evaluating the comprehensive benefit of eco industrial parks by employing multi criteria decision making approach for circular economy abstract with the increasing conflicts among economic growth environmental deterioration and resource shortage as an effective way to achieve the sustainable development and circular economy the eco industrial park gradually becomes a critical research issue in the field of recycling economy in this paper a hybrid framework for evaluating the comprehensive benefit of eco industrial parks from the perspective of circular economy was proposed firstly the evaluation index system for eco industrial parks was constructed by employing the grey delphi method according to the opinions provided by experts from relevant fields which includes economic benefit criteria social benefit criteria environmental benefit criteria ecology industry construction criteria and management level criteria consisting of seventeen quantitative sub criteria and nine qualitative sub criteria secondly in order to solve complicated uncertain and ambiguous problems under the fuzzy background a hybrid multi criteria decision making mcdm approach was put forward on the basis of superiority linguistic ratings and entropy weight method for weight determination as well as fuzzy vikor for ranking alternatives finally the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed hybrid mcdm approach was demonstrated through a case analysis of six representative eco industrial parks in china and the comprehensive benefits of six eco industrial parks were prioritized effectively the hybrid mcdm approach in this paper presents a great potential in evaluating and ranking the comprehensive benefits of eco industrial parks through solving complex and ambiguous problems in a fuzzy environment and varying mcdm tools the evaluation findings by employing the proposed mcdm approach can provide references for the construction and management of eco industrial parks and relevant policy formulation

an experimental validation of hypothetical wtp for a recyclable product using a within subject experiment we compare hypothetical andreal willingness to pay wtp for an improvement in therecyclability of a product subjects are faced with a real paymentscenario after they have responded to a hypothetical question contrary to most of the results obtained in similar studies at apopulation level there are no significant median differencesbetween actual and hypothetical stated values of wtp however within subject comparisons between hypothetical and actual valuesindicate that subjects stating a low high hypothetical wtp tendto underestimate overestimate the value of their actualcontributions

population growth and savings in ldcs a survey article both population growth and savings have traditionally taken a certain place of pride among models of growth and development the purpose of this paper is to examine the literature concerning the hypothesis that the savings rate itself is a function of the population growth rate and this effect exacerbates the negative effect of population on economic growth the evidence is examined from three perspectives i macroeconomic effects of variations in the age structure of the population ii choice theoretic models of family decision making particularly the joint determination of fertility decisions and savings decisions and iii market level interactions of variables which determine individual decisions the paper concludes that both population growth and savings rates are inextricably tied up in the process of economic development there are many ways in which the two variables may interact but no generalizations can be safely made across countries

energy consumption and gdp in developing countries a cointegrated panel analysis in this paper we re investigate the co movement and the causality relationship between energy consumption and gdp in 18 developing countries using data for the period 1975 to 2001 recently developed tests for the panel unit root heterogeneous panel cointegration and panel based error correction models are employed the empirical results provide clear support of a long run cointegration relationship after allowing for the heterogeneous country effect the long run relationship is estimated using a full modified ols the evidence shows that long run and short run causalities run from energy consumption to gdp but not vice versa this result indicates that energy conservation may harm economic growth in developing countries regardless of being transitory or permanent

environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century an age adjusted citation analysis of the influential articles journals authors and institutions we investigate the influence of articles authors journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics we depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field we adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article s publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors we analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009 we provide rankings of the influential articles authors journals and institutions and find that ecological economics energy economics and the journal of environmental economics and management have the most influential articles they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most the university of maryland resources for the future the university of east anglia and the world bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics

kalundborg symbiosis fostering progressive innovation in environmental networks abstract many environmental networks form around specific initiatives with prescribed outcome objectives when the objectives are met the networks frequently disband technological transfer halts and the social capital built up during the initiative fragments in many cases disappearing altogether in an era of globally unsustainable economic activity encouraging progressive innovation and broadening the scale and scope of knowledge transfer is one strategy for helping to attenuate ecological damage this paper presents empirical field work which explores the kalundborg symbiosis in denmark a network of economic actors that has organically come together to implement industrial ecology principles and documents how this network has managed to foster progressive innovation the four drivers which emerged as central for fostering collaboration are i a pragmatic environmental mindset ii the existence of opportunities to explore possibilities iii mutually beneficial initiatives and iv the presence of dominant needs which stimulate a proactive search for solutions the paper also contributes to sustainable public policy and urban planning literature by considering how municipal involvement can foster progressive and sustained development within the kalundborg symbiosis

assessing the consumers willingness to adopt a prepayment metering system in nigeria abstract despite the rising popularity in the adoption and usage of prepayment meters little is still known about the drivers of its adoption we examine the willingness to adopt prepayment metering ppm for a sample of nigerian households that were not prepayment users double hurdle models were estimated to account for households decisions concerning billing system switching behaviour and households willingness to pay wtp the estimated results revealed that decisions to adopt a prepayment meter are significantly affected by current electricity spending current billing method and the split incentive problem whereas current electricity spending significantly increased the tendency to adopt ppm the split incentive problem reduced the probability of adoption although unmetered consumers were more likely to express a willingness to adopt a ppm system than post paid customers they did not intend to pay a significantly higher amount to obtain the prepayment service income did not play a significant role in decision making concerning ppm adoption and the corresponding wtp amount these results cast doubt on the validity of the widely held belief that low income may be responsible for ppm adoption reflecting the widespread usage of ppm by low income households

the disparity between willingness to accept and willingness to pay measures of value psychologists have long argued that people are much more averse to a loss than attracted to an equivalent gain this behavior termed loss aversion has been formalized by kahneman and tversky 1979 in their reformulation of expected utility theory prospect theory in prospect theory the utility function is replaced by a value function that evaluates changes in income from the current level increases in income are weighted by a relatively small marginal utility decreases in income are weighted by a much larger marginal utility in effect the value function implies that a kink in the relationship between utility and income occurs at the initial income or reference point and that the slope of the utility function for losses in income is steeper than it is for gains in a recent paper knetsch and sinden 1984 report a series of experiments that demonstrate the existence of a large disparity between willingness to accept wta and willingness to pay wtp measures of value they argue that the psychological theory of loss aversion explains this difference economic theory would suggest that individuals who exhibit a large disparity between wta and wtp are perhaps underperceiving the value of gains or overperceiving the value of losses are behaving in an irrational manner and will consequently achieve a lower level of well being than if they behaved in a true utility maximizing manner this would in contrast to loss aversion usually imply near equal values for wta and wtp see willig 1976 further documentation of a larger than expected disparity between wta and wtp has been obtained in surveys asking for the value of a variety of public goods for example cummings brookshire and schulze 1986 document six

bridging the gap between the field and the lab environmental goods policy maker input and consequentiality abstract this paper explores the criterion validity of stated preference methods through experimental referenda that capture key characteristics of a stated preference survey for a proposed environmental program in particular we investigate whether advisory referenda where participant votes have either known or unknown weight in the policy decision can elicit values comparable to that of a standard incentive compatible referendum when participants regard their votes as consequential our results suggest there is no elicitation bias with advisory referenda for advisory referenda where participants view their votes as inconsequential and for purely hypothetical referenda we observe elicitation bias

employment protection legislation and firm growth evidence from a natural experiment a swedish reform in 2001 made it possible for firms with less than 11 employees to exclude two from the last in first out principle in case of layoffs the reform increased employment growth with o

effect of distance of transportation on willingness to pay for food abstract consumers interest in locally produced foods is increasing hence there is a need to decipher and quantify consumers desire for local foods and understand the underlying causes of this demand more specifically we examine in this paper the issue of distance of transportation and its impact on consumer preferences we investigate how consumers willingness to pay wtp for food varies with the distance the food traveled results from non hypothetical second price auctions indicate that average wtp is falling in distance traveled indicating a preference for local production results also indicate that the marginal value of a mile traveled depends on the type of food studied apples vs wine socio demographic characteristics perceptions of freshness taste and food safety as well as support of local economy impact wtp for local foods

promoting local foods in small island states the role of information policies ensuring the success of agriculture is at the heart of food security and it is necessary to examine strategies that tackle agricultural development through the production and consumption of sustainable food products one way to increase food security in small island states is to develop local food sectors by increasing consumers awareness about local products with sustainable characteristics we designed an economic experiment to assess consumers willingness to pay wtp for yams with sustainable characteristics the origin the intrinsic quality of an alternative variety and the mode of production the results showed that labelling significantly changes consumers valuation of the different yam profiles consumers wtp for local yams 2 85 kg 1 was significantly higher than for imported yams 1 80 kg 1 while the organic mode of production derives a significant premium if information on production methods has been disseminated the results also suggested that organoleptic characteristics of new varieties should not be overlooked we conclude on how the labelling strategy could be facilitated through a policy targeting the development of the local food sector

the causes of order effects in contingent valuation surveys an experimental investigation contingent valuation researchers have found that the hypothetical values respondents place on a nested sequence of environmental goods are sensitive to the order in which the goods are presented typically the smallest bundle of goods is valued more highly if presented first than if following more comprehensive bundles such effects appear even when each bundle is valued from an exclusive list or as an alternative to any other so that income and substitution effects are controlled we conduct lab experiments where participants are asked to value sequences of nested goods for purchase from an exclusive list using an incentive compatible becker degroot marschak mechanism we test whether order effects occur in valuation for a induced value goods b actual private goods and c identical private goods that are to be donated to charities we find significant order effects when the goods are valued for own use but not when they are valued for donation

designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice an overview of the issues abstract payments for environmental services pes have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external non market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services es in this introductory paper we set the stage for the rest of this special issue of ecological economics by reviewing the main issues arising in pes design and implementation and discussing these in the light of environmental economics we start with a discussion of pes definition and scope we proceed to review some of the principal dimensions and design characteristics of pes programs and then analyze how pes compares to alternative policy instruments finally we examine in detail two important aspects of pes programs their effectiveness and their distributional implications pes is not a silver bullet that can be used to address any environmental problem but a tool tailored to address a specific set of problems those in which ecosystems are mismanaged because many of their benefits are externalities from the perspective of ecosystem managers pes is based on the beneficiary pays rather than the polluter pays principle and as such is attractive in settings where es providers are poor marginalized landholders or powerful groups of actors an important distinction within pes is between user financed pes in which the buyers are the users of the es and government financed pes in which the buyers are others typically the government acting on behalf of es users in practice pes programs differ in the type and scale of es demand the payment source the type of activity paid for the performance measure used as well as the payment mode and amount the effectiveness and efficiency of pes depends crucially on program design

a simultaneous approach to the estimation of risk aversion and the subjective time discount rate in this paper we analyze a sample of 1832 individuals who responded to six randomly generated lottery questions that differ with respect to chance prize and the timing of the draw using a model that explicitly allows for consumption smoothing we obtain an estimate of relative risk aversion of 82 instead assuming consumption to be immediate gives an estimate of 2 close to what is traditionally reported while a model of full asset integration gives estimates higher by several orders of magnitude our results show that estimated risk aversion is sensitive to the assumptions made with respect to the consumption profile and that it is possible to determine the level of asset integration endogenously the average subjective time discount rate which includes a preference for the present equals 6 percent per month it is found that both parameters vary strongly over individuals and that the variation can be explained by income age gender and entrepreneurship consistent with the majority of previous evidence

the nature of the savings function in developing countries a survey of the theoretical and empirical literature the savings rate marginal or average is regarded as a key performance indicator by development economists and foreign aid practitioners admonish their clients to increase their savings ratio as a primary condition for achieving a satisfactory rate of economic growth however not only have questions been raised regarding the significance of the savings effort as an independent determinant of economic progress but the formulation of policies designed to increase the savings propensity has suffered from a dearth of knowledge regarding the nature of the savings function in developing countries a number of alternative savings hypotheses derived mainly from the literature relating to developed economies have been advanced but the paucity of reliable data has made it difficult to test these hypotheses and obtain results which warrant a reasonable degree of confidence the purpose of this article is a to review the theoretical and empirical literature on the savings function in developing countries b to assess critically the findings with respect to the major hypotheses and c to summarize the state of our knowledge on this important topic we shall begin with a brief review of the nature of the data on savings in developing countries with which economic analysts must work

are choice experiments incentive compatible a test with quality differentiated beef steaks this study compares hypothetical and nonhypothetical responses to choice experiment questions we test for hypothetical bias in a choice experiment involving beef ribeye steaks with differing quality attributes in general hypothetical responses predicted higher probabilities of purchasing beef steaks than nonhypothetical responses thus hypothetical choices overestimate total willingness to pay for beef steaks however marginal willingness to pay for a change in steak quality is in general not statistically different across hypothetical and actual payment settings

how reliable are meta analyses for international benefit transfers meta analysis has increasingly been used to synthesise the environmental valuation literature but only a few test the use of these analyses for benefit transfer these are typically based on national studies only however meta analyses of valuation studies across countries are a potentially powerful tool for benefit transfer especially for environmental goods where the domestic literature is scarce we test the reliability of such international meta analytic transfers and find that even under conditions of homogeneity in valuation methods cultural and institutional conditions across countries and a meta analysis with large explanatory power the transfer errors could still be large further international meta analytic transfers do not on average perform better than simple value transfers averaging over domestic studies thus we question whether the use of meta analysis for practical benefit transfer achieves reliability gains justifying the increased effort however more meta analytic benefit transfer tests should be performed for other environmental goods and other countries before discarding international meta analysis as a tool for benefit transfer

understanding the consequences of consequentiality testing the validity of stated preferences in the field this study pursues the external validation of stated preference methods by comparing survey responses from verified voters with the outcome of a parallel public referendum on a conservation and preservation program to be funded by a local property tax surcharge the majority of respondents were unaware of the upcoming referendum and the experimental design allows us to control for referenda related information effects as well as respondents perceptions regarding the consequentiality i e the potential policy impact of their survey votes we find the survey under predicts yes referendum votes at the precinct level these differences go away however if we focus only on respondents who perceived their survey vote to be consequential negative hypothetical bias among inconsequential survey respondents is also evident in the estimation of willingness to pay and controlling for consequentiality increases construct validity

gasoline demand revisited an international meta analysis of elasticities meta analysis is used to determine if there are factors that systematically affect price and income elasticity estimates in studies of gasoline demand four econometric models are estimated using long run and short run price and income elasticity estimates from previous studies as the dependent variables explanatory variables include functional form lag structure time span national setting estimation technique and other features of the model structure elasticity estimates are found to be sensitive to the inclusion or exclusion of some measure of vehicle ownership static models appear to overestimate short run elasticities underestimate long run price elasticities but pick up the full long run income responsiveness there is variation in the elasticity of demand across countries especially in the short run and gasoline demand appears to be getting more price elastic and less income elastic over time

an inferred valuation method although estimates of people s values for public goods are often needed to conduct cost benefit analysis existing value elicitation methods are prone to a number of well documented biases we argue that some of these biases result because people derive utility from the act of saying they are willing to pay for a good to counteract this phenomenon we consider an approach that asks people to predict or infer others values for a good instead of asking people to state their own value both a conceptual model and results from a laboratory experiment lend support for the new approach

are consumers in developing countries willing to pay more for micronutrient dense biofortified foods evidence from a field experiment in uganda vitamin a deficiency is a major health problem in africa and in many other developing countries biofortified staple crops that are high in pro vitamin a have the potential to reduce the prevalence of vitamin a deficiency using a choice experiment with the real product in uganda we quantify the magnitude of the premium or discount in consumers willingness to pay wtp that may be associated with it results suggest that taste plays an important role in consumer acceptance and the provision of nutrition information does translate into substantial premiums for the biofortified variety there is a substantial hypothetical bias in the wtp for the new varieties and while cheap talk mitigates this bias it does not eliminate it

determinants of private savings behaviour in turkey this study investigates the effects on private saving rates of a number of policy and non policy variables the analysis covers the period 1968 1994 the empirical private saving model for turkey is estimated the findings support the hypothesis that private saving rates have strong inertia the evidence indicates that government saving does not tend to crowd out private savings and the ricardian equivalence does not hold strictly income level has a positive impact on private saving rate and growth rate of income is not statistically significant from a policy point of view financial depth and development measures in turkey suggest that countries with deeper financial systems tend to have higher private saving rates private credit and real interest rates try to capture the severity of the borrowing constraints and the degree of financial repression for turkey moreover the negative impact of life expectancy rate lends support to the life cycle hypothesis the precautionary motive for saving is suppor

reliability and predictive validity of contingent values does the nature of the good matter abstract because the contingent valuation mechanism cvm elicits verbal reports of maximum willingness to pay and not actual willingness to pay analysts have expressed doubts about the reliability and validity of contingent values for commodities such as environmental amenities this skepticism is usually attributed to the amorphous nature of the commodity and to peoples lack of familiarity or experience however our comparison of two commodities which lie at polar extremes of the private good public good continuum suggests that the nature of the good may have little influence on the reliability and predictive validity of the cvm instead aspects of the cvm itself e g explicit payment obligation may be more important for high intention behavior consistency

estimating consumer willingness to supply and willingness to pay for curbside recycling we estimate the willingness to pay for curbside recycling based on a contingent valuation survey of 600 residents of a large southeastern united states city the best estimate of willingness to pay for curbside recycling is 2 29 month after adjustment for hypothetical bias we also report the results of a field experiment designed to test the effectiveness of explicit monetary incentives and communication appeals to influence the decision to recycle and the quantity of materials to recycle while households respond to the monetary cost of recycling the effects of the token ex ante incentives and appeals appear to be small jel d61 q21

the relationship between regional industrial organizing levels and ecological economic efficiency abstract this paper investigated the roles of industrial organizing levels economic resource endowments and natural resource endowments in the development of ecological economic efficiency using data from china during the past decade besides an original assessing method for industrial organizing levels was developed this paper investigated resource usage efficiency and pollution emission efficiency to determine the ecological economic efficiency and this relationship was defined by the artificial neural network based regression method in general china s industrial organizational levels and ecological economic efficiency increased in the past decade and had a positive relationship between them however resource endowments had a negative correlation with the ecological economic efficiency moreover no obvious quantitative relationship was found between the organizational levels and the efficiency of water usage after a deep discussion policy suggestions were offered such as enhancing the marketization of waste dealing businesses more publicity regarding preserving resource rich regions and increasing industrial organizing levels

dependency rates and savings rates reply arthur goldberger s comment is a tempest in a teacup this is readily verified from the data presented in table 1 this table reproduces from my original paper the coefficients for paired equations estimated with three different samples in which in s n and ln si y were the dependent variables as the data of table 1 indicate in 7 of the 12 cases the coefficients are identical through the second decimal place furthermore all the discrepancies are quantitatively very small in 9 cases the paired parameter estimates are within 1 percent of each other in the remaining cases the differences are of the magnitude of 0825 0012 and 0011 these are well within the margins of accuracy within which anyone views data generated from the national income accounts of the less developed countries in light of these considerations it is difficult to understand the tone of goldberger s comment the reason for the slight discrepancies is straightforward my observations for s n and s y were computed separately from data supplied by the statistical office of the agency for international development with the rounding introduced by the series for n and y it is not surprising that the series for s n is not identically equal to the series which would be obtained by forming s n from the product of y n and s y similar slight discrepancies have also been reported in other econometric work in which equations for s n and s y have been estimated with separately computed data series in any case nowhere in my paper did i even refer to the precise numerical parameter estimates obtained in my equations the main conclusions of the paper were that the dependency variables were quantitatively an important determinant of international savings rates and further that introduction of these variables greatly reduced the importance of percapita income on which some previous discussions had focused neither of these conclusions is affected by goldberger s comment

the economics of corporate social responsibility a firm level perspective survey this paper analyzes the economics of corporate social responsibility csr as a private response to market imperfections in order to satisfy social preferences depending on whether they affect regulation competition or contracts market imperfections driving csr decisions are classified in three categories public goods and bads and altruism imperfect competition and incomplete contracts we successively present these drivers of csr decisions and highlight the nature of incentives external or internal at work and the testable and tested hypotheses in the reviewed studies we finally review the link between csr and financial performance as well as between csr and social and environmental performance a twofold discrepancy appears in the literature opening future research paths a disconnection between our understanding of csr drivers and csr impacts and a knowledge gap between csr financial and social consequences the latter having received little attention

is hypothetical bias a universal phenomenon a multinational investigation a concern with the contingent valuation method cvm is the finding that hypothetical and real statements of value often differ we test whether hypothetical bias broadly defined is independent of location by comparing real and hypothetical votes on a dichotomous choice referendum in china france indiana kansas and niger we find significant differences in hypothetical bias across locations and reject the hypothesis that hypothetical bias is independent of location as opposed to the typical finding reported in the literature subjects in niger significantly understated their willingness to pay in the hypothetical referendum

what s to know about hypothetical bias in stated preference valuation studies abstract hypothetical bias arises in stated preference valuation studies when respondents report a willingness to pay wtp that exceeds what they actually pay using their own money in laboratory or field experiments although this bias is not found in all stated preference surveys hypothetical wtp typically exceeds the actual value by a factor of two to three unfortunately there is no widely accepted general theory of respondent behaviour that explains hypothetical bias therefore two meta analyses are reviewed to test current hypotheses regarding the causes of this overstatement of wtp and the associated recommendations to mitigate the bias suggestions for future research are made including the development of a general theory

risky sports and the value of safety information abstract we develop a theoretical account of how athletes engaged in risky sports value safety information based on our model we postulate that the demand value of such information rises with wealth and exposure and declines with the athlete s appetite for risk we use survey data from a sample of backcountry skiers to empirically test these predictions the high degree of self control over exposure makes these athletes a well suited population to study the demand value of safety information caution is warranted in the empirical analysis as unobserved factors may jointly affect the athlete s perceived risk and his willingness to pay for obtaining safety information we use a recursive two stage estimation approach to account for endogeneity concerns the empirical results are supportive of our theoretical predictions and suggest that variations in athletes demand for safety information can be explained by personal beliefs about risk exposure and deliberate risk taking

the development and estimation of a latent choice multinomial logit model with application to contingent valuation we offer a new approach to investigate hypothetical bias in contingent valuation using a latent choice multinomial logit model to develop this model we extend dempster laird and rubin s 1977 work on the expectations maximization algorithm to the estimation of a multinomial logit model with missing information on category membership our model can be used to determine within choice heterogeneity using data on the preservation of saginaw wetlands in michigan we find evidence for two types of yes responders in the data we suggest that one set of yes responders consists of yea sayers who answer yes to the hypothetical question but are less likely to pay the bid amount if it were real we suggest that the second group of respondents does not suffer from hypothetical bias and are more likely to pay the bid amount if it were real even if the connection to hypothetical bias cannot be made our method can be used in sensitivity analyses of willingness to pay estimates

what experimental protocol influence disparities between actual and hypothetical stated values preferences elicited in hypothetical settings have recently come underscrutiny causing estimates from the contingent valuation method to bechallenged due to perceived hypothetical bias given that the receivedliterature derives value estimates using heterogeneous experimentaltechniques understanding the effects of important design parameters onthe magnitude of hypothetical bias is invaluable in this paper we addressthis issue statistically by using a meta analysis to examine data from 29experimental studies our empirical findings suggest that on averagesubjects overstate their preferences by a factor of about 3 in hypotheticalsettings and that the degree of over revelation is influenced by thedistinction between willingness to pay and willingness to accept publicversus private goods and several elicitation methods

how do journal quality co authorship and author order affect agricultural economists salaries utilizing an original data set containing annual salaries and peer reviewed publication histories for 326 faculty members from top ranked ph d granting programs we examine the labor market for academic agricultural economists the results suggest that higher quality publications have a greater impact on annual earnings that sole authored articles have a higher return than multi authored articles and that no wage premium exists for being the lead author of a non alphabetic article

valuing nature lessons learned and future research directions this paper critically reviews the literature on environmental valuation of ecosystem services across the range of global biomes the main objective of this review is to assess the policy relevance of the information encompassed by the wide range of valuation studies that have been undertaken so far published and other studies now cover most ecosystems with aquatic and marine contexts attracting the least attention there is also a predominance of single function valuation studies studies valuing multiple functions and uses and studies which seek to capture the before and after states as environmental changes take place are rare by and large it is the latter types of analyses that are most important as aids to more rational decision taking in ecosystem conservation versus development situations involving different stakeholders local national and global aggregate global scale estimates of ecosystems value are problematic given the fact that only marginal values are consistent with conventional decision aiding tools such as economic cost benefit analysis in general valuation data provide prima facie support for the hypothesis that net ecosystem service value diminishes with biodiversity and ecosystem loss balmford et al 2002 science 297 p 950 future research effort should include complementary research on multiple ecosystem services that seeks to capture the temporal disturbance profile and its causal factors the explicit recognition of multiple interdependent ecosystem services and values poses both conceptual and empirical research challenges it would serve to transform the practice of research in this sub field via the a priori assumption of multiple and inter dependent use instead of independent single use this line of reasoning can then be extended to the institutional arrangements that determine which values are captured new institutional processes and arrangements are probably required in order to best realise benefit streams from multiple ecosystem use and non use provision across a range of different stakeholders

social responsibility messages and worker wage requirements field experimental evidence from online labor marketplaces this paper examines the effects of employer social responsibility on the wages workers demand through randomized field experiments in two online labor marketplaces workers were recruited for short term jobs and i manipulated whether or not they received information about the employer s social responsibility i then observed the payment workers were willing to accept for the job in the first experiment information about the employer s social responsibility marginally reduced prospective workers wage requirements on average and had a significant effect on the highest performers who were willing to give up the wage differential they would otherwise demand in the second prospective workers submitted 44 lower wage bids for the same job after learning about the employer s social responsibility this paper provides causal empirical evidence of a revealed preference for social responsibility in the workplace and of a greater preference among the highest performers more broadly it provides evidence that

application of the public private partnership model to urban sewage treatment funding shortages can greatly affect the construction and implementation of urban sewage treatment projects applying the public private partnership model to urban sewage treatment projects will increase the financing capacity and mitigate the risk of local debt based on analyses of current urban sewage treatment projects and the relationship between the public private partnership model and these projects we demonstrated that the public private partnership model is applicable to city sewage treatment projects thereby enhancing social capital improving the management and operation of the projects and facilitating various management methods for innovation and optimization we studied the relationships between responsibility and authority benefit sharing and risk sharing using the public private partnership model as well as the main issues that affect urban sewage treatment and we then analyzed these issues from the perspectives of government enterprises intermediary agencies and public groups we conclude that the implementation of public private partnership models affects urban sewage treatment projects by defining the relationship between the government and market based on our comprehensive analysis we provide policy suggestions regarding the public private partnership model for urban sewage treatment with respect to government social capital and intermediary organizations thereby providing a guide to the implementation of the public private partnership model

revealed performances worldwide rankings of economists and economics departments 1990 2000 in this paper i study the production of academic research by economics departments and economists worldwide rankings are provided based on both citations and publications these rankings reveal a dominant position of the united states in the production of economics literature over time however the extent of this dominance is decreasing jel a10 a14

combining revealed and stated preference data to estimate the nonmarket value of ecological services an assessment of the state of the science this paper reviews the marketing transportation and environmental economics literature on the joint estimation of revealed preference rp and stated preference sp data the rp and sp approaches are first described with a focus on the strengths and weaknesses of each recognizing these strengths and weaknesses the potential gains from combining data are described a classification system for combined data that emphasizes the type of data combination and the econometric models used is proposed a methodological review of the literature is pursued based on this classification system examples from the environmental economics literature are highlighted a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each type of jointly estimated model is then presented suggestions for future research in particular opportunities for application of these models to environmental quality valuation are presented

researcher rank stability across alternative output measurement schemes in the context of a time limited research evaluation the new zealand case abstractthis article focuses on the stability of rankings of academics by research productivity in the context of short term decision making in particular the growing use of national research assessment exercises nrae has increased interest in identifying the contributions of individual researchers to an assessment unit s output and ranking the article concentrates on the assessment of individuals using plausible journal ranking schemes we find that despite statistical evidence of a high degree of stability across journal ranking schemes as indicated by rank correlation coefficients the particular ranking scheme used is of great importance to individual researchers this applies with particular force to academics working within a nrae environment based on individual assessment such as new zealand s pbrf

the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth a multiple country test of an oath script hypothetical bias is one of the main issues bedeviling the field of nonmarket valuation the general criticism is that survey responses reflect how people would like to behave rather than how they actually behave in our study of climate change and carbon emissions reductions based on the increasing bulk of evidence from psychology and economics regarding the effects of making promises we investigate the effect of an oath script in a contingent valuation survey the survey was conducted in sweden and china and its results indicate that an oath script has significant effects on respondent behavior in answering willingness to pay wtp questions in both countries the shares of zero wtp responses and extremely high wtp responses decrease when an oath script is used resulting in lower variance furthermore the conditional wtp decreases in the chinese but not in the swedish sample we also find that the effect of the oath script is not generally dependent on respondent characteristics and the few differences we observe vary with the countries

the value of continuous power supply for flemish households abstract this paper estimates the willingness to pay accept wtp wta of flemish households for continuous power supply based on a stated preference approach the data were collected via a choice experiment and were then used to estimate a main effects conditional logit model and a random parameter logit model with interaction effects and correlated preferences power outages are characterized by 6 attributes annual frequency duration peak or off peak announced or unannounced winter or summer and invoice impact all estimates have the expected sign the results are used to assess the marginal wtp wta for each of these attributes overall the outcome suggests that flemish households have heterogeneous preferences regarding power outage attributes and that due to a status quo bias only a relatively small share of them is willing to switch to a lower reliability level if this would be compensated by a bill discount

the second generation of ecological economics how far has the apple fallen from the tree this paper examines the discourse produced in the academic journal ecological economics from its inception in 1989 and compares this discourse with that of the field of environmental economics i used methods for discourse analysis alceste and iramuteq on 6308 abstracts of papers published in four journals namely ecological economics the journal of environmental economics and management environmental values and environmental and resource economics published between 1989 and 2013 the results suggest that the discourses of ecological economics and environmental economics have grown closer over time the semantic classification of co occurrent terms used in ecological economics indicates increasing significance of the notions of ecosystem services and of monetary valuation i argue that this trend is parallel to costanza s career path which suggests the rise of a tacit recognition of the new environmental pragmatic scientific approach i conclude with some of the implications for ee of promoting this kind of discourse to such an extent

endowment structures industrial dynamics and economic growth this paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to explore industrial evolution and economic growth in a closed developing economy the authors show that industries will endogenously upgrade toward the more capital intensive ones as the capital endowment becomes more abundant the model features a continuous inverse v shaped pattern of industrial evolution driven by capital accumulation as the capital endowment reaches a certain threshold a new industry appears prospers then declines and finally disappears while the industry is declining a more capital intensive industry appears and booms ad infinitum explicit solutions are obtained to fully characterize the whole dynamics of perpetual structural change and economic growth implications for industrial policies are discussed

are we willing to pay enough to back the bid valuing the intangible impacts of london s bid to host the 2012 summer olympic games using a contingent valuation survey this paper provides the first empirical test of the proposition that intangible impacts might justify hosting major sporting events on cost benefit grounds respondents drawn from london manchester and glasgow were asked for their willingness to pay wtp to host the 2012 olympic games in london on the basis of the intangible impacts that this event might provide annual mean wtp is 22 12 and 11 per year for 10 years in these 3 uk cities respectively an illustrative total uk wtp for intangible impacts is in the region of 2 billion statistical analysis of wtp determinants reveals a range of plausible explanatory factors such as respondents degree of support for the bid

an incentive compatible conjoint ranking mechanism a simple method for making ranking based conjoint analysis incentive compatible is proposed the incentive compatible mechanism involves people purchasing a product profile with a probability proportional to its assigned rank in an empirical application related to consumer preferences for beef attributes we find that the forecasted market share for a new pasture raised steak obtained using incentive compatible rankings was significantly greater than that implied from traditional hypothetical conjoint rankings people s rankings of ground beef products were not affected by the mechanism or by information about pasture raised beef copyright 2008 oxford university press

economic evaluation of environmental externalities in china s coal fired power generation abstract serious environmental externalities exist in china s power industry environmental economics theory suggests that the evaluation of environmental externality is the basis of designing an efficient regulation the purposes of this study are 1 to identify chinese respondents preferences for green development of electric power industry and the socio economic characteristics behind them 2 to investigate the different attitudes of the respondents towards pollution and co2 reduction 3 to quantitatively evaluate the environmental cost of china s coal fired power generation based on the method of choice experiments ce and the 411 questionnaires with 2466 data points we found that chinese respondents prefer pm2 5 so2 and nox reduction to co2 reduction and that the environment cost of coal fired power plants in china is 0 30 yuan per kwh in addition we found that the socio economic characteristics of income education gender and environmental awareness have significant impacts on respondents choices these findings indicate that the environmental cost of coal fired power generation is a significant factor that requires great consideration in the formulation of electric power development policies in addition importance should also be attached to the implementation of green power price policy and enhancement of environmental protection awareness

mitigating hypothetical bias in stated preference data evidence from sports tourism one of the major criticisms of stated preference data is hypothetical bias using a unique dataset of both stated and actual behavior we test for hypothetical bias of stated preference survey responses we consider whether respondents tend to overstate their participatory sporting event behavior ex ante when compared to their actual behavior at different registration fees we find that stated behavior accurately predicts actual behavior at a middle level of respondent certainty overpredicts actual behavior at a lower level of certainty and underpredicts behavior at a higher level of certainty this result suggests that respondent uncertainty corrections can be used to mitigate hypothetical bias and stated preference data can be used to better understand actual behavior in situations where no data exist jel l83 q51 z2

contingent valuation a new perspective after several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation cv method a consistent behavioral explanation of hypothetical bias is still lacking based on evidence from economics economic psychology and the political sciences i propose an explanation that is based on two simple working hypotheses about respondent behaviour in contingent valuation surveys the first hypothesis is that survey respondents are unable to form consistent preferences about unfamiliar goods unless the choice context offers reliable informative cues that can be rationally exploited in simplified heuristics the second hypothesis is that the probability and impact of strategic responses in dichotomous choice questions about public goods depends on the extent to which the presented hypothetical costs differ from the actual costs the literature on hypothetical bias is revisited in the light of these behavioral hypotheses i find that the hypotheses are generally supported by the empirical data moreover the hypotheses are able to explain several important empirical phenomena that previous research has not been able to explain in particular they solve the puzzle that pre election polls but not cv surveys are able to predict actual referendum outcomes and they explain why income effects on willingness to pay are lower in cv responses than in actual votes if confirmed by further studies the hypotheses will have important implications for future research and practice first the hypothetical costs presented in the dichotomous choice question should to be close enough to the actual costs to be credible to all respondents this can be achieved by specifying the costs as a percentage rather than absolute change in taxes second the respondents should be given the option to answer based on information about the positions of large parties and interest groups with known political orientation rather than based on the raw policy information theory and evidence suggest that this new survey paradigm largely eliminates the fundamental problems of the conventional stated preference methods

convergent validity of attribute based choice questions in stated preference studies the application of attribute based choice questions is well established in the marketing literature but there are unique aspects of the design that warrant investigation to assess their validity for economic welfare estimation three design issues are investigated in this paper 1 the placement of the monetary stimulus policy cost to respondents in the sequence of attributes 2 the number of policy alternatives respondents are asked to consider in choice questions two versus three and 3 the inclusion versus exclusion of a status quo alternative in choice questions the data used to implement these investigations are from a survey designed to estimate the value maine residents place on a farmland conservation easement program tests of convergent validity indicate that the placement of the monetary stimulus first versus last in the list of attributes did not affect estimates of preference parameters significant differences between questions with three versus two alternatives did occur and the inclusion exclusion of a status quo alternative did not affect preference parameters

is the journal ecological economics really in itself a poor and misleading guide to what ecological economics is about a reply to influencing the perception of what and who is important in ecological economics

environmental and ecological economics a citation analysis this study looks at two distinct questions dwhat have been the most influential journal articles in environmental economics and ecological economics over the 10 year period 1994 2003 t and dhow much overlap is there between the fields of environmental and ecological economics t we examine the references in all articles published in jeem and ecological economics ee over this period for each of these two fields a list of the top articles and top journals cited by articles published in jeem and ee is presented we also present some results based on our study of the isi journal citation reports we find that there is a significant overlap between the two fields at the journal level the two journals cite similar journals there is a correlation of 0 34 between the number of citations received by the journals that are most cited and the correlation is even higher if journal self citation is excluded the main differences are that ecological economics tends to cite but not be cited by general natural science journals more often than environmental economics does environmental economics cites more heavily from journals rather than other publications and citations in environmental economics are more concentrated on particular journals and individual publications however there is much less similarity at the level of individual articles nonmarket valuation articles dominate the most cited articles in jeem while green accounting sustainability and the environmental kuznets curve are all prominent topics in ee d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

are valuations from nonhypothetical choice experiments different from those of experimental auctions due to the importance of comparability and external validity of results nonhypothetical experimental methods are increasingly used to elicit consumers willingness to pay for various goods two of the increasingly popular preference elicitation methods are the nonhypothetical choice experiments and experimental auctions we conduct experiments to compare willingness to pay estimates elicited from both methods our results generally suggest that valuations elicited from experimental auctions can differ from those obtained from nonhypothetical choice experiments copyright 2011 oxford university press

effects of cheap talk on consumer willingness to pay for golden rice a large body of literature suggests willingness to pay is overstated in hypothetical valuation questions as compared to when actual payment is required recently cheap talk has been proposed to eliminate the potential bias in hypothetical valuation questions cheap talk refers to process of explaining hypothetical bias to individuals prior to asking a valuation question this study explores the effect of cheap talk in a mass mail survey using a conventional value elicitation technique results indicate that cheap talk was effective at reducing willingness to pay for most survey participants however consistent with previous research cheap talk did not reduce willingness to pay for knowledgeable consumers

input subsidies cash constraints and timing of input supply is low input use by poor smallholder farmers caused by time inconsistent behavior or by limited ability to buy inputs are input subsidies the best solution to stimulate input demand or are there smarter solutions these issues are investigated by combining survey data stated preference questions and randomized experiments in malawi the demand for fertilizer at harvest time and at planting time farm gate shadow prices for fertilizer and the gap between the willingness to accept wta and willingness to pay wtp prices for a standard input package were investigated significant effects of timing and of cash constraints were found suggesting the possibility that smarter designs exist such as distribution of smaller packages from harvest time to planting time

can consumers willingness to pay incentivize adoption of environmental impact reducing technologies in meat animal production abstract this study develops a model estimating consumer willingness to pay wtp for environmental meat attributes and uses a multi objective nutritional optimizer to explore the extent to which wtp can offset on farm costs of reducing water use data for the wtp model are sourced from a literature survey of the agricola and google scholar databases yielding 46 studies estimating wtp for pure and impure organic grass fed natural environmental meat attributes bayesian analysis is used to estimate 3 models varying in independent variables models are evaluated by the correlation coefficient r2 root mean squared error of prediction rmspe and posterior model probability the most probable model is then used to estimate a confidence range of wtp for pure environmental beef impure environmental labels result in higher wtp than pure labels non hypothetical wtp for pure environmental labeling for north american consumers ranges from 6 7 to 32 6 a case study is conducted to identify the expected reduction in water use that can be funded from capturing wtp through labeling a multi objective nutritional optimizer is used to identify ideal management of beef cattle to reduce whole system water use in three regions of the united states cost increases from management are varied over the predicted range in wtp and combined with the probability of a consumer purchasing beef at each wtp value to identify the theoretical effect on expected environmental impact reduction a 10 premium is the ideal wtp resulting in water use reductions between 24 4 l and 41 4 l

bridging the gap between revealed and stated preferences in flood prone housing markets abstract this papers attempts to shed light on the gap between revealed and stated preferences methods in flood prone housing markets we quantitatively explore the market level consequences of various behavioural models assumptions regarding risky choices at the individual level in addition we quantify the effect of the market level bias in risk valuation that individual preferences for neighbourhood quality imply we apply an economic agent based housing market model to quantify and disentangle the impacts of behavioural biases in individual decisions under risk as well as neighbourhood externalities which both are known to distort markets we compare three different micro level behavioural risk models expected utility prospect theory and risk negligence the flood risk discount on a market level varies significantly but the results do not rule out any of these models in general markets with prospect theory traders overprice risks causing an unrealistically high price differential between risk prone and risk free properties the marginal implicit price for flood risk is much closer to empirically found prices in the expected utility and risk negligence models additionally we find that individual preferences for neighbourhood quality and multicollinearity in housing attributes can cause a bias in market level risk valuations of up to 9 7 of a property s value

research trends in environmental and resource economics insights from four decades of jeem abstract this paper provides a contemporary analysis of how research issues have developed in the journal of environmental economics and management jeem over the four decades of its existence we have classified the articles in the journal along five dimensions content methods environmental media the regional dimension of studies and cross cutting issues while up to about 10 years ago non market valuation and cost benefit analysis natural resource economics and environmental policy instruments represented the lion s share of articles published in the journal more recently we observe a significant shift towards a more diversified array of research areas with climate change and energy issues finding their way into the journal in addition increasing methodological plurality becomes apparent reflected in a significant shift away from economic theory and towards empirical approaches we also analyze key distinctions between the major environmental economics journals finally we analyze jeem s external influence on leading general economics a journals we find that a citations are positively correlated with a focus on climate change economics market based environmental policies and policy comparisons the use of econometric and statistical methods or experimental approaches and negatively correlated with a focus on water pollution and other pollutants such as pesticides

revealed and stated preferences for co2 emissions reduction the missing link abstract in this paper we combine data collected from two strands of literature dealing with revealed preferences expressed by conventional vehicle drivers for fuel price variation and stated preferences expressed by consumers for alternative fuel vehicles we employ a meta analysis approach drawing data on 30 primary studies reflecting two important policy interventions which are fuel price taxation and subsidies for alternative fuel vehicles this is a new contribution in environmental and energy economics in that we rescale all primary information into a unique index which captures consumers economic attitude towards carbon dioxide co2 emission reduction in monetary terms focusing on the transport sector we compute the implicit price for the avoidance of a kilogram of co2 emissions named pco2 explaining the existing heterogeneity from several points of view the results of the meta analysis show that contextual and individual characteristics influence the implicit price for co2 emissions avoidance this implicit price is on average positive in the case of revealed preferences studies whereas it is negative in the stated preferences studies although there are some important geographical differences our results show that fuel taxes could be an important additional instrument for environmental policy

the impact of climate information on milk demand evidence from a field experiment it has been suggested that carbon labelling of food on voluntary or non voluntary basis could reduce emissions of greenhouse gases however there is limited empirical evidence on the influence of such labels on consumer purchases the purpose of this study was to investigate whether voluntary carbon labelling affects the demand for milk a randomized field experiment was conducted in 17 retail stores in sweden where a sign provided consumers with qualitative information about the carbon impact of climate certified milk the results suggest that the sign increased the demand for the climate certified milk by approximately 6 8 and the result is robust to alternative model specifications the effect is entirely driven by large stores such as supermarkets we find no statistically significant impact on total milk sales and the dataset is too small to verify the consequences for other milk brands the effect on the demand for the labelled milk is short lived

resolving questions about bias in real and hypothetical referenda despite 10 years of research on behavior in hypothetical referenda conflict remains in the literature on whether or not the mechanism generates biased responses compared to real referenda and the nature and source of any such bias almost all previous inquiry in respect of this issue has concentrated on bias at the aggregate level this paper reports a series of three experiments which focuses on bias at the individual level and how this can translate to bias at the aggregate level the authors argue that only an individual approach to hypothetical bias is consistent with the concept of incentive compatibility the results of these experiments reflect these previous conflicting findings but go on to show that individual hypothetical bias is a robust result driven by the differing influence of pure self interest and other regarding preferences in real and hypothetical situations rather than by a single behavioral theory such as free riding in a hypothetical situation these preferences cause yea saying and non demand revealing voting this suggests that investigation of individual respondents in other hypothetical one shot binary choices may also provide us with insights into aggregate behavior in these situations

stated versus revealed knowledge determinants of offsetting co2 emissions from fuel consumption in vehicle use abstract this paper examines the role of prior knowledge in offsetting co2 emissions from fuel consumption in vehicle use the main result of our econometric analysis on the basis of unique representative data from drivers license holders in the usa and germany refers to the strong discrepancy between the stated and revealed knowledge of co2 offsetting the revealed knowledge measured by the correct estimation of the costs for this offsetting practice has a positive impact on the stated purchase of corresponding offsetting credits in both countries in contrast the effect of the stated knowledge of offsetting is not robust and in some cases even negative surprisingly it cannot even be confirmed that drivers license holders who claim that they are more than sufficiently informed estimate these costs more accurately

the shallow or the deep ecological economics movement ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation shadow pricing sustainability measures and squeezing nature into the commodity boxes of goods services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic financial and banking discourses there are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social psychological political and ethical facets the relationship with nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching however this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation a shallow movement allied to a business as usual politics and economy has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values if instead ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society the implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st century author s abstract

convergent validity of revealed and stated recreation behavior with quality change a comparison of multiple and single site demands we consider the convergent validity of several demand models using beach recreation data two models employ multiple site data a count data demand system model and the kuhn tucker demand system model we explore the role of existing variation in beach width in explaining trip choices and analyze a hypothetical 100 foot increase in beach width we compare these models to a single equation model where we jointly estimate revealed and stated preference trip data and focus on a hypothetical scenario considering a 100 foot increase in beach width in each case we develop estimates of the change in beach visits and the welfare impacts from the increase in width the trip change estimates from two of the three models are similar and convergent valid though the willingness to pay estimates differ in magnitude

journal communication and influence in financial research this article uses the articles and citations from a set of eight finance journals to explore interjournal citation patterns the research interests of individual journals each journal s influence in particular areas areas of recent interest to finance and the extent of interdisciplinary borrowing by finance we find the following two journals comprise the research core of finance research most journals publish in a variety of research areas but are influential in a smaller number a higher level of interest in financial markets than in corporate finance or financial institutions and an overall low level of borrowing from outside disciplines in this study we use journal publication and citation data to explore the communication of knowledge through journals such data are used in finance research by zivney and bertin 1992 chung and cox 1990 and heck and cooley 1988 among others to explore research productivity and by jensen et al 1990 to explore journal ratings most recently schwert 1993 employs such data in examining the influence of the journal of financial economics since its inception these types of data are also useful for investigating knowledge communication because they provide evidence of both transmission and reception of knowledge among journals the remainder of this article is organized to address the following three issues interjournal communication journal publication and influence across research areas and interdisicplinary borrowing in the first section we describe our data we study interjournal communications by examining the citation patterns of an eight journal set in section ii then in section iii we investigate journal publication and influence by categorizing each journal s articles by research area and by measuring the citation frequency of a journal s articles in individual research areas we also explore the areas of high overall publication interest in section iv we examine the level of interdisciplinary borrowing in finance by categorizing every citation of every article by discipline concluding remarks are in section v

using neuroeconomics to understand environmental valuation contingent valuation choice experiments and other stated preference methods are frequently used to capture the nonmarket valuation of natural resources and ecosystem services the emerging field of neuroeconomics which assesses the neuroscience underlying decision making plots a promising course to explore the mechanisms underlying complex environmental valuation decisions neuroeconomic methods offer a unique capacity to isolate value components that contribute to willingness to pay wtp separating an individual s response to natural resource attributes that are of interest to economists from other attributes or influences on the decision process neuroimaging data can also aid in understanding differences in response between preference elicitation techniques and identifying the use of different decision processes and heuristics during valuation this article surveys the benefits and limitations of using neuroeconomics methods to assess the value of environmental goods and focuses on three examples where neuroeconomics may inform environmental valuation protest responses comparison of hypothetical and consequential choice contexts and the evaluation of environmental attributes and optimization of study design in stated choice experiments neuroeconomics methods offer a foundation for positive collaboration between environmental economists and cognitive neuroscientists yielding metrics that complement and augment current stated preference methods of determining environmental valuation

evaluating the validity of the dichotomous choice question format in contingent valuation hypothetical and actual cash willingness to pay wtp for an art print were elicited with dichotomous choice and open ended question formats comparing hypothetical and actual dichotomous choice responses using both a likelihood ratio test and the method of convolutions suggests we reject equality at the 0 05 but not the 0 01 level hypothetical wtp was roughly two times actual wtp with the dichotomous choice format there were no significant differences between the open ended and dichotomous choice question formats when both were used to estimate hypothetical wtp or both used to estimate actual wtp

the importance of taste in experimental auctions consumers valuation of calorie and sweetener labeling of soft drinks a majority of purchases that consumers make are classified as repeat purchases one of the main reasons why consumers make repeat food purchases is the food s taste therefore we examined the importance of including taste testing in nonhypothetical experimental auctions specifically we used two experiments to determine consumers willingness to pay for soft drinks labeled with different calorie and sweetener information in experiment 1 participants tasted the soft drinks prior to the bidding rounds in experiment 2 participants did not taste the soft drinks prior to the bidding rounds bidding behavior for the soft drinks was significantly different between experiment 1 and experiment 2 results suggest that including taste testing in the design of experimental auctions is important to accurately capture consumers willingness to pay for foods that are purchased repeatedly results also imply that policies aimed at combating obesity by making the calorie content of foods more visible may not produce desired outcomes

the deadweight loss of christmas when economists comment on holiday gift giving it is usually to condone the healthy effect of spending on the macroeconomy however an important feature of gift giving is that consumption choices are made by someone other than the final consumer a potentially important microeconomic aspect of gift giving is that gifts may be mismatched with the recipients preferences in the standard microeconomic framework of consumer choice the best a gift giver can do with say 10 is to duplicate the choice that the recipient would have made while it is possible for a giver to choose a gift which the recipient ultimately values above its price for example if the recipient is not perfectly informed it is more likely that the gift will leave the recipient worse off than if she had made her own consumption choice with an equal amount of cash in short gift giving is a potential source of deadweight loss this paper gives estimates of the deadweight loss of holiday gift giving based on surveys given to yale undergraduates i find that holiday gift giving destroys between 10 percent and a third of the value of gifts while these recipients may be unrepresentative of the u s population their gifts are not necessarily unrepresentative holiday expenditures average 40 billion per year implying that a conservative estimate of the deadweight loss of christmas is a tenth as large as estimates of the deadweight loss of income taxation i also explore how deadweight loss and the tendency to give cash gifts vary with the relationship and age difference between giver and recipient i find that gifts from friends and significant others are most efficient while noncash gifts from members of the extended family are least efficient and destroy a third of their value i develop a simple expected utility model to explain the decision to give cash as opposed to in kind gifts the data are consistent with the model cash gifts are most common from the sorts of givers whose noncash gifts have the lowest expected value to recipients given their cost and high variability in recipient valuation

dynamic hypothetical bias in discrete choice experiments evidence from measuring the impact of corporate social responsibility on consumers demand abstract this paper is aimed at studying the dynamics of consumers preferences for corporate social responsibility the data come from both a discrete choice experiment dce and a field experiment conducted in a real market setting the results show that in a static setting first month predictions of a standard dce study and real market shares are statistically similar for the various profiles of corporate social responsibility however as time evolves real market shares present some dynamic patterns that are not mirrored by the standard dce predictions the overall conclusion is that differences between real market behavior and dce data can be attributed to the lack of learning experience or adaptation in dce surveys rather than to the hypothetical nature of the experiments

influencing the perception of what and who is important in ecological economics abstract in a recent article using citation analysis hoepner et al 2012 make strong claims to have identified the most influential works authors journals and institutions in a hypothetical field they call environmental and ecological economics this paper shows that their work is biased by its framing far from the non subjective approach they claim and highly sensitive to minor data errors more than this the exercise can be seen as another example of how ecological economics is susceptible to suppression by a dominant mainstream economic perspective which attempts to override belittle and dismiss a whole range of alternative thought including that which is heterodox interdisciplinary from the natural sciences and based in the non economic social sciences ecological economics is not the same as agricultural resource or environmental economics and if it were it would be pointless neither can it be understood or treated as a subfield of resource and environmental economics as done by hoepner et al 2012 i argue that the study promotes a limited perspective on social environmental and economic problems that includes an implicit political and ideological framing what is most influential important or high quality in ecological economics is certainly not defined by such work

savings rates and income distribution further evidence from ldcs a cross country test for the existence of kaldor effects in less developed countries is developed earlier attempts have been inconclusive and have led to a perception that the effect is unimportant it is argued that previous tests may have ben misspecified within a standard life cycle framework a savings rate function that also incorporates two distribution variables one involving measures of income inequalities across income classes and the other a broad measure of inequalities among sectors was specified and estimated the results indicate that regardless of the inequality measure employed some sort of kaldor effect may be at work this suggests that the traditional conflect between growth and equity warrants continued investigation

energy and depletable resources economics and policy 1973 1998 abstract this paper reviews the impact of the literature in depletable resources and energy economics over the period 1973 1998 particularly the initial period of publication of the journal of environmental economics and management 1974 1998 a discussion of prominent policy issues in this arena is provided along with an indication of what academic economics papers have contributed to that debate this is followed by a citation analysis of contributions in the fields of energy and exhaustible resource economics for each of these two fields a list of the top papers in each five year period from 1974 to 1998 is presented along with a list of the top journals in each decade based on average citations per article the top ten cited articles in the fields in the journal of environmental economics and management are also presented

measuring the environmental cost of hypocrisy this paper provides an example of how to estimate the marginal environmental cost of hypocrisy using revealed behavior and self identification survey responses from coffee drinkers regarding their use of cardboard and plastic i e non reusable cups coffee shops provide a convenient microcosm for assessing the impact of hypocritical behavior because of 1 readily available cheap substitutes i e reusable coffee cups 2 a relatively accurate estimate of the environmental in particular carbon cost associated with using non reusable cups and 3 the ability to delineate hypocritical behavior by observing a choice with relatively few potential confounding factors hypocritical behavior is measured as a geometric mean of how often an individual takes coffee in a non reusable cup and the degree to which the individual self identifies as being concerned about his environmental footprint all else equal the more often a person takes his coffee in a non reusable cup and the greater the degree to which he self identifies as being concerned about his footprint the greater the individual s hypocrisy score controlling for other attitudinal and demographic characteristics including self identified awareness of environmental issues and willingness to pay for the convenience of using a non reusable cup we are able to determine the marginal effect of an individual s hypocrisy score on the environmental cost associated with the use of non reusable coffee cups

influential publications in ecological economics revisited we revisit the analysis of costanza et al 2004 ecological economics of influential publications in ecological economics to discover what has changed a decade on we examine which sources have been influential on the field of ecological economics in the past decade which articles in the journal ecological economics have had the most influence on the field and on the rest of science and on which areas of science the journal is having the most influence we find that the field has matured over this period with articles published in the journal having a greater influence than before an increase in citation links to environmental studies journals a reduction in citation links to mainstream economics journals and possibly a shift in themes to a more applied and empirical direction