modelling the domestic and foreign tourist arrivals to tamil nadu india in recent years due to the indian federal government s and tamil nadu state government s various initiatives and promotional activities foreign and domestic tourist arrivals in tamil nadu are on the increase this article aims to model the monthly tourist arrivals foreign as well as domestic in tamil nadu for monthly time series data during the period 1998 to 2002 using univariate time series models as both time series show strong seasonal patterns we also investigate the possibility of seasonal unit roots in the domestic and foreign tourist arrivals series the results show that significant growth in domestic and foreign arrivals takes place during the months december to january growth rate for domestic tourist arrivals is positive during april and may but is negative for the foreign tourist arrivals during april and insignificant during may such information would be very useful to the tamil nadu government and the tourism industry in maximizing the usage of available tourist spot infrastructure

multiple communities and controlling corruption corruption presents an assurance problem to businesses all businesses are best off if none act corruptly but in the event that corruption occurs are better off if they act corruptly than if they do not and because there is no assurance that other actors are not cheating a business does not know how to act the usual solution to an assurance problem criminal sanctions imposed on cheaters does not work in a corrupt system integrative social contract theory suggests a solution to the assurance problem application of integrative social contract theory to corruption demonstrates that in the case of corruption it has advantages over international law and that the theory s elegance lies in its recognition of norms generated by multiple communities

institutional selection in international relations state anarchy as order by the end of the medieval era three new competing institutions attempted to capture gains from trade and reduce feudal particularism sovereign territorial states cityleagues and city states by the middle of the seventeenth century city leagues and city states had declined markedly territorial states survived as the dominant form because they were able to reduce free riding lower transaction costs and credibly commit their constituents the selection process took place along three dimensions first sovereign territorial states proved competitively superior in the economic realm second states increasingly recognized only other sovereign territorial states as legitimate actors in the international system third other actors defected to or copied the institutional makeup of sovereign territorial organization the emergence of discrete territorial units in which only sovereign authorities represented their citizens as the predominant type of organization in international affairs created a new solution to the problem of markets and hierarchies

the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

an analysis of count data models for the study of exclusivity in wine consumption several models which analyse count data have been proposed in econometric literature these models allow the discrete nonnegative nature of specific phenomena of interest to be gathered in a appropriate way and can be useful for the explanation of specific preference structures among individuals in this work an analysis of the number of wine types consumed by residents of tenerife is carried out with an aim to observe which characteristics determine the exclusivity in its consumption given the current context of increased competition in this sector the specific characteristics of the considered variable allow the study to cover two aspects the first is methodological and is seen by the variety of models that may be considered in this case this focus consists in comparing several possibilities which fit the type of count data involved the second aspect is clearly empirical and is based on the description of not only the most appropriate decision making mechanism for the study but in the identif

alternative approaches to valuing intangible health losses the evidence for multiple sclerosis abstract this study uses both risk risk and risk dollar approaches to assess intangible health losses associated with multiple sclerosis ms using an estimation approach that adjusts for potential perceptional biases that may affect the expressed risk tradeoffs we estimated parameters of the utility function of persons with and without ms as well as the degree of subjects overestimation of the probability of obtaining ms the sample included subjects from the general population and persons with ms we found that marginal utility of income is lower in the state with ms than without it however the difference in marginal utility in the two states was greater for persons without ms than for those with the disease persons with ms overestimated the probability of acquiring ms to a greater extent than did persons within ms correcting for overestimation of this probability the value of intangible loss of a statistical case of ms derived from responses of the general population was us 350 000 to us 500 000 persons with ms were willing to pay somewhat more than this d80 i18 j17

pressure and the division of a public budget this paper considers the division of a public budget among competing interests the planner determines the optimal allocation by maximizing a weighted social welfare function these weights reflect society s attitudes to different recipient groups and are not constrained to be constant by exerting pressure the recipients can attempt to manipulate the weights and hence influence the division of the budget the amount of resources used on pressure and the effects on the preference weights are calculated an important parameter in the model is the elasticity of pressure for which an appropriate estimate is presented from the case of competition for a share of a health services budget in norway

using rank data to estimate health state utility models in this paper we report the estimation of conditional logistic regression models for the health utilities index mark 2 and the sf 6d using ordinal preference data the results are compared to the conventional regression models estimated from standard gamble data and to the observed mean standard gamble health state valuations for both the hui2 and the sf 6d the models estimated using ordinal data are broadly comparable to the models estimated on standard gamble data and the predictive performance of these models is close to that of the standard gamble models our research indicates that ordinal data have the potential to provide useful insights into community health state preferences however important questions remain

cost efficiency of the lodging industry in the tourist destination of gran canaria spain abstract this paper analyses whether the expansion of the lodging industry in gran canaria canary islands spain which has occurred during the last 10 years as a result of increases in tourist numbers and the accommodation made available to them has been accompanied by a parallel increase in efficiency over the same period thus the cost efficiency and economic scale of the lodging industry hotels and apartments on the island of gran canaria during the period 1991 2002 are studied assuming that such efficiency is non constant over time the estimation of a stochastic cost frontier model was considered by using a panel data approach a translog cost function was estimated using unbalanced panel data for a sample of 44 companies over the study period the overall results indicate the existence of diseconomies of scale except in the case of small companies with an operating revenue of less than 3 7 million euros these comprised 40 of the companies in the sample the findings on cost inefficiency show that this is time variant that not all lodging companies produce at minimum cost levels and that it decreases over time specifically average cost inefficiency is around 17 and decreases over time

quasi states dual regimes and neoclassical theory international jurisprudence and the third world decolonization in parts of the third world and particularly africa has resulted in the emergence of numerous quasi states which are independent largely by international courtesy they exist by virtue of an external right of self determination negative sovereignty without yet demonstrating much internal capacity for effective and civil government positive sovereignty they therefore disclose a new dual international civil regime in which two standards of statehood now coexist the traditional empirical standard of the north and a new juridical standard of the south the biases in the constitutive rules of the sovereignty game today and for the first time in modern international history arguably favor the weak if international theory is to account for this novel situation it must acknowledge the possibility that morality and legality can in certain circumstances be independent of power in international relations this suggests that contemporary international theory must accommodate not only machiavellian realism and the sociological discourse of power but also grotian rationalism and the jurisprudential idiom of law

cost effectiveness utility analyses do current decision rules lead us to where we want to be despite the growing literature on economic evaluation of health care programmes little attention has been paid to the theoretical foundations of cost effectiveness and cost utility analyses and the validity of the decision rules adopted as methods of achieving the stated goals we show that although applications of the techniques can be used to pursue some managerial objectives in the context of highly constrained environments such applications are inconsistent with both welfare economic objectives and the interpretations of the findings of these applications alternative strategies are identified as potential and practical methods for pursuing welfare economic objectives

return to tourist destination is it reputation after all in this paper the hypothesis that repeated purchases in the tourism markets could be considered as a consequence of asymmetrical information problems is studied this hypothesis is analysed with the case study of the island of tenerife using the estimation of a count data model it was found that the length of the stay and the information obtained from previous visits and or relatives and friends might increase the return to a destination suggesting the presence of a reputation mechanism as proposed by shapiro 1983 the determinants of the willingness to return were also estimated confirming the main results

sustaining quality in tourism destinations an economic model with an application sustaining quality in tourism destinations can be described as seeking to maintain a destination s reputation this is a strategy that has a dynamic dimension in the sense that the benefits from such a strategy are likely to accrue in the future the task of building reputation will necessitate some investment which implies that in equilibrium a high quality tourism experience will sell for a premium above its cost of production this premium can be seen as the return on the initial investment in reputation or as an important incentive in inducing a destination to maintain its reputation as a particular kind of quality destination without such a premium a destination may find that a fly by night strategy of quality reduction would be profit maximizing this is the type of moral hazard problem that is present when say a tourism destination faces the question of how to react to increases in tourist numbers with large numbers reputation may not be seen as important and the various providers have a str

a comparative evaluation of multiattribute consumer preference models in this paper the theory and estimation procedures for several consumer preference models are discussed predictive accuracy in the form of internal consistency of these models is compared in an empirical application consumer decision situations are classified into two classes decisions under certainty and decisions under uncertainty for each of the two classes of decision situations two modeling strategies have been used statistical estimation and algebraic solution an additive conjoint an additive and a multiplicative measurable value and an additive and a multiplicative utility model are considered our main finding is that the statistical estimation procedures outperform their algebraic counterparts on the criterion of predictive accuracy the utility model provides better predictions for decisions under uncertainty than the widely used conjoint models the relationship between models for decisions under certainty and decisions under uncertainty is discussed it is shown how a conjoint or a mea

what s in a name reputation as a tradeable asset the author develops a model in which a firm s only asset is its name which summarizes its reputation and studies the forces that cause names to be valuable tradable assets an adverse selection model in which shifts of ownership are not observable guarantees an active market for names with either finite or infinite horizons no equilibrium exists in which only good types buy good names the reputational dynamics that emerge from the model are more realistic than those in standard game theoretic reputation models and suggest that adverse selection plays a crucial role in understanding firm reputation

applications of cost benefit analysis to health care departures from welfare economic theory in applying the principles of cost benefit analysis to real world problems of resource allocation particular care must be taken to ensure that the welfare economic theory which underlies the cost benefit technique is adhered to major problems arise where costs and benefits are used interchangeably to represent the good and bad attributes of a programme furthermore in the presence of mutually exclusive projects focussing attention upon the net benefits or cost benefit ratios of individual projects as opposed to the net benefits of the use of budgeted resources can lead to biased estimates of the shadow price of projects and consequently errors in analysts conclusions as a result economic appraisals of individual projects are not directly relevant for choosing between mutually exclusive projects of different sizes both types of problem are illustrated by reference to both simple examples and published economic appraisals of health care techniques integer programming is proposed and demonstrated as a method of selecting between mutually exclusive projects

reputation and competition this paper shows how competition generates reputation building behavior in repeated interactions when the product quality observed by consumers is a noisy signal of firms effort level there are two types of firms and good firms try to distinguish themselves from bad firms although consumers get convinced that firms which are repeatedly successful in providing high quality are good firms competition endogenously generates the outside option inducing disappointed consumers to leave firms this threat of exit induces good firms to choose high effort allowing good reputations to be valuable but its uncompromising execution forces good firms out of the market jel c7 d8

on the aggregation of health status measures in the present paper we address the problem of finding conditions under which aggregation of individual health status measurements e g qalys is meaningful in the sense that there is a universal unit of measurement for health the problem is studied in a model where different aspects of health take the form of lancasterian characteristics to be produced by the individuals using commodities obtained in the market for a meaningful unit of measurement to exist marginal rates of substitution between different aspects of health should not differ among individuals and for this to happen in an equilibrium of the economy considered certain assumptions of separability of technology and or preferences must be satisfied this means that universal measures of health will be meaningful only if there are not too many spillovers in achieving different aspects of health

rank ordered logit models an empirical analysis of ontario voter preferences this study provides a bayesian investigation of rank ordered multinominal logit models employing conjugate priors for standard multinomial logit models as well as other priors also considered is a specification test of the independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption the proposed techniques are demonstrated in an empirical investigation of ontario voter preferences before the 1988 canadian federal election

the estimation of a preference based measure of health from the sf 36 this paper reports on the findings of a study to derive a preference based measure of health from the sf 36 for use in economic evaluation the sf 36 was revised into a six dimensional health state classification called the sf 6d a sample of 249 states defined by the sf 6d have been valued by a representative sample of 611 members of the uk general population using standard gamble models are estimated for predicting health state valuations for all 18 000 states defined by the sf 6d the econometric modelling had to cope with the hierarchical nature of the data and its skewed distribution the recommended models have produced significant coefficients for levels of the sf 6d which are robust across model specification however there are concerns with some inconsistent estimates and over prediction of the value of the poorest health states these problems must be weighed against the rich descriptive ability of the sf 6d and the potential application of these models to existing and future sf 36 data set

using a discrete choice experiment to estimate health state utility values in this study we explored a novel application of the discrete choice experiment dce that resembles the time trade off tto task to estimate values on the health utility scale for the eq 5d the dce was tested in a survey alongside the tto in a sample of english speaking canadians recruited by a market research company the study found that the dce is able to derive logical and consistent values for health states valued on the full health dead scale the dce overcame some issues identified in the version of tto currently used to value eq 5d notably allowing for fewer data exclusions and incorporating values considered worse than dead without introducing a separate valuation procedure this has important implications for providing robust values that represent the preferences of all respondents

who wants a good reputation we examine a market in which long lived firms face a short term incentive to exert low effort but could earn higher profits if it were possible to commit to high effort there are two types of firms inept firms who can only exert low effort and competent firms who have a choice between high and low effort there is occasional exit and competent and inept potential entrants compete for the right to inherit the departing firm s reputation consumers receive noisy signals of effort choice and so competent firms choose high effort in an attempt to distinguish themselves from inept firms a competent firm is most likely to enter the market by purchasing an average reputation in the hopes of building it into a good reputation than either a very low reputation or a very high reputation inept firms in contrast find it more profitable to either buy high reputations and deplete them or buy low reputations

models of quality adjusted life years when health varies over time survey and analysis quality adjusted life year qaly models are widely used for economic evaluation in the health care sector in the first part of the paper we establish an overview of qaly models where health varies over time and provide a theo retical analysis of model identification and parameter estimation from time trade off tto and standard gamble sg scores we investigate deterministic and probabilistic models and consider five different families of discounting functions in all the second part of the paper discusses four issues recurrently debated in the literature this discussion includes questioning the sg method as the gold standard for estimation of the health state index re examining the role of the constant proportional trade off condition revisiting the problem of double dis counting of qalys and suggesting that it is not a matter of choosing between tto and sg procedures as the combination of these two can be used to disen tangle risk aversion from discounting we find that caution must be taken when drawing conclusions from models with chronic health states to situations where health varies over time one notable difference is that in the former case risk aversion may be indistinguishable from discounting models of quality adjusted life years qalys are widely used as health related quality of life measures for economic evaluation in the health care sector in its simplest form the qaly approach assumes that the utility of a profile of health states over time may be estimated by adding the values of the constituent health states in the health profile in more sophisticated models health events occurring in the future may be discounted or risk adjusted

measurement of health state utilities for economic appraisal health status measurement for use in economic appraisal of health care programmes is reviewed in this paper with particular emphasis on utility measurement a framework for economic appraisal is presented displaying the various components that must be measured and showing how the three forms of analysis cost effectiveness analysis cost benefit analysis and cost utility analysis relate to the framework and to each other one of the components in the framework is health status it can be measured using ad hoc numeric scales willingness to pay receive or health state utilities the determination of health state utilities is reviewed covering the following issues alternative sources of utilities health state descriptions multi attribute utility approach determination of appropriate subjects utility aggregation and accuracy three measurement techniques for health state utilities are described in detail rating scale standard gamble and time trade off the use of these methods is described for both chronic and temporary health states and for both health states considered better than death and those considered worse than death

the abolition of slavery and the end of international war slavery and war have both historically been considered inevitable consequences of human nature yet slavery has been abolished and moral progress may have contributed to slavery s disappearance both realists and marxists are skeptical about the impact of ethical constraints on political decisions while idealists as well as at least some regime analysts emphasize the role of those constraints however elements of all of these approaches support the proposition that moral progress may bring an end to international war some historical trends do not support the idea that international war is on the verge of disappearance but there has not been a war between major powers since 1945 in addition norms against colonialism are strong no war has occurred between democratic states nor does a war appear likely among the rather sizable number of industrialized democratic states in the international system today explanations of these pockets of peace based on caution induced by nuclear weapons or on economic interdependence for example are certainly not beyond question therefore it may be that norms inhibiting the initiation of international war have already made obsolete not only wars between the richest and most powerful states in the world but also some forms of depradation by the strong against the relatively weak states

incorporating psycho social considerations into health valuation an experimental study abstract this study used multiple elicitation question modes and group discussions to value psycho social considerations associated with public perceptions of health risks values for saving 100 statistical lives in six different policy contexts varied by 50 largely due to psycho social considerations of choice and control a currency effect was found value of life differentials were smaller when questions were framed directly in the currency of lives saved rather than willingness to pay or public spending to save lives discussions reduced but did not eliminate inconsistencies and slightly increased the relative valuations of health interventions involving less choice and control by those at risk