resolving differences in willingness to pay and willingness to accept reply gwendolyn c morrison 1997 raises a logical point regarding our experimental test of the divergence between willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta measures of economic value shogren et al 1994 she argues that our design does not provide a true test of the existence of a fundamental endowment effect since we did not control for the potential of a pivoting indifference map daniel kahneman et al 1990 she concludes that even though our ev idence shows that the mean wtp and wta bids for market goods with close substitutes e g candy bars and coffee mugs converge after market experience the endowment effect might still be alive and well albeit at statisti cally insignificant levels

heterogeneity and the evaluation of efficiency the case of italian universities a random parameters stochastic frontier model is applied to italian data in order to evaluate the cost function and efficiency of higher education institutions the method yields useful information about inter institutional variation in cost structure and technical efficiency returns to scale and scope are evaluated for the typical university and it is found that these returns are almost ubiquitously decreasing a finding with clear policy implications

behavioral economics for environmental policy abstract the predictions of widely prescribed global and country level environmental policies at present are based mainly on mainstream economic models which treat individual actors to be unboundedly rational in their decision making in recent years however behavioral and experimental economists have found that the individual actors in many circumstances act within a bounded rationality framework suggesting that predictions based on the unbounded rationality models would be less valid while some of mainstream economists have already started adopting the bounded rationality based models in their academic discourse many environmental economists seem to be reluctant to use these alternative models of rationality in their research and policy prescriptions this paper highlights the implications of using bounded rationality models in environmental research in general and policymaking in particular

alternative models of individual behaviour and implications for environmental policy abstract most insights of environmental economics are in line with the standard neoclassical economic model of rational behaviour formulated in terms of maximization of utility in general or of profits in particular the standard theory of environmental policy is a case in point however the maximization hypothesis and its methodological foundation have been criticized on many grounds related to a lack of either logical or empirical content moreover over the years a great many alternative models of behaviour have been proposed both criticism and alternatives are surveyed here attention is devoted to relevant insights from the philosophy of science the notion of methodological individualism and other criticism the alternative behavioural models include bounded rationality and satisficing lexicographic preferences habitual behaviour incommensurability and multicriteria evaluation and various models of behaviour under uncertainty major implications of the criticism and alternative models of individual behaviour for environmental policy theory are outlined

cost benefit criteria and the compensation principle in evaluating small projects the use of the compensation principle in cost benefit analysis as a means of separating the efficiency and distributional effects of a project is theoretically suspect for a number of reasons one difficulty is the lack of a necessary and sufficient criterion for determining that a compensation test is passed in an economy where consumers and producers prices are not the same for this paper we establish such a criterion for projects that are small in the differential sense the criterion requires the calculation of a set of shadow prices which is a weighted average of the consumers and producers price vectors

willingness to accept willingness to pay and the income effect abstract the gap between willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta has previously been studied by searching for evidence of substitutability the neoclassical hypothesis or status quo bias testing for neoclassical versus psychological theories of preferences we study the gap differently asking whether the observed pairs of wta and wtp are consistent with neoclassical preferences we use sugden s alternatives to the neoclassical theory of choice in i bateman k g willis eds valuing environmental preferences theory and practice of the contingent valuation method in the us eu and developing countries oxford university press oxford pp 152 180 chapter 6 result showing that the effect of income on wtp can be approximated from information on the ratio wta wtp drawing inferences from a meta analysis of 201 wta wtp ratios we conclude that the data are not consistent with neoclassical preferences

progress in behavioral game theory i s game theory meant to describe actual choices by people and institutions or not it is remarkable how much game theory has been done while largely ignoring this question the seminal book by von neumann and morgenstern the theory of games and economic behavior was clearly about how rational players would play against others they knew were rational in more recent work game theorists are not always explicit about what they aim to describe or advise at one extreme highly mathematical analyses have proposed rationality requirements that people and firms are probably not smart enough to satisfy in everyday decisions at the other extreme adaptive and evolutionary approaches use very simple modelsmostly developed to describe nonhuman animals in which players may not realize they are playing a game at all when game theory does aim to describe behavior it often proceeds with a disturbingly low ratio of careful observation to theorizing this paper describes an approach called behavioral game theory which aims to describe actual behavior is driven by empirical observation mostly experiments and charts a middle course between over rational equilibrium analyses and under rational adaptive analyses the recipe for behavioral game theory i will describe has three steps start with a game or naturally occurring situation in which standard game theory makes a bold prediction based on one or two crucial principles if behavior differs from interested readers familiar with game theory should read crawford 1997 whose approach is more eclectic than mine he concludes p 236 that most strategic behavior can be understood via a synthesis that combines elements from each of the leading theoretical frameworks traditional game theory evolutionary game theory and adaptive learning with a modicum of empirical information about behavior behavioral game theory adds psychological interpretations to this synthesis

resistance to reform status quo bias in the presence of individual specific uncertainty comment why do governments so often fail to adopt policies which economists consider to be efficiency enhancing our answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform we show that there is a bias towards the status quo and hence against efficiency enhancing reforms whenever some of the individual gainers and losers from reform cannot be identified beforehand there are reforms which once adopted will receive adequate political support but would have failed to carry the day ex ante the argument does not rely on risk aversion irrationality or hysteresis due to sunk costs jel d72 f13 why do governments so often fail to adopt policies that economists consider to be efficiency enhancing this is one of the fundamental questions of political economy the answer usually relies on what may be

discourse based valuation of ecosystem services establishing fair outcomes through group deliberation discourse based methods involving small groups of citizens have yet to be thoroughly engaged in the practice of ecosystem valuation this remains true despite the fact that many ecosystem goods and services such as clean air biodiversity and unpolluted lakes and rivers are considered to be public goods the conventional application of ecosystem valuation relies heavily on methodologies such as contingent valuation in which individuals are asked to express the value they attach to ecosystem goods and services in social isolation the difference between the public nature of ecosystem services and their valuation through individual expression has thus recently led to calls for more deliberative forms of environmental valuation because the allocation of ecosystem services directly affects many people and raises normative questions about social equity it is argued that carefully designed discursive methods will help ensure the achievement of social equity goals in this paper we examine the theoretical and normative assumptions that rest beneath the proposed turn towards discourse based methods and identify procedures for testing their application in the field 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

behavioral innovations the missing capital in sustainable development abstract many scholars argue that environmental issues can be addressed through technological innovation a proposal which echoes a lasting debate between environmental and ecological economics about the substitution rate between natural and manufactured capital in addition to these two established types of capital this paper introduces the idea of behavioral capital we define behavioral capital as the latent potential of behavioral change to affect improvement in environmental quality our contribution argues that technological and traditional regulatory innovations serve as insufficient tools for addressing modern environmental issues and ensuring sustainable development without discarding these solutions we contend that because human behavior is a significant contributor to environmental problems it should be regarded as a key component of continued solutions we suggest that the dual interest theory can serve as an integrative framework for behavioral innovations related to environmental issues in suggesting this we assume that behavioral innovations can both overcome some of the limitations of technological innovations and offer new solutions our main insight is to suggest that some depletion of natural capital but not all can be offset by behavioral changes without decreasing or even increasing subjective well being

institutions of higher education as multi product firms economies of scale and scope a multiple output cost function is estimated for institutions of higher education in the united states employing data for 1981 82 the authors flexible fixed cost quadratic function includes three outputs undergraduate teaching graduate teaching and research grants and one input price average faculty salaries results indicate the existence of scope economies at least up to a point for both public and private institutions of higher education ray economies of scale are more pronounced in the private sector and product specific economies of scale are observed only in the public sector for research and graduate teaching copyright 1989 by mit press

costs efficiency and economies of scale and scope in the english higher education sector an understanding of the production and cost technology of higher education institutions is of considerable policy interest as it motivates the structure of the sector how large universities should be and what mix of outputs they should produce we review the literature and using data for english institutions in 2013 14 apply appropriate frontier methods to model the structure of costs in this diverse sector in doing so we uncover information about the returns to scale and scope within the higher education sector in particular the class of institutions comprising larger research intensive universities and small specialist institutions could benefit from further concentrating postgraduate and research activity we find that the universities comprising the english higher education sector are largely efficient measured relative to observed practices and that there is little scope for gains in technical efficiency from allocating resources on the basis of efficiency scores

do environmental benefits matter evidence from a choice experiment among house owners in germany residential buildings strongly contribute to global co2 emissions due to the high energy demand for electricity and heating particularly in industrialised countries within the eu decentralised heat generation is of particular relevance for future climate policy as its emissions are not covered by the eu ets we conducted a choice experiment concerning energy retrofits for existing houses in germany in the experiment the approximately 400 sampled house owners could either choose a modern heating system or an improved thermal insulation for their home we used standard and mixed logit specifications to analyse the choice data we found environmental benefits to have a significant impact on choices of heating systems however they played no role in terms of insulation choices based on the estimated mixed logit model we further obtained willingness to pay wtp measures for co2 savings

features of experimentally observed bounded rationality abstract on the basis of experimental evidence reported in the literature the paper draws conclusions about the bounded rationality exhibited by human economic behaviour among the topics discussed are presentation effects caused by superficial analysis strategic reasoning and strategy construction based on reciprocity and fairness avoidance of circular concepts in step by step strategic reasoning ex post rationality and learning direction theory presence of both adaptive and analytic approaches to repeated decision tasks and the absence of quantitative expectations and optimization in typical repeated game strategies

the role of fairness norms the household based natural forest conservation the case of wolong china the shadow of the tragedy of the commons with its popularized assumption of selfish individual behavior concerns policy makers and consequently the cooperative capability of local communities in common resource management is usually underrated nevertheless here we propose a hypothesis based on a game theory model that the social norm of fairness rather than self interest might motivate cooperation in natural resource conservation by discounting the utility gain from illegal logging at the cost of another household s subsidy loss in wolong nature reserve of china a recent household based natural forest conservation program has led to remarkable progress in protecting the habitat of giant pandas ailuropoda melanoleuca with low monitoring pressure we undertook experiments based on a one shot ultimatum game to test the prevalence of the norm of fairness in the local communities most proposers in the experiments showed strong preferences for fair offers in spite of the responders reluctance to reject low offers and the result contradicted the expectation of pure self interest taking into account the norm of fairness the prediction of the model is consistent with the local performance of the household based conservation policy it highlights the potential of local social norms to facilitate participation and cooperation by the local community in common natural resource conservation c 2010 published by elsevier b v

the approach of ecological economics this paper discusses the major tenets of ecological economics including value pluralism methodological pluralism and multi criteria policy assessment ecological economics offers viable alternatives to the theoretical foundations and policy recommendations of neoclassical welfare economics a revolution in neoclassical economics is currently taking place and the core assumptions of welfare economics are being replaced with more realistic models of consumer and firm behaviour this paper argues that these new theoretical and empirical findings are largely ignored in applied work and policy applications in environmental economics as the only heterodox school of economics focusing on the human economy both as a social system and as one imbedded in the biophysical universe and thus both holistic and scientifically based ecological economics is poised to play a leading role in recasting the scope and method of economic science

a new explanation for the wtp wta disparity abstract we propose a new explanation for the wtp wta disparity in experiments and surveys uncertainty irreversibility and limited learning opportunities can generate commitment costs driving a wedge between wtp and wta we present experimental evidence that supports our hypothesis

the economics of higher education this paper describes the expansion of higher education he in oecd countries and discusses its economic consequences for most governments this expansion has been seen as the silver bullet that improves economic growth and helps tackle problems of inequality however in most countries increasing numbers of graduates are going into jobs that were once done by non graduates raising the concern that the true social returns to he expansion are low because of this it is unsurprising that economists have found it difficult to establish firm links between higher education expansion and economic growth at the same time in some countries he expansion has exacerbated problems of economic and social inequality the paper argues that governments need to take a more realistic view of the role of he consider alternative ways of preparing people for the labour market and at the same time explore more rigorously exactly how the sector is conducting itself

in search of homo economicus behavioral experiments in 15 small scale societies we can summarize our results as follows first the canonical model is not supported in any society studied second there is considerably more behavioral variability across groups than had been found in previous cross cultural research and the canonical model fails in a wider variety of ways than in previous experiments third group level differences in economic organization and the degree of market integration explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation the greater the level of cooperation in experimental games fourth individual level economic and demographic variables do not explain behavior either within or across groups fifth behavior in the experiments is generally consistent with economic patterns of everyday life in these societies

self command in practice in policy and in a theory of rational choice an increasingly familiar occurrence for obstetricians is being asked by patients to withhold anesthesia during delivery the physician often proposes that a facemask be put beside the patient who may inhale nitrous oxide as she needs it but some determined patients ask that no such opportunity be provided if gas is available they will use it and they want not to be able to the request is interesting for decision theory and raises questions of ethics policy and physician responsibility even if the woman is merely making a mistake if she simply does not know how painful labor will be and how glad she will be even in retrospect if the pain is relieved but some women who make this request have had earlier deliveries during which they demanded anesthesia and received it they are acquainted with the pain they anticipate asking for relief and they want it withheld when they do they expect to regret afterwards any recourse to anesthesia this particular instance of attempted selfdenial has features that are special but many that are common the woman is so far as we know in good health physically and mentally she anticipates a transient period when her usual values and preferences will be suspended or inaccessible she has reasons for wanting to frustrate her own wishes at the critical time she needs cooperation she may ratify her choice afterward by expressing herself grateful that no anesthesia was offered even when requested there are ethical dilemmas and legal issues and there is conflict if say the husband disagrees with the physician in the delivery room about what his wife really wants

corruption and reduced oil production an additional resource curse factor prominent contributions to the resource curse literature suggest weak governance and corruption are important factors behind the wide welfare variations observed among oil producing countries how weak governance and corruption influence revenue management and expenditure decisions as well as the possible welfare benefits derived from oil are broadly discussed how they impact upon volumes of oil produced has however attracted little attention this paper combines a review of the resource curse and oil production literatures with findings from qualitative interviews with oil sector experts to appreciate the feasibility of connections between corruption and oil production below its potential we make particular reference to environments where regulatory institutions or political accountability are weak and focus primarily on producer government and oil firm relations drawing on insights from geology political science and economics we suggest suboptimal production solutions can impact volumes of oil actually produced and create constraints on long term revenues for oil producing countries we argue greater disclosure of information on oil production efficiency on a field by field and country by country basis will assist further investigation of the relationships between corruption and volumes of oil produced

contingent valuation controversies and evidence contingent valuation cv has become one of the most widely used non market valuation techniques cv s prominence is due to its flexibility and ability to estimate total value including passive use value its use and the inclusion of passive use value in benefit cost analyses and environ mental litigation are the subject of a contentious debate this paper discusses key areas of the debate over cv and the validity of passive use value we conclude that many of the alleged problems with cv can be resolved by careful study design and implementation we further conclude that claims that empirical cv findings are theoretically inconsistent are not generally supported by the literature the debate over cv however has clarified several key issues related to nonmarket valuation and can provide useful guidance both to cv practitioners and the users of cv results

performance assessment in higher education in britain all public sector organisations in the uk have witnessed changes in funding arrangements during the 1980s as part of the government s drive to make them more accountable to the tax payer the development of performance indicators is seen as an essential step to ensure that such organisations provide value for money this paper examines the possibility of constructing measures of the performance of uk universities a methodology is developed in the framework of production theory and uses multiple regression techniques to estimate the relationship between the outputs and inputs of universities around 80 of the inter university variation in four output measures can be explained by corresponding variations in several input measures this highlights the need to take into account the inputs available to a university when comparing its output performance with that achieved by other institutions the problems of interpreting an array of performance indicators are also clearly demonstrated

willingness to pay and willingness to accept how much can they differ comment i agree with the point made by edoh y amiran and daniel a hagen 2003 that there can be a substantial or even infinite divergence between the wta and wtp for a public good even where there is a nonzero elasticity of substitution between market goods and the public good provided that the indifference curves are asymptotically bounded with respect to market goods in the manner they describe this is an important point they are also correct to point out that the elasticity of substitution is a local concept whereas their asymptotic boundedness condition applies also for discrete changes my 1991 paper used a local analysis because it was following the structure of the analysis in robert d willig 1976 and alan randall and john r stoll 1980 i wanted to show that while randall and stoll appeared to extend willig s local result on wta versus wtp from price changes to changes in the quantity of a public good the relevant elasticity was in fact different and involved the substitution elasticity as well as the income elasticity i view these points by amiran and hagen as not two separate results but essentially the same result their asymptotic boundedness condition generalizes my zero elasticity of substitution condition to discrete changes the asymptotic boundedness condition can be expressed as follows assuming a bivariate utility function u x q and given a reference point x q associated with a reference utility level u u x q there exists some q q such that for all q q there exists no x such that u x q u in other words no amount of x can substitute for the reduction in public good from q to q q in the case of a zero elasticity of substitution q q but as amiran and hagen show in their theorem 1 this is unnecessarily restrictive when dealing with a discrete reduction in q furthermore their theorem 2 can be viewed as a special case of their theorem 1 in which q 0 which makes q an essential commodity it is well known in consumer theory that the wta to avoid the loss of an essential market good is infinite their theorem 2 extends this result to the case of an essential nonmarket good but as their theorem 1 shows essentialness is not necessary for an infinite wta the boundedness condition is the key and this implies a fundamental lack of substitutability between money market goods and the public good

beyond homo economicus evidence from experimental economics environmental policies are generally based on a model of the human actor taken from neoclassical economic theory this paper reports on laboratory experiments suggesting weaknesses in this model and describes alternative models correcting these weaknesses one finding is that economic actors tend to be hyperbolic as opposed to exponential discounters who discount the immediate future at a higher rate than the more distant future another finding is that economic actors are not self regarding but rather in many circumstances are strong reciprocators who come to strategic interactions with a propensity to cooperate respond to cooperative behavior by maintaining or increasing cooperation and respond to free riders by retaliating against the offenders even at a personal cost and even when there is no reasonable expectation that future personal gains will flow from such retaliation we discuss some implications for policy analysis 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

unit costs some explanations of the differences between uk universities considerable interest is currently being shown in the funding of university education the uk university sector has suffered a series of major cuts in public funding since 1980 and these have been accompanied by demands for higher standards and increased efficiency policy statements issued during the present decade have frequently emphasized the need for methods of assessing the performance of universities the comparison of universities on the basis of their performance it is argued would lead to a more efficient use of resources the essentials of performance measurement in education are to introduce into considerations of policy and the management of the education system at national and institutional level some concrete information on the extent to which the benefits expected from education expenditure are actually secured and to facilitate comparisons in terms of effectiveness and efficiency as between various parts of the system and as between different points in time des 1987a p 49 variou

consumer s surplus without apology the purpose of this paper is to settle the controversy surrounding consumer s surplus and by so doing to validate its use as a tool of welfare economics i will show that observed consumer s surplus can be rigorously utilized to estimate the unobservable compensating and equivalent variations the correct theoretical measures of the welfare impact of changes in prices and income on an individual i derive precise upper and lower bounds on the percentage errors of approximating the compensating and equivalent variations with consumer s surplus these bounds can be explicitly calculated from observable demand data and it is clear that in most applications the error of approximation will be very small in fact the error will often be overshadowed by the errors involved in estimating the demand curve the results in no way depend upon arguments about the constancy of the marginal utility of income consequently this paper supplies specific empirical criteria which can replace the apologetic caveats frequently employed by those who presently apply consumer s surplus moreover the results imply that consumer s surplus is usually a very good approximation to the appropriate welfare measures to preview below i establish the validity of these rules of thumb for a

efficiency in the provision of university teaching and research an empirical analysis of uk universities summary a flexible three output two input cost function model is used to examine the cost efficiency of uk universities as producers of teaching and research outputs unlike previous studies a comprehensive peer review of research quality is incorporated overall product specific and input specific economies of scale global and product specific economies of scope marginal costs and cost complementarities are estimated overall and product specific scale results indicate considerable increasing returns while the scope results generally suggest neither economies nor diseconomies sensitivity analysis is used to simulate the impact of current government policy regarding the expansion of undergraduate teaching output on these results

a theoretical approach to deliberative valuation aggregation by mutual consent in deliberative valuation a small group of selected persons explores the values that should guide collective decisions through a process of reasoned discourse proponents argue that deliberative techniques enhance the effectiveness and perceived legitimacy of policy making by facilitating public participation this paper outlines an approach to deliberative valuation that is grounded in democratic theory social psychology and cooperative game theory emphasizing applications to the monetary valuation of environmental services the analysis suggests that deliberative groups that employ consent based choice rules may aggregate individual values in a manner that systematically departs from the additive aggregation procedures of standard cost benefit analysis

a framework for mapping and comparing behavioural theories in models of social ecological systems formal models are commonly used in natural resource management nrm to study human environment interactions and inform policy making in the majority of applications human behaviour is represented by the rational actor model despite growing empirical evidence of its shortcomings in nrm contexts while the importance of accounting for the complexity of human behaviour is increasingly recognized its integration into formal models remains a major challenge the challenges are multiple i there exist many theories scattered across the social sciences ii most theories cover only a certain aspect of decision making iii they vary in their degree of formalization iv causal mechanisms are often not specified we provide a framework mohub modelling human behavior to facilitate a broader inclusion of theories on human decision making in formal nrm models it serves as a tool and common language to describe compare and communicate alternative theories in doing so we not only enhance understanding of commonalities and differences between theories but take a first step towards tackling the challenges mentioned above this approach may enable modellers to find and formalize relevant theories and be more explicit and inclusive about theories of human decision making in the analysis of social ecological systems

petroleum taxes and optimal resource recovery abstract the objective of this paper is to quantify the incentive effects of petroleum taxes this enables us to estimate individual petroleum reservoirs supply functions before and after tax of central importance are the marginal reserves within the petroleum reservoir itself the recovery factor of oil and gas reservoirs is influenced by economic considerations both the rate of return requirement and petroleum taxes play crucial roles the conclusion is that the distorting effects observed in many petroleum taxation systems have serious resource recovery consequences and reduce the recovery factor for individual oil and gas reservoirs

two cheers and a qualm for behavioral environmental economics behavioral economics can gain more in roads into environmental economics if we better understand why exchange institutions fail more effectively reduce health risks and environmental conflicts encourage more coordination and cooperation design better incentive systems more accurately estimate economic measures of value and promote more protection at less cost behavioral economics deserves two cheers for advancing ideas of context dependence and social preferences which we illustrate with two examples of recent research

rationality in psychology and economics the task i shall undertake here is to compare and contrast the concepts of rationality that are prevalent in psychology and economics respectively economics has almost uniformly treated human behavior as rational psychology on the other hand has always been concerned with both the irrational and the rational aspects of behavior in this paper irrationality will be mentioned only obliquely my concern is with rationality economics sometimes uses the term irrationality rather broadly e g becker 1962 and the term rationality correspondingly narrowly so as to exclude from the domain of the rational many phenomena that psychology would include in it for my purposes of comparison i will have to use the broader conception of psychology one point should be set immediately outside dispute everyone agrees that people have reasons for what they do they have motivations and they use reason well or badly to respond to these motivations and reach their goals even much or most of the behavior that is called abnormal involves the exercise of thought and reason freud was most insistent that there is method in madness that neuroses and psychoses were patients solutions not very satisfactory solutions in the long run for the problems that troubled them the assumption that actors maximize subjective expected utility economic rationality supplies only a small part of the premises in economic reasoning and that often not the essential part the remainder of the premises are auxiliary empirical assumptions about actors utilities beliefs expectations and the like making these assumptions correctly requires an empirically founded theory of choice that specifies what information decision makers use and how they actually process it this behavioral empirical base is largely lacking in contemporary economic analysis and supplying it is essential for enhancing the explanatory and predictive power of economics

optimal environmental taxes under relative consumption effects abstract this paper explores the interactions between carbon dioxide emissions taxes and a pre existing income tax in a numerically calibrated model of climate change and the world economy based on evidence from the recent empirical literature the model allows for the presence of relative consumption effects in the specification of preferences in the absence of relative consumption effects optimal emissions taxes would rise from us 44 to us 229 per tonne of carbon in year 2000 dollars over the course of the next century these tax rates which arise when emissions tax revenues are used to reduce taxes on personal income are slightly above the present value marginal benefits of emissions control given realistic assumptions concerning the empirical magnitude of relative consumption effects the optimal emissions tax rises from us 63 per tonne in 2005 and us 384 per tonne in 2105 accounting for relative consumption effects reduces the perceived social benefits of consumption thus increasing social willingness to pay for environmental quality while reducing both the costs of tax interaction effects and the benefits of efficient revenue recycling taken together these factors support the implementation of comparatively high environmental taxes in the face of relative consumption effects

present bias predicts participation in payments for environmental services evidence from a behavioral experiment in uganda farmers are necessary agents in global efforts to conserve the environment now that croplands and pastures together constitute the largest terrestrial system on earth covering some 48 of ice free land surface whereas standard economic models predict that farmers will participate in conservation programs so long as they are profitable empirical findings from behavioral economics point to a number of normally unobservable preferences that may influence the decision making process this study tests for the first time whether heterogeneity in behavioral preferences correlates with decisions to participate in payments for environmental services pes programs we elicit individual trust and time preferences using economic experiments and link resulting measures to household survey data and participation decisions in a ugandan pes program we find that farmers who exhibit a preference for proximate gains present biased preferences are 47 7 more likely to participate in the program than those who show time consistent or future biased preferences this result has implications for ongoing and planned pes programs involving farmers particularly in africa by highlighting a potential relationship between payment timing and participation and further validates the use of behavioral experiments in explaining real world decisions

what are political leaders environmental intentions the impact of social identification processes and macro economic conditions abstract evidence of continued environmental degradation has led to a questioning of the traditional vision of unlimited economic growth in favour of sustainable development although several explicit environmental strategies were designed at the supranational level the pursuit of environmental sustainability remains an aim driven by political concerns at the country level this study aims to investigate the role of both internal cognitive and motivational factors and external social forces and macro economic conditions contexts in influencing the propensity of political leaders regarding environmental matters the findings indicate that cognitive and motivational factors tend to shape the environmental intentions of political leaders whereas the external context does not have a significant impact our results suggest that the political leaders propensity for addressing environmental matters is largely affected by the desire of leaders to establish or confirm an individual status through political processes or to conform to group norms however younger political leaders demonstrate a higher environmental propensity than do older leaders

farmers adoption of integrated crop protection and organic farming do moral and social concerns matter we investigate empirically the role of moral and social concerns in farmers decision to adopt integrated crop protection ip and organic farming of a survey questionnaire has been sent to 1286 fruit growers and vegetable producers located in the french areas of alpes de haute provence hautes alpes and vaucluse analysis of individual responses n 243 shows that although economic concerns play a strong role a significant number of respondents give high importance to moral and social ones we also examine how these considerations matter according to different crop protection strategies that is conventional farming ip and of using a multinomial logistic regression we find that 1 social concerns e g showing to others one s environmental commitment drive both ip and of adoption 2 moral concerns e g do not feel guilty about one s choices increase the probability of organic farming adoption only and 3 farmers who give high importance to economic concerns e g cutting production costs are less likely to adopt of

heterogeneous beliefs and climate catastrophes we study how heterogeneous beliefs about the causes and extent of global warming affect local mitigation and adaptation strategies and therefore global climate dynamics local policies are determined by expectations of policy makers about future climate there are three types of expectations strong skeptic weak skeptic and science based strong skeptics deny human induced climate change and a possibility of a climate catastrophe weak skeptics believe that industrial emissions cause global warming but deny catastrophic climate change science based policy makers considering the warning of the scientific community account for both human influence on climate and possible catastrophic shifts aggregate behavior of policy makers determines the total emission level which influences global climate dynamics the paper argues that even if there are only skeptical policy makers the climate catastrophe can still be avoided