the methodology applied estimates random coefficient logit models which control possible correlations between different destinations and consider tourist heterogeneity the empirical application carried out in spain on a sample of 2127 individuals shows that the dissuasive influence of distance and prices on the selection of destinations is moderated by motivations in the sense that the motivations have a direct increasing the dissuasive effect or inverse reducing the dissuasive effect moderating effect on the influences of distance and prices

a choice experiment on fuel taxation and earmarking in norway abstract pigouvian taxes are efficient but unpopular among voters and hence often politically infeasible earmarking of revenues has been widely reported to increase public support for taxes but earmarking is generally not the most efficient use of the revenues this trade off between efficiency and political feasibility is the motivation for our primary research objective to quantify the effect of earmarking on support for fuel tax rises our secondary research objective is to investigate why earmarking increases support using data from a representative sample of the norwegian voter population n 1147 we estimate models of voter preferences for fuel taxes using logistic regression models our results show that in the absence of earmarking the majority of voters would like to reduce fuel taxes but earmarking the revenues for environmental measures has a substantial effect on voter support for fuel tax increases garnering a majority for increases of up to 15 above present levels further analysis indicates that a prime reason why earmarking for environmental measures is popular is that it increases the perceived environmental effectiveness of the tax and hence its legitimacy as an environmental rather than a fiscal policy instrument

investment in finished goods inventories an analysis of adjustment speeds it is well known that fluctuations in inventory investment are a major source of fluctuations in gross national product this has stimulated numerous empirical studies designed to understand the causes of changes in inventory investment these studies include those for example michael lovell that utilize a flexible accelerator model of inventory behavior as well as those for example david belsley that utilize the linear decision rule approach to optimal inventory holding the latter approach however can be interpreted in terms of a flexible accelerator model see j c r rowley and p k trivedi for a survey of the literature recently several authors for example martin feldstein and alan auerbach observed that these studies yield very implausible empirical results the basic difficulty is that the estimates of the speed with which firms close gaps between desired and actual inventory stocks are very low often the estimated speed of adjustment is less than 10 percent per quarter as feldstein and auerbach stress this is extremely implausible when even the largest swings in inventories in a given quarter amount to less than one day s production the purpose of this paper is to undertake an analysis of adjustment speeds for finished goods inventory investment in our empirical work we utilize a modified flexible accelerator model of inventory investment 1 like the conventional flexible accelerator the model permits firms to close a fraction of the gap between desired and actual inventories in any period the relevant fraction is of course the adjustment coefficient and it may vary in principle between zero and unity our model differs from the conventional model in assuming that the desired stock of finished goods inventories depends on the normal levels of exogenous variables that firms must forecast to make decisions on inventory holdings these include not only the normal level or orders or demand which is a standard explanatory variable in the empirical literature but also the normal levels of real factor input prices and real interest rates in addition we permit the normal levels to change relatively slowly in response to changes in past levels of orders real factor input prices and real interest rates our objective is to investigate whether the slow adjustment speeds that have been estimated in the literature are due to the use of models which contain an incomplete menu of exogenous variables to determine desired inventories and pay inadequate attention to lags in the adjustment of normal levels of exogenous variables

inventory investment over the business cycle in the eu and the us abstract this paper investigates the business cycle properties of aggregate inventory investment in the countries of the european union eu and the us given the experience of the latest recessions this issue becomes particularly interesting for the study of the propagation mechanism of business cycles the kydland prescott methodology was used to derive and organize the business cycle features the results showed that business cycle fluctuations in the eu are more volatile than those in the us the contribution of the declines of inventory investment in recessions has also been greater in the eu important similarities though were identified as to the extent of the destabilizing effect of inventory investment cycles in the overall economic activity

consumer payment minimization in power pool auctions this paper presents a new methodology within the framework of centralized optimization for calculating optimal generation schedules that minimize energy payments by power pool consumers this paper addresses issues related to market structure and the operation of power pools such as bid evaluation generator no load and start up cost recovery generator unit operating constraints and market clearing price determination unlike conventional unit commitment algorithms that minimize total energy production costs the method presented here minimizes payments by power pool consumers a payment minimization objective leads to a different unit commitment and dispatch solution and lower market clearing prices additionally optimal allocation of generator no load and start up costs over the scheduling period is integrated in the bid evaluation process leading to a further reduction in consumer payments

public preferences for carbon tax attributes the impacts of climate change are already visible throughout the world recognizing the threats posed by climate change the durban platform the 17th session of the conference of parties cop 17 underscores that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation and ambitious action by all countries a crucial starting point for the design of effective and publicly acceptable policies is to explore public preferences for climate policy instruments using a choice experiment this study investigates public preferences for carbon tax attributes in a developing country context the results account for heterogeneity in preferences and show that turkish people prefer a carbon tax with a progressive cost distribution rather than one with a regressive cost distribution the private cost has a negative effect on the probability of choosing the tax earmarking carbon tax revenues increases the public acceptability of the tax moreover there is a preference for a carbon tax that promotes public awareness of climate change

auction implementation problems using lagrangian relaxation lagrangian relaxation lr is used as an auction method for bidding in a deregulated environment this paper focuses on the problems that occur while using lr as an auction method identical or similar units can prevent lr from finding the optimal solution if the units are similar lr may have trouble selecting some of them for the optimal solution a feasible solution may thus not be found since a heuristic selection of which unit data to alter has to be applied this is inequitable to the unit s not selected and may result in lawsuit s because the dispatcher has to use heuristic selection there is no fair solution to these problems the authors suggest previously published methods to implement auctions sensitivity analysis has also been applied in this paper to show that the percentage difference of similarity between units may affect the solution found

predictive testing of consumer choice models not subject to independence of irrelevant alternatives the probabilistic modeling of the relationship between objective or perceived characteristics of multiattribute alternatives and consumer choice is receiving increased attention in marketing and ot

unit commitment with dual variable constraints a new unit commitment model is proposed for market economies with some form of indivisibilities nonconvexities coordination in electricity pool auction markets with unit commitment is a conspicuous example this presentation applies to a single time period unit commitment with no network the new formulation includes a market coordinator who collects the sale and purchase bids and determines the optimal solution that balances the total generation with the forecast demand a solution to the new commitment model is said to be optimal if it maximizes the monetary margin of every accepted production unit while minimizing the sum of the margins of the unaccepted units that would achieve positive margins at the prevailing market price the new unit commitment model produces a market price that is the system wide marginal bid cost some preliminary results are reported considering the single period unit commitment problem which provide some insights into the adequacy of the proposed approach as well as its economic implications as a tool for managing restructured energy systems

using discrete choice models with experimental design data to forecast consumer demand for a unique cultural event an approach is developed to forecast participation in unique events with long gestation periods experimental observations of choice are derived for conjoint measurement type multiattribute alternatives that describe possible event configurations the choice data are analyzed by means of discrete choice econometric models a multinomial logit choice model is applied to forecast the choice of attendance at various types of international expositions the empirical work was part of the planning efforts undertaken to investigate the potential demand for an international exposition to be held in eastern australia in conjunction with the australian 1988 bicentennial celebrations

can the production smoothing model of inventory behavior be saved the production smoothing model of inventory behavior has a long and venerable history and theoretical foundations that seem very strong yet certain overwhelming facts seem not only to defy explanation within the production smoothing framework but actually to argue that the basic idea of production smoothing is all wrong most prominent among these is the fact that the variance of detrended production exceeds the variance of detrended sales this paper first documents the stylized facts then it derives the production smoothing model rigorously and explains how the model can be amended to make it consistent with the facts finally it reviews the theoretical and empirical evidence and tries to draw some tentative conclusions