investment in cleaner technology and signaling distortions in a market with green consumers abstract i analyze the pricing and investment behavior of a firm that signals the environmental attributes of its production technology through its price to uninformed environmentally conscious consumers i then analyze the effect of change in environmental regulation on the signaling outcome and the firm s ex ante incentive to invest in cleaner technology when regulation is weak a firm signals cleaner technology through higher price in this case the firm earns lower profit when it has cleaner technology and thus has no incentive to invest in cleaner technology the price charged by the clean firm declines sharply beyond a critical level of regulation when regulation is sufficiently stringent the firm with cleaner technology charges lower price but earns higher signaling profit and ex ante the firm has positive incentive to invest in cleaner technology with weak regulation the incentive of the firm to directly disclose its environmental performance rather than signal it through price is increasing in the level of regulation the opposite holds when regulation is sufficiently stringent

product and price competition in a duopoly this paper examines the role of consumer preferences costs and price competition in determining the competitive product strategy of a firm in the model studied here there are two identical firms competing on product quality and price they face consumers who prefer a higher quality product to a lower quality product but differ in how much they are willing to pay for quality the consumers can also choose a substitute if they don t like the product price offerings of the two firms for the firms a higher quality product costs more to produce than a lower quality product the paper shows that the equilibrium strategy for each firm should be to differentiate its product from its competitor with the firm choosing the higher quality choosing the higher margin as well this differentiation however is not efficient that is it is possible to choose two other products and offer them at prices that cover their marginal cost and still satisfy consumers needs better in the aggregate a monopolist by contrast would differentiate his product line efficiently this suggests that cannibalization has different effects on product strategy than competition the paper also shows that if one firm enters the market first then it can defend itself from later entrants and gain a first mover advantage by preempting the most desirable product position

optimization of manufacturing systems under environmental considerations for a greenness dependent demand abstract in this work we show that the optimization models for manufacturing systems should evolve to consider the environmental impacts of manufacturing activities and to integrate the environmental performance of finished products in particular the selection of manufacturing processes technologies and input items components should be revised with environmental consideration with this scope in mind we develop two optimization models where we consider the selection of production processes and the choice of input products in the first model a single product is offered by the firm and the demand of this product depends on its greenness in the second model the market is segmented between ordinary and green customers and the firm offers a different variety of the output product to each segment in this case both the demand and the price depend on the product greenness in both models the greenness of the output product is a decision variable that is simultaneously determined along with the other decisions in addition the models integrate environmental legislations we conduct numerical experiments on a case study from the textile sector in order to show how the integration of the product greenness impacts on the system profit and decisions

quality and competition in recent years the practitioner literature in operations management has seen a dramatic surge in articles on quality management it reflects the increased emphasis on quality by u s firms which has been attributed largely to increased competition faced by them the question of how quality is influenced by competitive intensity however has not received much attention either in the practitioner or the academic research literatures the notion of competitive intensity itself has not been defined precisely in this paper we develop formal models of oligopolistic competition to investigate whether equilibrium levels of quality increase as competition intensifies we consider three different competitive settings i asymmetric duopolistic competition where the dominant firm s intrinsic demand potential decreases ii a symmetric duopoly where the firms are precluded from cooperating in setting quality levels and iii symmetric oligopolistic competition where the number of firms increases we find that the relation between equilibrium quality and competitive intensity depends on what is understood by increased competition and in addition the relation is contingent on the values of parameters describing the cost and demand structure for the industry

goal programming data envelopment analysis godea for target based multi level planning allocating central grants to the greek local authorities abstract in this paper we develop an interface between goal programming and data envelopment analysis godea in order to integrate target setting and resource allocation in multi level planning problems data envelopment analysis dea has been traditionally used for assessing the performance of individual decision making units and therefore necessary extensions are needed to apply dea principles to the global organisational level without however losing its attractive features the method was originally developed as an aid to the reorganisation of the allocation of central funds to local authorities in greece

resource allocation based on efficiency analysis the purpose of this paper is to develop an approach to a resource allocation problem that typically appears in organizations with a centralized decision making environment for example supermarket chains banks and universities the central unit is assumed to be interested in maximizing the total amount of outputs produced by the individual units by allocating available resources to them we will develop an interactive formal approach based on data envelopment analysis dea and multiple objective linear programming molp to find the most preferred allocation plan the units are assumed to be able to modify their production in the current production possibility set within certain assumptions various assumptions are considered concerning returns to scale and the ability of each unit to modify its production plan numerical examples are used to illustrate the approach

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

a taste for taxes minimizing distortions using political preferences abstract we conduct an experiment with online workers to assess whether the distortionary effect of a tax is sensitive to the ideological match between taxpayer and tax expenditures we find that among self identified political moderates the labor supply elasticity with respect to the net of tax wage is significantly smaller when individuals pay taxes to a favored government agency as compared to an unfavored one while the tax has a significant distortionary effect in the latter case with a point estimate for the labor supply elasticity of approximately 0 77 the elasticity point estimate is close to zero when taxes go to a favored agency there is also an increase in total output for the matched population among moderates there is no evidence that these effects hold for self identified liberals or conservatives

partisan bias and expressive voting abstract we conduct an experiment to characterize the expressive voting behavior of political partisans we find that participants who are asked to vote on the answer to factual questions tend to offer more partisan responses than those who must answer as decisive individuals we further test whether voters exploit corrective information that sometimes challenges their partisan views when information is available we observe smaller partisan gaps and more correct responses especially when the information is free when information is costly to acquire we find that voters generally choose to remain uninformed consistent with the downsian theory of rational ignorance

expressive voting and electoral equilibrium there are two rival accounts of rational voting in the public choice tradition the mainstream instrumental account that sees the vote as a revelation of preference over possible electoral outcomes essentially analogous to a market choice and the expressive account that sees the vote as expressing support for one or other electoral options rather like cheering at a football match this paper attempts to lay out some of the implications of the expressive account of voting for the issue of who votes as well as for the nature of political equilibrium and to compare these implications with those derived from the instrumental account we also identify and discuss the alternative views of the domain of electoral politics associated with the instrumental and expressive accounts of voting and sketch a route towards the integration of expressive and instrumental ideas in the analysis of rational electoral politics

toward a theoretical model of voluntary overcompliance abstract we explain why some firms voluntarily overcomply with environmental regulation in our model all consumers value environmental quality but differ in their willingness to pay which depends on their income levels publicly available information on environmental performance of firms enables consumers to identify clean firms firms participate in a two stage duopoly game where they first choose their levels of cleaning technology and next engage in price competition the market gets segmented by income levels a minimum standard binding on the dirty firm has the effect of improving the performance of the cleaner firm a subsidy obtains the same competitive outcome

equilibrium analysis of supply chain structures under power imbalance abstract this paper investigates the implications of channel power on supply chain stability in a setting where multiple suppliers sell substitutable products through a common retailer such supply chains have been traditionally analyzed as one or two stage stackelberg non cooperative games with all suppliers sharing balanced equal decision making power in this paper we relax this assumption and formulate game theoretic models to examine scenarios where one supplier can act as the stackelberg leader consequently we analyze new supply chain structures and introduce the notion of structure dominance a novel approach to analyze the performance of supply chains that has practical implications thus a decision maker can employ the concepts of structure dominance to determine whether there exist supply chain scenarios that are more stable than others i e less prone to power reconfigurations at both agent and group level we find that power imbalance causes significant declines in supply chain profits and the more balanced the agents are the higher their profits when demand is linear regardless of product competition it develops that neither the manufacturer stackelberg nor the retailer stackelberg supply chains are stable structures in our generalized setting but that structures where power is equally split between agents provide for best stability and performance

a theory of participation in elections we analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so unlike previous duty based models of participation in our model an ethical agent s obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior jel d72

ideological segregation online and offline we use individual and aggregate data to ask how the internet is changing the ideological segregation of the american electorate focusing on online news consumption offline news consumption and face to face social interactions we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation we find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption and significan tly lower than the segregation of face to face interactions with neighbors co workers or family members we find no evidence that the internet is becoming more segregated over time

impact of efficiency investment and competition on low carbon manufacturing abstract low carbon economy has become a top agenda for many countries following the agreement in the paris meeting on climate change in this article we take price and emission sensitive demand into account and incorporate competition between the two rival manufacturers in the demand function this research takes more proactive actions incorporating carbon emissions in the strategic and operational decisions which complements the existing literature on low carbon manufacturing in which the carbon emissions attribute is often used as a constraint or only the single manufacturer s demand is considered based on game theory the pricing and carbon emissions reduction decisions are investigated our study contributes to the existing literature on low carbon manufacturing by specifically examining the impact of production efficiency carbon emissions reduction efficiency and market power structure on achieving low carbon manufacturing through the systematic analysis of optimal pricing and green technology investment decisions to improve the economic and environmental performance under different market power structures our findings provide valuable managerial implications which will help many manufacturing firms to make important strategic and operational decisions regarding low carbon manufacturing

an optimization model for a monopolistic firm serving an environmentally conscious market use of chemical reaction optimization algorithm this work considers a monopolist firm which faces the following twin challenges of serving an environmentally sensitive market the first challenge is the demand s elasticity to emissions and price to entice its emission conscious customers and generate higher demand the firm incrementally invests in cleaner production technologies it also adopts a voluntary limit on its emissions from transportation however such investments and penalty lead to the second challenge of reduced net profit to address above trade off a non linear programming nlp model with a maximization quadratic profit function has been formulated recently developed chemical reaction optimization algorithm with superior computational performance has been adopted to solve the nlp the output of the model provides near optimal monopolistic price best attainable reduction in manufacturing emissions through proportional investment and makes a choice of suitable mode of transportation for each type of product offered by the firm three types of sensitivity analyses were performed by varying contextual parameters customers emission elasticity penalty charged per unit emission and investment coefficient the results underpin the importance of investments in cleaner technologies and the need of financial aids for profit maximizing firms operating in cleaner markets this work provides a decision making tool to determine the near optimal degree of each of the above dimension in multiple business fronts

information aggregation rationality and the condorcet jury theorem the condorcet jury theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the better of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote sincerely in the collective decision making a seemingly innocuous assumption given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative however in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference in particular sincere voting does not constitute a nash equilibrium a satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably do better than individuals therefore has yet to be derived

customer regulatory and competitive pressure as drivers of environmental innovation we develop an economic analysis in order to examine the effects of consumer regulatory and competitive pressure on firm investments in environmentally friendly production specifically we ask why do firms vary in their levels of environmental innovation under what conditions are such pressures effective in bringing about environmental innovation we first consider a monopolist who faces the twin pressures of reduced customer demand and regulatory penalties as a result of its emissions in response to these pressures the firm has the opportunity to make a costly investment in reduction of emissions secondly we consider a competitive scenario in which two firms compete for environmentally sensitive customers solving our model we find that pressure has the intended effect as long as the firm s initial level of emissions is below a certain threshold if the emissions are above this threshold we find that pressure might have an adverse effect on the firm s environmental investment and that subsidies that support environmental innovation can be a better alternative we also show that competition over environmentally sensitive customers can improve the effectiveness of environmental pressures

voting behavior and information aggregation in elections with private information we analyze two candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters each voter has noisy private information about the state variable we show that the fraction of voters whose vote depends on their private information goes to zero as the size of the electorate goes to infinity nevertheless elections fully aggregate information in the sense that the chosen candidate would not change if all private information were common knowledge equilibrium voting behavior is to a large extent determined by the electoral rule i e if a candidate is required to get at least x percent of the vote in order to win the election then in equilibrium this candidate gets very close to x percent of the vote with probability close to one finally if the distribution from which preferences are drawn is uncertain then elections will generally not satisfy full information equivalence and the fraction of voters who take informative action does not converge to zero

game theoretical perspectives on dual channel supply chain competition with price discounts and pricing schemes abstract this paper evaluates the impact of price discount contracts and pricing schemes on the dual channel supply chain competition channel conflict occurs when the supplier enters the online direct channel traditional contracts normally require tedious administrational participation full information of the cost structures and other factors the introduction of simple price discount contracts aims at providing easy implementation and effective coordination results from supplier stackelberg retailer stackelberg and nash game theoretic perspectives we show that the scenarios with price discount contracts can outperform the non contract scenarios in addition we show consistent pricing scheme can reduce the channel conflict by inducing more profit to the retailer the leader in the games might but is not guaranteed to have advantages

inventory management under joint product recovery and cap and trade constraints abstract the influence of environmental legislation in inventory control policies is explored previous work on product recovery is extended using the introduction of a cap and trade mechanism in an infinite horizon inventory system in which demand and returns are uncertain demand is met through two different sources namely manufacturing and remanufacturing which differ in cost and greenhouse gas emissions the main contributions of this paper are 1 comparison of system operation in terms of cost and environmental performance under conventional and green inventory policies and 2 managerial insights into the structure of green inventory policies to illustrate the impact of a cap and trade scheme a numerical example is used we solved the problem as a markov decision process and characterized the inventory policies based on the optimal replenishment strategy we also conducted a sensitivity analysis to examine the effect of underlying environmental parameters such as the emission cap and the allowance price in the policy structures the results indicate that decisions are sensitive to carbon prices the inventory policy could play an important role in compliance with environmental legislation although there is threshold carbon price beyond which the company must focus on strategic decisions rather than tactical decisions

the role of co opetition in low carbon manufacturing abstract low carbon manufacturing has become a strategic objective for many developed and developing economies this study examines the role of co opetition in achieving this objective we investigate the pricing and emissions reduction policies for two rival manufacturers with different emission reduction efficiencies under the cap and trade policy we assume that the product demand is price and emission sensitive based on non cooperative and cooperative games the optimal solutions for the two manufacturers are derived in the purely competitive and co opetitive market environments respectively through the discussion and numerical analysis we uncovered that in both pure competition and co opetition models the two manufacturers optimal prices depend on the unit price of carbon emission trading in addition higher emission reduction efficiency leads to lower optimal unit carbon emissions and higher profit in both the pure competition and co petition models interestingly compared to pure competition co opetition will lead to more profit and less total carbon emissions however the improvement in economic and environmental performance is based on higher product prices and unit carbon emissions

including sustainability criteria into inventory models research on sustainability performance has considerably enriched operations management literature in recent years however work with quantitative models is still scarce this paper contributes by revisiting classical inventory methods taking sustainability concerns into account we believe that reducing all aspects of sustainable development to a single objective is not desirable we thus reformulate the classical economic order quantity model as a multiobjective problem we refer to this model as the sustainable order quantity model then a multi echelon extension of the sustainable order quantity model is studied for both models the set of efficient solutions pareto optimal solutions is analytically characterized these results are used to provide some insights about the effectiveness of different regulatory policies to control carbon emissions we also use an interactive procedure that allows the decision maker to quickly identify the best option among these solutions the proposed interactive procedure is a new combination of multi criteria decision analysis techniques

expressive voting and government redistribution testing tullock s charity of the uncharitable models of expressive voting postulate that voters will consume ideological stances on issues by voting for them even when they are against the voter s own narrow selfinterest if the probability of being a decisive voter is low when a voter is unlikely to sway the outcome the odds that avoter will incur any real personal cost a higher tax burden for example from her own expressive vote is small we testand find support for tullock s straightforward empiricalimplication of this model that government welfare transfer payments are inversely related to the probability of being thedecisive voter

fixed cost and resource allocation based on dea cross efficiency abstract in many managerial applications situations frequently occur when a fixed cost is used in constructing the common platform of an organization and needs to be shared by all related entities or decision making units dmus it is of vital importance to allocate such a cost across dmus where there is competition for resources data envelopment analysis dea has been successfully used in cost and resource allocation problems whether it is a cost or resource allocation issue one needs to consider both the competitive and cooperative situation existing among dmus in addition to maintaining or improving efficiency the current paper uses the cross efficiency concept in dea to approach cost and resource allocation problems because dea cross efficiency uses the concept of peer appraisal it is a very reasonable and appropriate mechanism for allocating a shared resource cost it is shown that our proposed iterative approach is always feasible and ensures that all dmus become efficient after the fixed cost is allocated as an additional input measure the cross efficiency dea based iterative method is further extended into a resource allocation setting to achieve maximization in the aggregated output change by distributing available resources such allocations for fixed costs and resources are more acceptable to the players involved because the allocation results are jointly determined by all dmus rather than a specific one the proposed approaches are demonstrated using an existing data set that has been applied in similar studies

green consumerism and pollution control abstract in this paper we show that collective action by environmentally aware green consumers who derive benefits from consuming environmentally cleaner products can reduce pollution and improve social welfare in the same manner as pollution taxes or subsidies for reducing pollution can we construct a model with two competing firms each producing a good of different environmental quality and two types of consumers with high and low preferences for environmental quality and characterize a benchmark equilibrium in which each consumer acts individually and disregards that his decision to buy a good may affect the level of pollution we then show that compared to the benchmark equilibrium collective action by consumers with high preference who take into account the impact of their combined decision to buy a good on pollution will result in an equilibrium with not only lower pollution and higher social welfare but also higher prices and profits for the firms

a generalized dea model for centralized resource allocation abstract in this paper we introduced a new generalized centralized resource allocation model which extends lozano and villa s and asmild et al s models to a more general case in order to uncover the sources of such total input contraction in the generalized centralized resource allocation model we applied the structural efficiency to further decompose it into three components the aggregate technical efficiency the aggregate allocative efficiency and re transferable efficiency components the proposed models are not only flexible enough for the central decision maker to adjust the inputs and outputs to achieve the total input contraction but also identify the sources of such total input contraction thereby giving rise to an important interpretation and understanding of the generalized centralized resource allocation model finally an empirical example is used to illustrate the approach

the effects of emission trading on production and inventories in the arrow karlin model abstract the paper deals with the effect of introduction of tradable permits on the production inventory strategy of a firm it is assumed that the firm will minimize its costs the cost function consists of linear holding and convex production costs after introducing emission trading the cost function will contain a linear emission procurement selling cost we will compare the optimal production inventory strategy before tradable permits and thereafter the mathematical investigation is based on the well known dynamic arrow karlin model

would rational voters acquire costly information abstract we analyze an election in which voters are uncertain about which of two alternatives is better for them voters can acquire some costly information about the alternatives in agreement with downs s rational ignorance hypothesis individual investment in political information declines to zero as the number of voters increases however if the marginal cost of information is near zero for nearly irrelevant information there is a sequence of equilibria such that the election outcome is likely to correspond to the interests of the majority for arbitrarily large numbers of voters thus rationally ignorant voters are consistent with a well informed electorate

a theory of consumer boycotts under symmetric information and imperfect competition this article models strategic interactions between non identical duopolistic firms and a public interest environmental organisation eo that promotes green production practices by threatening consumer boycotts against brown producers the article describes when boycotts are deterred by prior firm commitments to be green and also when a boycott arises in equilibrium despite symmetric information when a boycott arises it is either a small persistent boycott against the small firm in the industry or a large transitory boycott against the large firm in the industry that prompts the target firm to accede to the boycott demands quickly

facts alternative facts and fact checking in times of post truth politics abstract how effective is fact checking in countervailing alternative facts i e misleading statements by politicians in a randomized online experiment during the 2017 french presidential election campaign we subjected subgroups of 2480 french voters to alternative facts by the extreme right candidate marine le pen and or corresponding facts about the european refugee crisis from official sources we find that i alternative facts are highly persuasive ii fact checking improves factual knowledge of voters iii but it does not affect policy conclusions or support for the candidate iv exposure to facts alone does not decrease support for the candidate even though voters update their knowledge we find evidence consistent with the view that at least part of the effect can be explained by raising salience of the immigration issue

the market for news we investigate the market for news under two assumptions that readers hold beliefs which they like to see confirmed and that newspapers can slant stories toward these beliefs we show that on the topics where readers share common beliefs one should not expect accuracy even from competitive media competition results in lower prices but common slanting toward reader biases on topics where reader beliefs diverge such as politically divisive issues however newspapers segment the market and slant toward extreme positions yet in the aggregate a reader with access to all news sources could get an unbiased perspective generally speaking reader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in media than competition per se

a comparative analysis of greening policies across supply chain structures abstract in this paper we examine an apparel serial supply chain whose players initiate product greening we consider situations in which the players cooperate or act individually our problem is motivated by recent developments in the supply chains of global apparel players we build game theoretic models and show how greening levels prices and profits are influenced by channel structures we also study the impact of greening costs and consumer sensitivity towards green apparels we propose a two part tariff contract to coordinate the green channel our key contribution lies in the model of decision making of various supply chain structures and analyzing its impact on the players and supply chain the problem throws interesting insights into the strategies of apparel players and their key decisions

moral bias in large elections theory and experimental evidence in this article we provide evidence that voters in large elections tend to vote against their material self interest and to vote for a morally or ethically appealing alternative it may seem puzzling that voters might behave differently in small elections than they do in large ones however we show that such behavior is a logical consequence of voters having a conflict between obtaining a better material outcome and choosing a moral action we develop a simple model of this conflict and show that decreasing the probability that a single vote is decisive i e pivot probability reduces the importance of outcomes relative to actions in voter decision making because pivot probability is generally small in large elections alternatives that are understood by voters to be morally superior are more likely to win in large elections than in small ones thus compared to the preferences of voters election results will be biased in favor of moral alternatives 1 the model produces a set of predictions that we test in a laboratory experiment to clarify ideas consider a situation in which two outcomes are possible a and b assume that b gives

an experimental study of expressive voting in this paper we report results of an initial attempt to test the theory of expressive voting our experiment involves requiring subjects to vote between receiving a in cash or having b donated to charity on their behalf across subjects we vary the probability that their vote will decide which disbursement is made as the probability of being decisive is lowered the opportunity cost of giving expression to charitable sentiment decreases hence the likelihood of voting in accordance with such sentiment is expected to increase we find weak support for the hypothesis but the results do not replicate when we alter the parameter settings limitations of our design are discussed

the curse of uninformed voting an experimental study we study majority voting over two alternatives in small groups individuals have identical preferences but are uncertain about which alternative can better achieve their common interest before voting each individual can obtain information by buying a valuable but imperfect signal about the better alternative voting is either voluntary or compulsory in the compulsory mode each individual must vote between the two alternatives while in the voluntary mode they can also abstain an uninformed random vote generates a negative externality since it may override an informative group decision in pivotal events in our experiments participants in randomly re matched groups obtain information more often with compulsory than voluntary voting and the average number of signals is greater in larger than smaller groups surprisingly uninformed voting is common even in the voluntary mode finally group performance is poor in all treatments indicating the need to reconsider current practice of jury and committee voting

competitive investment in clean technology and uninformed green consumers abstract in a market where consumers and the regulatory authorities are not fully informed about the actual production technology or environmental performance of firms that engage in strategic competition i study the effect of environmental consciousness of consumers on firms incentive to invest in cleaner technology firms compete in prices and may signal their environmental performance to uninformed consumers through prices i also analyze the effect of an expected liability on firms in this setting compared to full information incomplete information generates higher strategic incentive to invest in cleaner technology particularly when consciousness and or expected liability are not too high requiring mandatory disclosure of technology or environmental performance may discourage such investment even though consumers and the regulator are uninformed competition has a positive effect relative to monopoly on the incentive to invest

when votes are words not deeds some evidence from the nuclear freeze referendum according to our empirical results voting patterns in the nfr were consistent with the central thesis of an expressive model that moral expression dominates consequentialist behavior when choice is costless while consequentialist theory would predict that owners of capital would favor nuclear weapons capital owners could afford to vote contrary to their interests and in line with common morality because the costs of moral expression in the nfr were so low just as the capital ownership variables do not work in the direction predicted by our consequentialist model neither does income does this mean that wealthy voters cast votes diametrically opposed to their self interest not at all the expressive model contends that when voting is costless people do not have interests but rather moral judgments which now cost very little to express indeed when votes involve words not even individuals interests in government expenditure can be detected

tax subsidy policies in the presence of environmentally aware consumers abstract we study policy measures to improve environmental quality in the presence of environmentally aware consumers we consider two sets of policy instruments uniform policies for the firms and policies that discriminate between the firms based on their environmental quality for the latter set either the better performer is rewarded with a subsidy or the worse performer is punished with a tax we find that while a uniform subsidy policy improves average environmental quality a uniform tax policy worsens it further while a discriminatory subsidy policy reduces total pollution and enhances aggregate welfare a discriminatory tax policy may increase total pollution and may reduce aggregate welfare

multi item production planning with carbon cap and trade mechanism abstract carbon emission control becomes a challenge in recent years and carbon emission trading is an effective way to curb carbon emission this paper investigates the multi item production planning problem with carbon cap and trade mechanism in which a firm uses a common capacity and carbon emission quota to produce multiple products for fulfilling independent stochastic demands and the firm can buy or sell the right to emit carbon on a trading market of carbon emission a profit maximization model is proposed to characterize the optimization problem the optimal policy of production and carbon trading decisions is analyzed and an efficient solution method with linear computational complexity is presented for solving the optimal solution the impacts of carbon price carbon cap on the shadow price of the common capacity production decisions carbon emission and the total profit are investigated the comparisons of the carbon cap and trade policy and the taxation policy are given to show the effectiveness of the policies numerical analyses are presented for illustrating our findings and obtaining some managerial insights and policy implication

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

ignorance and bias in collective decisions we study theoretically and experimentally a committee with common interests committee members do not know which of two alternatives is the best but each member can acquire privately a costly signal before casting a vote under either majority or unanimity rule in the experiment as predicted by bayesian equilibrium voters are more likely to acquire information under majority rule and attempt to counter the bias in favor of one alternative under unanimity rule as opposed to bayesian equilibrium predictions however many committee members vote when uninformed moreover uninformed voting is strongly associated with a lower propensity to acquire information we show that an equilibrium model of subjective prior beliefs can account for both these phenomena and provides a good overall fit to the observed patterns of behavior both in terms of rational ignorance and biases

voting when money and morals conflict an experimental test of expressive voting abstract moral considerations may matter much in voting because the costs of expressing support for a morally worthy cause may be low in a referendum these costs depend on whether a voter expects to affect the outcome of the referendum to test the low cost theory of expressive voting we experimentally investigate a proposal to tax everyone and to donate tax revenues the analysis of expectations and voting decisions shows that the low cost theory fails to explain voting decisions instead we find that voters tend to approve of the proposal if they expect others to approve too

abstention ideology and information acquisition we consider an election in which each voter can collect information of different precision voters have asymmetric information and preferences that vary both in terms of ideology and intensity in contrast to all other models of voting with endogenous information in equilibrium voters collect information of different qualities we show that information and abstention are not necessarily negatively correlated some voters are more likely to abstain the more informed they are we also discuss the manner in which incentives to acquire information are non monotonic in terms of both ideology and the level of intensity

decision support for target based resource allocation of public services in multiunit and multilevel systems this paper is concerned with the problem of resource allocationand target setting in the provision of public services the paper develops a network based representation of multilevel resource management with equity efficiency and effectiveness being recognised as the fundamental objectives of the system on the modelling side the proposed method combines data envelopment analysis and goal programming formulations integrated within an interactive planning framework an illustrative application on fire departments is used to show the applicability of the method developed to assist the resource allocation process