the role of reference prices in experimental auctions abstract we examine the role of reference prices field prices in willingness to pay studies involving experimental auctions using a 2nd price vickrey auction we find that provision of reference prices increases bid values

consumer research with big data applications from the food demand survey foods in three separate studies based on data from the food demand survey foods which has been conducted monthly for over three years this paper explores heterogeneity in preference across consumers in traditional demand systems heterogeneity in preferences over time in choice experiments and the tail of the distribution for a particular food consumption pattern vegetarianism results show that elasticities of demand for food at home and food away from home vary widely across different groups of consumers defined by a priori cluster analysis based on demographic and attitudinal variables results from a choice experiment are found to depend on when the experiment was conducted and on the market prices prevailing at the time of the survey given the large sample of consumers observed over time there is sufficient data to demographically characterize a small portion of the population vegetarians using traditional logit models and a machine learning method a classifications tree

producer decision making under uncertainty role of past experiences and question framing limited research examines the role of reference points or how uncertain outcomes are processed in producer decisions this study employs a survey containing a split sample choice experiment varying how uncertain outcomes are portrayed and assesses multiple candidate reference points results suggest that u s cattle producers use the best outcome experienced as reference points in their decisions and the method by which uncertain outcomes are presented impacts loss aversion marginal willingness to pay and market participation estimates this illustrates how research employing split samples multiple reference points and alternative methods of portraying uncertain outcomes may better identify producer decision making

combining economic and environmental dimensions value chain analysis of uk iron and steel flows this paper presents the methodology of value chain analysis developed for a study which combined a material flow analysis of the uk iron and steel sector with a consideration of the economic dimension of those material flows in order to shed light on concepts such as resource productivity and dematerialisation of the economy the methodology is used in this paper to map the current value chain of iron and steel flows through the uk noting the high value of scrap arisings at different stages of the production and use chain and the substantial cost of disposing of iron and steel as waste to examine the residual outputs generated by this industry and the value of applying industrial ecology principles to contrast the environmental impacts of different categories of materials with their values and to discuss the findings in terms of the global environmental burden of this sector of the economy with particular attention paid to international trade aspects it was found that while imports are substantial net imports are in terms of both weight and value a rather small part just under 20 of total uk iron and steel production and use defined as domestic production plus net imports the findings show that value chain analysis is a robust methodology for exploring various aspects of the economy environment interface and a useful complement to material flow or life cycle analyses with a potentially very widespread applicability the value chain analysis also provides a framework for coherent and integrated responses by industry as well as policy makers through its focus on linkages within different stages and actors in a chain and on the potential for systemic efficiencies

should reference alternatives in pivot design sc surveys be treated differently analysts are increasingly making use of pivot style stated choice sc data in the estimation of choice models these datasets often contain a reference alternative whose attributes remain invariant across replications for the same respondent this paper presents evidence to suggest that respondents react differently to the attributes of these reference alternatives and those of purely hypothetical alternatives while some such evidence has been reported in the existing literature this paper goes further and details a number of different departures from a common treatment of the two types of alternatives relating both to the observed part of utility and the error term

sufficiency and consumer behaviour from theory to policy abstract it is increasingly obvious that for safeguarding environmental sustainability eco efficiency measures will need to be complemented by sufficiency in particular by strong sustainable consumption the theory of planned behaviour tpb and social practice theory spt offer different views on consumer behaviour and on ways to change it this paper briefly describes the challenges discusses the applicability of both theories and their meaningfulness for policy recommendations we suggest an approach combining results of both bodies of theory complemented by ideas from political economy to substantiate the prism of sustainable consumption we introduce as a heuristic sufficiency policy tool it is useful to identify affordability criteria for change in each dimension as the basis for deriving suggestions for effective policy interventions we conclude that i effective interventions are possible ii they have to address several dimensions of affordability simultaneously and iii the sufficiency policy space prism can be a useful tool in structuring planned interventions

citizens of the green world cosmopolitan orientation and sustainability contemporary consumer markets are characterized by both a heightened need for sustainability and an increasingly cosmopolitan lifestyle this article bridges these two trends and studies two untapped questions 1 how do cosmopolitan consumers relate to sustainable behavior and 2 how should environmental messages be framed to successfully target cosmopolitan consumers four studies in three countries show that high cosmopolitan consumers demonstrate environmental concern and engage in sustainable behavior to successfully target this promising segment with sustainable products or messages to promote sustainable behavior marketers and public policymakers should highlight the benefit of these products behaviors for the global rather than the local environment however the findings also show that high cosmopolitan consumers can be successfully targeted to support local environmental initiatives when activating their local identification the article offers implications for businesses non government organizations and public policymakers in designing effective messages to promote sustainable behavior

sustainable consumption within a sustainable economy beyond green growth and green economies abstract in 1992 one unambiguous result of the unced conference was the need for changing consumption and production patterns with affluent countries taking the lead 20 years later at the 2012 uncsd little is left over and instead the green economy has been the theme pursued by the oecd the eu and other countries so the question needs to be answered if this is finally an attempt to put into practice what was promised 20 years ago or another diversion from what needs to be accomplished sustainable development is still a convincing concept if the original definition is taken avoiding the confusion caused by partisan interests reinterpreting the concept focussing on human needs fulfilment and respecting environmental limits it can still guide strong sustainable consumption green economy green growth on the other hand is a new terminology for what is known since 40 years as ecological modernisation it is indeed overdue but with its focus on efficiency and innovation it cannot guarantee to fulfil the brundtland sustainability criteria a factor analysis based on the i p a t formula demonstrates how optimistic the assumptions regarding future technologies must be to support the green growth concept consequently the authors pledge for a pragmatic risk avoiding approach by slimming the physical size of the economy this requires strong sustainable consumption including production as resource consumption which in turn requires a change of the societies institutional settings formal and informal mechanisms and orientations finally some elements of a strategy towards this end are pointed out with special emphasis on the role of non governmental organisations ngos through networking and advocacy they can both stimulate bottom up action and mobilise the pressure necessary for the institutional changes which are needed to mainstream strong sustainable consumption

how much is too much an investigation of the effect of the number of choice sets context dependence and the choice of bid vectors in choice experiments in a split sample design we examine how the number of choice sets design of the first choice set context dependence and the choice of attribute levels in the cost attribute affect the precision in the elicited preferences in otherwise completely identical choice experiment surveys these issues are investigated for swedish households marginal willingness to pay to reduce power outages our results indicate that neither the number of choice sets nor the design of the first choice set has a significant impact on estimated marginal willingness to pay while the effect was significant for the additive scaling of the cost vector at the end of the article we discuss the implications of our results on future developments and applications of choice experiments

material substitution and path dependence empirical evidence on the substitution of copper for aluminum abstract adopting an evolutionary perspective this paper argues that path dependence plays a major role in material use and substitution such that it might delay or even prevent substitution despite the occurrence of significant relative price changes after elucidating the importance of material substitution from an ecological economic point of view and after explaining the meaning of path dependence from an evolutionary perspective the copper aluminum material substitution process is described for the main electrical conductor producing countries the us germany and japan this example makes clear that irrespective of attractive relative prices in favor of aluminum it could neither achieve a predominant market position nor is it possible to identify an explicit relation between relative price changes and relative material use in a qualitative analysis applying a distributed lag model for data on copper and aluminum for electrical applications the significance of relative prices and path dependence is examined for a 51 year time period for the us japan and germany the results indicate that path dependence and relative prices especially in the long run are both important factors influencing the copper aluminum substitution process the major conclusions read that substitution processes cannot be predicted by relative price movements alone and that price instruments to encourage material substitution should not be overestimated instead in the design of resource policies it should be considered that material substitution is an evolutionary and path dependent process which requires learning as well as time capital research and experience

am i getting a good deal reference dependentdecision making when the reference price is uncertain models of consumer decision making commonly incorporate reference dependent preferences in these models the reference point is typically assumed to be known by the consumer however research on price recall and the reference formation process reveals that the reference price is often uncertain at the time of purchase reference price uncertainty creates ambiguity for the consumer about whether they are getting a good or bad deal this paper develops a model of consumer choice in the presence of reference dependent preferences when the reference price is uncertain data from two empirical studies that vary the product category and order of the elicitation of reference prices show that the new model generally outperforms conventional discrete choice models that either ignore reference prices or treat reference prices as certain the new model provides insights into the effect of reducing reference price uncertainty on consumer choice and reveals that high uncertainty smoothes the kink in the demand curve that is present in traditional reference price demand models

material flow analysis of the forest wood supply chain a consequential approach for log export policies in france part of the french timber transformation industry suffers from difficulties to adapt to recent changes on global markets this translates into net exports of raw wood and imports of transformed products detrimental to both the trade balance and the local creation of wealth at the same time no consistent and homogeneous accounts for wood product production and consumption exist at this time this article first aims at objectifying this situation by undertaking the first material flow analysis of the french forest wood supply chain we then evaluate the potential consequences of various scenarios of raw wood exports reduction policies namely subsidies for consumption or transformation and taxation of exports on both economic outcomes for the different actors and material flows we thus provide an example of coupling material flow analysis with economic modeling in an attempt to move from the diagnostic phase to the assessment of possible actions within a decision making perspective

psychological factors and stock option exercise we investigate stock option exercise decisions by over 50 000 employees at seven corporations controlling for economic factors psychological factors influence exercise consistent with psychological models of beliefs employees exercise in response to stock price trends exercise is positively related to stock returns during the preceding month and negatively related to returns over longer horizons consistent with psychological models of values that include reference points employee exercise activity roughly doubles when the stock price exceeds the maximum price attained during the previous year

stock dynamics for forecasting material flows case study for housing in the netherlands abstract this article discusses the role of lifestyle in physical material accounting and introduces a new method for simultaneously determining national or regional resource demand and waste generation through estimations of the population and its lifestyle which is manifested in the stocks of service providing goods their composition and lifetimes improving our comprehension of the stocks in use is essential for environmental policy making because 1 they are becoming the most important resource providers 2 they are important drivers for resource and energy consumption as well as waste and emission generation and 3 their magnitudes and dynamics are the parts of the material cycles that is usually least understood a generic dynamic material flow analysis model is presented and applied for the diffusion of concrete in the dutch dwelling stock for the period of 1900 2100 simulation results are illustrated for a standard scenario and a parameter variation the results show that 1 construction and demolition flows follow a cyclical behaviour 2 the cycles of construction and demolition flows are phase displaced in the first half of the 21st century with decreasing construction and increasing demolition and 3 growth of the dwelling stock is becoming increasingly more material intensive as a growing amount of material is used for replacements the presented stock dynamics approach can principally be applied for any anthropogenic material stock however it is most useful for the examination of metabolic consequences of diffusion processes of durable and fixed capital stocks

analysis of the residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior by incorporating multiple self selection effects abstract it is expected that the residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior might correlate with each other besides due to the existence of self selection effects the observed inter relationship between them might be the spurious result of the fact that some unobserved variables are causing both these concerns motivate us to 1 consider residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior for both in home appliances and out of home cars simultaneously and 2 explicitly control self selection effects so as to capture a relatively true effect of land use policy on household energy consumption behavior an integrated model termed as joint mixed multinomial logit multiple discrete continuous extreme value model is presented here to identify the sensitivity of household energy consumption to land use policy by considering multiple self selection effects the model results indicate that land use policy do play a great role in changing beijing residents energy consumption pattern while the self selection effects cannot be ignored when evaluating the effect of land use policy based on the policy scenario design it is found that increasing recreational facilities and bus lines in the neighborhood can greatly promote household s energy saving behavior additionally the importance of soft policy and package policy is also emphasized in the context of beijing

shared producer and consumer responsibility theory and practice abstract over the past decade an increasing number of authors have been examining the nexus of producer versus consumer responsibility often dealing with the question of how to assign responsibility for internationally traded greenhouse gas emissions recently a similar problem has appeared in drafting the standards for the ecological footprint while the method traditionally assumes a full life cycle perspective with full consumer responsibility a large number of producers businesses and industry sectors have started to calculate their own footprints see www isa org usyd edu au adding any producer s footprint to other producers footprints or to population footprints which all already cover the full upstream supply chain of their operating inputs leads to double counting the sum of footprints of producers and consumers is larger than the total national footprint the committee in charge of the footprint standardisation process was hence faced with the decades old non additivity problem posing the following dilemma for the accounting of footprints or any other production factor if one disallows double counting but wishes to be able to account for producers and consumers then one cannot impose the requirement of full life cycle coverage the supply chains of actors have to be curtailed somehow in order to avoid double counting this work demonstrates and discusses a non arbitrary method of consistently delineating these supply chains into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive portions of responsibility to be shared by all actors in an economy

benefit estimates for landscape improvements sequential bayesian design and respondents rationality in a choice experiment a multi attribute stated preference approach is used to value low and high impact actions on four major landscape components addressed by the rural environment protection scheme in ireland several methodological issues are addressed the use of prior beliefs on the relative magnitudes of parameters standardized description of different levels of landscape improvements via image manipulation software adoption of efficiency increasing sequential experimental design and sensitivity of benefit estimates to inclusion of responses from irrational respondents results suggest that bayesian design updating delivers significant efficiency gains without loss in respondent efficiency and estimates are upward biased when irrational respondents are included

consumer normal price estimation market versus personal standards in reference price models internal reference price is typically estimated from actual market prices given the generally poor price knowledge consumers have exhibited in prior research the question is whether it is reasonable to use actual market prices to estimate consumers internal reference price standards the initial answer provided in this research surprisingly is yes although internal reference prices are measurable and do affect consumer price perception the gains in measuring and using those standards in predicting brand choice for frequently purchased products may not be worth the costs reasons why the surrogate price measure may work and implications for the measurement of internal reference price standards are considered

sustainable homeservices toward household services that enhance ecological social and economic sustainability abstract the idea of services replacing products is increasingly offered as a solution to making the production and consumption patterns of the affluent consumers more sustainable however the discussion about sustainable services or sustainable product service systems tends to emphasize the eco efficiency perspective rather than explicitly capture all sustainability aspects social or socioeconomic considerations are often forgotten or by passed without scrutiny this paper argues that there is the need for a concept of sustainable services in which the social sustainability aspect is also recognized with equal attention since a major part of private consumption occurs in the household context living at home and moving to and from it this paper will put forth the concept of sustainable homeservices and will suggest a way to assess sustainability of services directed to households for assessing the sustainability of services directed to households a set of indicators relating to the ecological social and economic dimensions of sustainability is proposed with the aim of giving an idea of how to assess homeservices in practical terms the paper will also exemplify how one could operationalize these indicators on an ordinal rating scale the conclusion is that it is possible to assess the sustainability of a homeservice in a relative fashion using no service or the product alternative as the point of comparison households alone have a limited capacity to influence their consumption choices because other actors set the frame for this reason institutional arrangements for making services easily available to households are outlined it appears that housing organizations have a central role in the alternative option for organizing the supply of service provision they are involved in five of the seven alternative ways of supplying services that could be identified the role of the housing organization can vary from direct supply to lighter forms such as cooperative arrangements with external service providers or resident involvement

the contemporary european copper cycle the characterization of technological copper cycles abstract copper is an example of an anthropogenically utilized material that is of interest to both resource economists and environmental scientists it is a widely employed industrial metal and one that in certain forms and concentrations is moderately biotoxic it is also one that may be potentially supply limited a comprehensive accounting of the anthropogenic mobilization and use of copper must treat a series of life stages mining and processing fabrication utilization and end of life reservoirs in which copper resides include the lithosphere ore and ingot processing facilities fabricators at least a dozen major uses several intentional and default stockpiles landfills and the environment the flow rates among those reservoirs constitute the cycle if a non global cycle is being constructed imports to and exports from the region of interest must also be included in this paper we discuss the characteristics of each of the components of anthropogenic copper cycles as well as generic approaches to the acquisition and evaluation of data over space and time data quality and data utility are evaluated noting that information relevant to technology and resource policy is easier to acquire than is information relevant to human health and ecosystem concerns partly because the spatial scale required by the latter is considerably smaller and the flow rates rarely analyzed and reported despite considerable data limitations we conclude that information is sufficiently available and the data sufficiently accurate to characterize copper cycles at a variety of spatial scales

are food choices really habitual integrating habits variety seeking and compensatory choice in a utility maximizing framework given the large number of food choices that consumers make each day it seems likely that they will adopt decision strategies that minimize cognitive effort to examine this issue we develop a conceptual and empirical model of habitual choice and the factors that result in transitions to two strategies other than habitual selection utility maximizing choice and a variety seeking strategy our approach provides an alternative to traditional state dependence methods used in this type of panel data we apply this framework to the choice of two food products that illustrate the heterogeneity across types of products in decision strategies and routine choice patterns copyright 2013 oxford university press

material flows and economic models an analytical comparison of sfa lca and partial equilibrium models abstract the growing concern for environmental problems in the current economy has spurred the study of the way materials and substances flow through the economy resulting in many different types of analysis since all of these have their merits and shortcomings much of the present theoretical research seems to be focusing on combining the best aspects of each model type into an integrated model the aim of this paper is to make a first step in bridging the gap between the various types of analysis of material flows in the economy by discussing the main differences and similarities of three often employed model types substance flow analysis life cycle assessment and partial economic equilibrium analysis instead of submitting each model to a lengthy theoretical discussion we apply them to a single hypothetical example of a pollution problem by doing so we are able to evaluate the differences and similarities of the methods and results of the model in a practical way it appears that the results of the three models are complementary rather than contradictory each of them puts an emphasis on different aspects of the real world a sequential application of a number of limited models may therefore be an approach that provides more useful information than the tedious construction and application of an encompassing model that integrates these models

transition towards improved regional wood flows by integrating material flux analysis and agent analysis the case of appenzell ausserrhoden switzerland this paper discusses the integration of material flux analysis and agent analysis as the basis for a transition towards improved regional wood management in appenzell ausserrhoden ar a small swiss canton located in the pre alps of switzerland we present a wood flow analysis for forests wood processing industries and consumption in ar accounting for different wood products we find that the forest is currently significantly underutilized although there are sizeable imports of wood and fuel to this small region the underutilization of the forest contributes to a skewed age distribution jeopardizing long term sustainable development of the forest as the fulfillment of its protective and production function are likely to be at risk the wood resources however are capable of satisfying current wood demand among the population of ar and wood could even be exported underutilization has two main causes first wood prices are so low that harvesting trees is a money losing proposition second consumer wood demand and the current supply from forest owners are not aligned furthermore cultural values lifestyle trends and traditions make an alignment of supply and demand difficult consensus and strategy building with the relevant stakeholders on the basis of the results obtained from the wood flow analysis and agent analysis is a reasonable next step to take we conclude that wood flow analysis combined with agent analysis provide a useful and straightforward tool to be used as the basis of a transition process towards improved regional wood flows which in turn should contribute to sustainable forest management

the dynamics of willingness to consume abstract it is increasingly acknowledged that the growing consumption in the north constitutes an important part of global environmental problems to improve the possibilities of dealing with this aspect of the problems this paper explores some of the driving forces behind the growth in consumption the first section introduces the environmental debate on consumption including the relationship between final consumption and the consumption of resources the recent political acceptance of dealing with consumption and the fundamental conditions for consumption growth in the north in the following sections a cross disciplinary approach is applied in a broad search for the driving forces behind the willingness to consume throughout the exposition two questions are explored 1 why are productivity increases largely transformed into income increases instead of more leisure 2 why is such a large part of these income increases used for the consumption of goods and services with a relatively high materials intensity instead of less material intensive alternatives the explanations are divided into three groups first the economic explanations including socio economic aspects related to the institutional set up of the economy second socio psychological explanations focusing on consumption from the perspective of the human being embedded in specific social relations third historical and socio technological explanations focusing on different aspects of everyday life the paper concludes with some reflections on the political implications of the analysis

consumers valuation of sustainability labels on meat there are various sustainability certifications and claims for food products that focus on environmental or ethical benefits these claims empower consumers to make informed purchasing decisions that take environmental and ethical considerations into account this paper compares consumers preferences for four types of sustainability claims related to organic meat free range animal welfare and carbon footprint using a choice experiment on a chicken breast product our results show that nine in every ten belgian consumers favor free range claims which are also valued the most highly attracting premiums ranging from 43 to 93 our study also shows that a vast majority of consumers 87 would welcome the introduction of an eu level animal welfare label the carbon footprint labels and the organic labels are less appealing to consumers who have lower willingness to pay for these labels belgian consumers prefer the national belgian organic food logo certified by a private organization to the newly introduced eu organic food logo

expectations as endowments evidence on reference dependent preferences from exchange and valuation experiments while evidence suggests that people evaluate outcomes with respect to reference points little is known about what determines them we conduct two experiments that show that reference points are determined at least in part by expectations in an exchange experiment we endow subjects with an item and randomize the probability they will be allowed to trade subjects that are less likely to be able to trade are more likely to choose to keep their item in a valuation experiment we randomly assign subjects a high or low probability of obtaining an item and elicit their willingness to accept for it the high probability treatment increases valuation of the item by 20 30 copyright 2011 oxford university press

spatial and temporal flows of china s forest resources development of a framework for evaluating resource efficiency abstract population growth and resource scarcity have remained major constraints on china s development for several decades under conditions of resource limitations utilization efficiency is a key concern for chinese scientists and decision makers based on forest production and trade data for china we present a conceptual framework for resource flow analysis calculate the quantities and analyze the characteristics of flows of forest resources primarily wood and wood byproducts during the critical early economic development of china from 1953 to 2000 by converting the forest resource flows into log equivalents i e the quantity of logs required to generate a unit of each type of product the consumption of forest resources has accelerated throughout the study period and the structure and efficiency of forest resource utilization have both improved the proportion of forest resource flows obtained from outside china has increased and most of this wood was consumed by wood processing industries over time consumption has shifted from logs and lumber to the pulp and paper and artificial board industries to improve the economics and sustainability of its use of forest resources china should increase consumption of forest resources by its pulp and paper industry more fully utilize forest resources obtained from outside china and weaken the dependence on these foreign forest resources by promoting increased utilization efficiency and structural readjustment of the forest industry therefore improved forest management is an effective mean of weakening the dependence on foreign forest resources

dynamic substance flow analysis the delaying mechanism of stocks with the case of pvc in sweden abstract today s stocks are tomorrow s emissions and waste flows as a result of the time lag introduced by the buffering function of the stock of materials and products in society environmental problem flows which seem to be under control can easily rebound in this paper an example is given of how signal processing can be used in dynamic substance flow analysis for estimating the future generation of waste and emissions from present societal stocks an approach is outlined to estimate the outflow of waste products from stocks on the basis of assumptions on the shape of the distribution describing the inflow of new products the average life span of the products and the life span distribution to exemplify the approach we used a theoretical case of pvc in sweden it was found that the delaying mechanisms of the stocks can make the outcome counterintuitive furthermore the chosen shape of the input distribution function has the most influence on the predicted outflows especially in the case of possible fashion type exponentially increasing markets the choice of the shape of the inflow distribution could therefore be based on qualitative knowledge of the market of the different products the life span distribution appears to have a more subtle influence on the height of the peaks and the time that they occur so far only a normal distribution has been considered more research is recommended into other types of distribution

using composition of land multiplier to estimate ecological footprints associated with production activity abstract ecological footprint ef a measure of sustainability represents the areas of land and water required to produce the goods and services for satisfying the consumption of a defined human population or economy and to provide environmental assimilation capacity for keeping its environmental quality at a given level production land footprint a main component of the ef represents the lands used by production sectors for producing the goods and services for the final consumption of a given human population there have been at least two alternatives in estimating the production land footprint one is based on the estimates of apparent consumption of each type of resource along the line of the methodology proposed by wackernagel and rees wackernagel m rees w e 1996 and its later refinement the other suggested by bicknell et al 1998 is based on the monetary values of products that are delivered to domestic final demand the information recorded in an input output table the former faces the challenge of distinguishing the commodities used as intermediate input from those as final consumption although its recent development has tried to calculate the raw materials used directly in traded manufactured products wackernagel m lewan l hansson c b 1999a it is not an easy job because the indirect input requirements are also involved using input output analysis which has been widely used to consider the direct and indirect input requirements of supporting final demand may alleviate this difficulty bicknell et al 1998 adopted input output analysis to estimate the footprint of new zealand in their calculation they used land multipliers to obtain the production land areas required to produce the outputs for domestic final consumption directly and indirectly and presented the estimates under three land categories agricultural land forest land and degraded land however this presentation causes errors in the concept and calculation this is because that the area requirement of sector j s production land is obtained by multiplying sector j s land multiplier with its output for domestic final consumption the result would contain not only sector j s own production land but also those of other sectors whose outputs sector j uses as inputs thus the ensuing estimates on sectoral production lands cannot be presented by land category using the hypothetical data in the article of bicknell et al 1998 this paper explains the reasons for using the composition of land multipliers instead of land multipliers in estimating the production land footprint so that the calculated areas can be expressed by land category the revised calculation is then applied to taiwan for estimating her two footprint components production land and energy land in 1991

the design of an environmental index of sustainable food consumption a pilot study using supermarket data monitoring of the environmental impacts of consumption is necessary for the evaluation of current performance and to support the understanding of how initiatives for change can be implemented we discuss design issues and methodology for an environmentally sensitive shopper ess index to measure the environmental sustainability of food consumption at the household level the ess index is based on revealed consumer preferences and uses scanner data provided by the largest uk food retailer as a pilot illustration of the methodology we use the index to identify environmentally critical periods during the calendar year

rediscovering place and accounting space how to re embed the human economy abstract this article proposes to move beyond monetary assessments of ecosystem services in order to counteract an important mechanism behind their current undervaluation the process of disembedding disembedding describes the influence of modernity on social relationships it also clarifies how human nature relationships have been affected modern societies have become disembedded from the context of local ecosystems resulting in diminishing knowledge of and attention to ecosystem services the emergence of general purpose money is presented as a key factor in the disembedding process because it has brought with it the message of substitutability and the possibility of an increasing appropriation of distant ecosystems the paper argues that in order to re embed societies instead of pursuing current trends the limits to human expansion in the biosphere have to be made visible therefore a strategy of re embedding the human economy into the life support context is put forward where bioregional thought and its intention of rediscovering mapping and re inhabiting local places is combined with the ecological footprint tool in contrast to monetary assessments of ecosystem services the ecological footprint assessment presents the limits of the services availability and thus clarifies the fact that increased appropriation of bio productive space normally involves increasing pressure on remaining ecosystems

applying physical input output analysis to estimate land appropriation ecological footprints of international trade activities in the last few years some studies have been presented which link land use accounting and input output analysis based on monetary input output tables miots for the calculation of direct and indirect land appropriation of production and consumption activities the compilation of the first comprehensive physical input output tables piots for some western european countries in the 1990s opened new possibilities for linking physical accounting and input output analysis using a physical multiplier for this kind of calculation is more appropriate as the most land intensive sectors are also the sectors with the highest amounts of material flows physical input output analysis illustrates land appropriation in relation to material flows of each of the sectors which is more appropriate from the point of view of environmental pressures than land appropriation in relation to monetary flows of a miot physical input output analysis has so far not been applied for any land related studies based on a physical input output model of the eu 15 physical input output analysis is applied in this paper in order to calculate direct and indirect land requirements for the production of exports from eu 15 to the rest of the world

empirical generalizations from reference price research considerable theoretical justification for consumers use of psychological reference points exists from the research literature from a managerial perspective one of the most important applications of this concept is reference price an internal standard against which observed prices are compared in this paper we propose three empirical generalizations that are well supported in the marketing literature first there is ample evidence that consumers use reference prices in making brand choices second the empirical results on reference pricing also support the generalization that consumers rely on past prices as part of the reference price formation process third consistent with other research on loss aversion consumers have been found to be more sensitive to losses i e observed prices higher than reference prices than gains we also propose topics for further research on reference prices

how closely do hypothetical surveys and laboratory experiments predict field behavior we compare the ability of three preference elicitation methods hypothetical choices nonhypothetical choices and nonhypothetical rankings and three discrete choice econometric models the multinomial logit mnl the independent availability logit ial and the random parameter logit rpl to predict actual retail shopping behavior in three different product categories ground beef wheat flour and dishwashing liquid overall we find a high level of external validity our specific results suggest that the nonhypothetical elicitation approaches especially the nonhypothetical ranking method outperformed the hypothetical choice experiment in predicting retail sales we also find that the rpl can have superior predictive performance but that the mnl predicts equally well in some circumstances experiment

the bunch of sustainability labels do consumers differentiate abstract a huge number of sustainable labels addressing the different pillars of sustainability emerged over the last years some labels promote factors which already imply other sustainability issues e g organic incl animal friendliness to a certain extent hence the question arises how consumers react towards the redundancies of different sustainability labels to add to the literature this study applies a latent class model for discrete choices first to test whether consumers take different sustainable labels into account when making their decision and second to test how consumers deal with different sustainable labels that are partly claiming the same aspect results indicate that three consumer segments with well distinguished preferences and willingness to pay measures for the respective attributes can be identified one group being the price sensitives exclusively deciding on the product with the lowest price regardless of any sustainable attribute of the product another group opts for products with a sustainable label without any clear preference for a specific sustainable attribute but expressing a clear willingness to pay more for all presented sustainable labels i e the label choosers a third group can be named price conscious label discriminators for them some sustainable aspects provide negative utility when labelled exclusively e g organic or free of genetically modified organisms but labelled together e g organic together with free of genetically modified organisms or animal welfare it provides them significantly positive utility even though being redundant by definition based on our findings there is no general statement to be made regarding the question whether different sustainable aspects complement or substitute each other the research rather emphasizes that a differentiated look at different consumer types and different labels symbolizing sustainability is needed the research adds to the existing literature by examining not only the relevance and acceptance of different sustainable labels to different consumer segments but also the interrelationship of different sustainable labels the study clearly shows that with regard to different sustainable labels the more the merrier does not always apply however almost 85 of the market could be satisfied with a universal sustainability label

the economics of tropical forest land use options tropical deforestation is generally characterized as conversion of forest land to alternative uses notably agriculture this would suggest the need for rational decision making concerning the optimal allocation of tropical forest land between competing uses the following paper explores this problem by devising rules for determining optimal land use allocation between timber and agriculture at the stand and forest levels a complementary intertemporal model for optimal allocation of forest land to agricultural conversion at the forest level is also developed and used to derive a demand relationship for agricultural conversion which is then approximated through empirical estimation

an empirical analysis of latitude of price acceptance in consumer package goods scanner panel data analyses for sweetened and unsweetened drink categories with four brands in each support the presence of a region of price insensitivity around a reference price the analyses also suggest that consumers with higher average reference price have a wider latitude of price acceptance consumers with a higher frequency of purchase i e shorter average interpurchase time interval are found to have a narrower latitude of price acceptance because they are more aware of the range of price distributions finally consumers with a higher average brand loyalty have a wider latitude of price acceptance demonstrating greater tolerance of price fluctuations

a range theory account of price perception it is well accepted in the behavioral pricing literature that a consumer s perception of the attractiveness of a market price depends on a comparison of the market price to an internal reference price the rationale underlying this dynamic has its roots in adaptation level theory however consistent with range theory we postulate that a consumer s assessment of the attractiveness of a market price may also depend on a comparison of the market price to the endpoints of the evoked price range four experiments provide evidence that variance in the width of the evoked price range affects price attractiveness judgments in the absence of any variance in the internal reference price of theoretical importance findings from the present article suggest that pricing theory is in need of augmentation in order to account for this effect of managerial relevance these findings suggest that changes in context can bring about changes in the evoked price range and perceptions of the attractiveness of a market price

choice experiments are not conducted in a vacuum the effects of external price information on choice behavior abstract consumers carry a wealth of external knowledge and experience into a study that may affect choices in even the most well crafted experiment we derive a conceptual model showing how the level and variability of price perceptions outside the task at hand might affect choice behavior and we conduct an experiment to test the model by manipulating information provided to respondents in a way to alter the outside the experiment perceptions mixed logit error component models show that reference dependent models best describe the choice data and we find that consumer choice is significantly affected by the experiment manipulations the predictions of the model are borne out in the data as expected price sensitivity is generally higher for price changes above a price reference point than below also as predicted exogenously increasing external reference prices and exogenously reducing the variability in references prices both serve to increase the probability of making a purchase and reduce the probability of choosing none these results have important implications for the design and practice of choice experiments as they show that consumer choice is affected by perceptions of the level and variability of prices outside the experiment more generally the results highlight the need to understand the formation and distribution of reference prices when predicting consumer choice

the adoption of switchgrass and miscanthus by farmers impact of liquidity constraints and risk preferences lignocellulosic biomass is expected to become a key feedstock for renewable energy production however the potential supply strongly depends on farmers willingness to grow the new perennial energy crops many economic assessments have been led at the farm level all based on the standard net present value approach this paper looks into the effect of farmers liquidity constraints and risk preferences on switchgrass and miscanthus adoption by farmers we study the problem of the land allocation between a traditional cropping system and an innovative one in a static framework using four intertemporal choice models we find that in central france agronomic and economic conditions switchgrass and miscanthus result to be less profitable in terms of annualised net margin than the usual rape wheat barley rotation nevertheless they can be highly competitive as diversification crops when appropriate contracts are offered to farmers despite the additional liquidity they require

mill s scissors structural change and the natural resource inputs to labour the environmental structural change strategy claims that by shifting our expenditures to economic sectors with lower environmental intensity absolute resource consumption and environmental impact can be lowered environmental input output methodologies for computing these intensities attribute no resource consumption to labour or households because these are not classified as sectors the suggestion that service sectors entail less environmental impact however loses force if a unit of labour contains embodied energy and attributing these inputs to labour drastically reduces intensity variation between sectors relative growth of service sectors has furthermore not been accompanied by decreased resource consumption thus models whose intensity computations cover not only inter firm payments but also labour earnings and household expenditures may have superior predictive power if moreover natural resource and labour inputs to product are incommensurable intensity ratios themselves have perhaps only monetary rather than real significance

political consumerism and public policy good complements against market failures political consumerism has become over the past years an ever growing phenomenon by which citizens express through their consumption their political environmental and ethical opinions this paper discusses political consumerism from an economic science perspective focusing on the link between political consumerism and public policies it wonders to what extent political consumerism may represent an effective and fair instrument against market failures overall it seems that it would be better to consider it as a complement to conventional public policies

an economic assessment of potential ethanol production pathways in ireland abstract an economic assessment was conducted on five biomass to ethanol production pathways utilising the feedstock wheat triticale sugarbeet miscanthus and straw the analysis includes the costs and margins for all the stakeholders along the economic chain this analysis reveals that under current market situations in ireland the production of ethanol under the same tax regime as petrol makes it difficult to compete against that fuel with tax breaks however it can compete against petrol on the other hand even under favourable tax breaks it will be difficult for indigenously produced ethanol to compete against cheaper sources of imported ethanol therefore the current transport fuel market has no economic reason to consume indigenously produced ethanol made from the indigenously grown feedstock analysed at a price that reflects all the stakeholders costs to deliver a significant penetration of indigenous ethanol into the market would require some form of compulsory inclusion or else considerable financial supports to feedstock and ethanol producers

a comparative analysis of reference price models the effect of reference price on brand choice decisions has been well documented in the literature researchers however have differed in their conceptualizations and therefore in their modeling of reference price in this article we evaluate five alternative models of reference price of which two are stimulus based i e based on information available at the point of purchase and three that are memory based i e based on price history and or other contextual factors we calibrate the models using scanner panel data for peanut butter liquid detergent ground coffee and tissue to account for heterogeneity in model parameters we employ a latent class approach and select the best segmentation scheme for each model the best model of reference price is then selected on the basis of fit and prediction as well as on the basis of parsimony in cases where the fits of the models are not very different in all four categories we find that the best reference price model is a memory based model namely one that is based on the brand s own price history in the liquid detergent category however we find that one of the stimulus based models namely the current price of a previously chosen brand also performs fairly well we discuss the implications of these findings

the effects of changing cost vectors on choices and scale heterogeneity choice experiments ce are widely used to estimate the values of changes in non market goods and services a cost attribute is typically included in a ce questionnaire to enable the estimation of monetary values for changes in the non market attributes presented notwithstanding the central importance of the cost attribute relatively little research has been undertaken on the impacts of varying cost attribute levels on value estimates or on individual heterogeneity in this paper i present results from mixed logit and generalised mixed logit models that account for unobserved idiosyncratic preference and scale heterogeneity respondents are found to anchor their choices on the relative cost levels presented in the survey with results suggesting that people are more sensitive to relative rather than absolute cost vectors however the higher cost levels do not lead to significantly higher value estimates partly because of observed preference heterogeneity towards the environmental attributes an important observation is that scale heterogeneity is important accounting for scale as well as preference heterogeneity in the generalised mixed logit model leads to significantly improved model fit the results indicate significant unobserved error variance across respondents unrelated to whether a high or low cost vector is used

environmentally sustainable household consumption from aggregate environmental pressures to priority fields of action unsustainable consumption patterns of the north or rather of the global affluent consumers class have been identified by agenda 21 as one of the key driving forces behind the unsustainable development however neither accounting based on the system of national accounts sna nor household economics provide the proper instruments to assess the environmental impact of household decision making eco efficiency assessments as familiar in the business sector provide no appropriate tool for households as an alternative an environmental space based assessment scheme is suggested covering the major pressures on the environment caused by household decisions the methodology is used twice once to analyse the environmental relevance of the main activity clusters of household consumption and once to identify the dominant acts of consumption within each cluster the latter provide the basis for deriving environmental performance indicators a rough analysis of household influence potentials permits to identify housing eating and mobility as the three priority fields for action for minimising the environmental impact of households extending the influence analysis actor matrixes are derived allocating influence and thus responsibility for environmental pressures to different groups of economic agents

linking material and energy flow analyses and social theory the paper explores the potential of habermas theory of communicative action to alter the social reflexivity of material and energy flow analysis with his social macro theory habermas has provided an alternative critical justification for social theory that can be distinguished from economic libertarianism and from political liberalism implicitly most flow approaches draw from these theoretical traditions rather than from discourse theory there are several types of material and energy flow analyses while these concepts basically share a system theoretical view they lack a specific interdisciplinary perspective that ties the fundamental insight of flows to disciplinary scientific development instead of simply expanding micro models to the social macro dimension social theory suggests infusing the very notion of flows to the progress of disciplines with regard to the functional integration of society material and energy flow analyses can rely on the paradigm of ecological economics and at the same time progress the debate between strong and weak sustainability within the paradigm however placing economics at the centre of their functional analyses may still ignore the broader social integration of society depending on their pre analytic outline of research and the methods used

downscaling material flow analysis the case of the cereal supply chain in france the spatial reconstruction of the production trade transformation and consumption flows of a specific material can become an important decision help tool for improving resource management and for studying environmental pressures from the producer s to the consumer s viewpoint one of the obstacles preventing its actual use in the decision making process is that building such studies at various geographical scales proves to be costly both in time and manpower in this article we propose a semi automatic methodology to overcome this issue we describe our multi scalar model and its data reconciliation component and apply it to cereals flows namely using ocial databases insee agreste franceagrimer sitram as well as corporate sources we reconstructed the supply chain flows of the 22 french regions as well as the flows of four nested territories france the rhone alpes region the isere departement and the territory of the scot of grenoble we display the results using sankey diagrams and discuss the intervals of confidence of the model s outputs we conclude on the perspectives of coupling this model with economic social and environmental aspects that would provide key information to decision makers

market and non market determinants of private consumption and their impacts on the environment abstract the view of consumption as an activity combining market and non market elements with the aim of attaining life enjoyment targets allows one to focus on the social and institutional determinants of the border between market and non market components of the consumption process and to consider the interrelations of market and non market domains of social life as a possible source of the environmental degradation which derives from consumption activities in this paper an analytical framework is proposed in which the view of consumption as a social process and the neo ricardian theory of prices and profits are combined to yield an evaluation of consumer efficiency and of its environmental effects the paper argues that the social and institutional framework in which consumption is embedded significantly determines the impact of human activities on the natural environment and that environmental degradation is intimately connected with a distortion in the consumption process towards a predominance of market relations and an excess of labour in industrial society two examples household energy conservation and private transportation illustrate the analytical framework and suggest the importance of redrawing the border between market and non market domains of social life in environmental policy

between preferences and references asymmetric price elasticities and the simulation of fiscal policies abstract canonical demand studies and fiscal policy simulations rest on the assumption that consumers react symmetrically to price increases and decreases such assumption has been challenged from both the empirical and theoretical points of view we propose theoretically consistent empirical specifications to estimate discrete choice models random utility dcm and continuous demand systems easi and aids demand systems that allow for reference prices and asymmetric own and cross price demand response our application focuses on the demand for sugar sweetened beverages in great britain using transaction level household purchase data and different product aggregation levels we find substantial evidence of asymmetric consumer response and loss aversion with a stronger response when prices rise above their reference level our results hold for both dcms on highly differentiated products and demand systems on aggregate product categories and are robust to alternative model and reference price specifications simulations of taxes and subsidies on soft drinks shows that ignoring asymmetry may lead to biases especially when predicting price cuts

virtual land use and agricultural trade estimating environmental and socio economic impacts abstract liberalization has caused an increase in the global trade of goods and services in particular the value and physical volume of agricultural goods traded have largely increased as the environmental and social consequences of trade are complex they are rarely included in the national and international agricultural policies one reason is that there is a lack of concepts and methods for assessing the environmental and social impacts of trade policies in this paper we develop a method for quantifying and assessing the land use hidden in the export and import of agricultural goods for the case of switzerland for our analysis we focus on arable crops the first methodological step of our research illustrates the spatial relationship of switzerland with countries all over the world through the import and export of land use for arable crops the second step links this spatial dimension with a qualitative assessment of the environmental and socio economic impacts of agricultural land use we applied the method to the case of wheat cultivation within switzerland and import to switzerland the major problem we were confronted with was the availability of data which had both to be reliable and available for the countries wheat is imported from the results show that the calculation of land use is credible in spite of the problems related with data availability the assessment results for each indicator are in agreement with the current situation in the respective countries in addition the aggregation seems to accurately reflect the countries agricultural polices the developed method is used to estimate the overall environmental and socio economic impacts of an increase in wheat imports to switzerland we argue that this method could be applied for anticipating potential impacts of trade agreements still further research is required for fine tuning of the utility functions including a weighting procedure in the aggregation procedure for practical applications important aspects like water shortage should enlarge our limited set of indicators in addition the average impact on a country level was assessed to refine that different agricultural systems ranging from intensive to extensive to organic should be considered beyond our scope was to analyze impacts due to other life cycle stages than the agricultural production for informed decision however information on the whole life cycle of agricultural products is required

real time identification of mean retention time and end of life rate in cyclic manufacturing used in predicting demand and new orders for shelf stock replacement and in inventory planning the mean retention time mrt of consumer products is long established as a key production and marketing parameter higher mrts are also associated with enhanced sustainability favoring longer production consumption cycles waste prevention and resource preservation the mrt or the corresponding product stock level and the end of life eol outflow to be collected for disassembly and recycling are useful for planning efficient cyclic operations determination of stock and eol level for cyclic products is challenging however due to random stock losses and to the volatile and distributed nature of returns and eol exit actuary science methods presume specific residual life distributions usually fitted ex post which may become inaccurate when applied to real production consumption cycles anchored on a recent constitutive law in cyclic manufacturing a method is presented for real time mrt and eol identification the law related mean stock and eol levels under random losses and random distributed eol exit via a simple equation without involving residual life or eol distributions or early loss history one degree of freedom still remained for both stock and eol are random and unobservable the work herein ties the remaining degree of freedom it enables sequential identification of stock and eol level using reliable and readily acquired data in a key equation obtained for the production consumption cycle adapting to varying early loss consumer take back and discard volatility it may be useful in proactive policy sizing of disassembly and recycle lines and return inventory control towards cleaner production consumption cycles

economics of technological change and the natural environment how effective are innovations as a remedy for resource scarcity abstract the paper aims to substantiate the importance of endogenous innovations when evaluating the compatibility of natural resource use and economic development it explains that technological change has the potential to compensate for natural resource scarcity diminishing returns to capital poor input substitution and material balance restrictions but is limited by various restrictions like fading returns to innovative investments and rising research costs it also shows how innovative activities are fostered by accurate price signals and research favouring sectoral change the simultaneous effects of increasing technical knowledge decreasing resource inputs and increasing world population largely determine the chances of long run sustainable development consequently future research has to be directed at a more thorough understanding of the mechanisms driving innovations in the presence of natural resource scarcity

environmental regulation of households an empirical review of economic and psychological factors abstract the literature on sustainable consumption and environmental regulation of household behavior is dominated by conceptual and normative approaches as a result many suggestions lack a firm empirical basis to overcome this deficiency econometric studies in three areas of environmentally relevant activities of households are reviewed residential use of energy generation of solid waste and recycling and residential use of water next to price and income elasticities attention is devoted to individual socio economic features and psychological factors such as attitudes knowledge perceptions and values potential psychological determinants and related insights are further examined by discussing a range of representative and illustrative statistical psychological studies of environmental behavior one important general finding is that there are very few empirical studies that systematically combine socio economic and psychological determinants a range of insights for environmental policy is derived and research recommendations are offered

choke price bias in choice experiments this paper reports on the results from a split sample choice experiment where the effect of changing the maximum level of the cost attribute is investigated the hypothesis was that changing the maximum price level would either give rise to an income effect or have no effect on consumers preferences this was tested in the framework of a valuation study of different quality characteristics of minced pork the data was analysed using a mixed logit error component model which accounts for correlation in the unobserved part of the utility results suggest that the size of the maximum price level does matter and that changing the maximum price level has a statistically significant effect on both the general preferences structure and the wtp estimates hence researchers should be very careful when defining not only the range of the price attribute but also the maximum level of the price attribute

quantifying u s aluminum in use stocks and their relationship with economic output abstract a dynamic material flow analysis model is developed to quantify aluminum in use stocks and old scrap recycling and recovery in the united states for the period of 1900 to 2007 the total in use aluminum stock in 2007 is estimated as 93 million metric tons which represents approximately 34 of the cumulative apparent consumption since 1900 alternately since 1900 nearly 40 of the cumulative discarded aluminum has not been recycled for domestic use in the u s or for export to foreign consumers statistical time series analysis is used to explore the relationship between model results of in use stocks and gross domestic product gdp unlike most previous studies of material consumption and economic activity which ignore the statistical properties of time series data to the detriment of model estimation and inference data stationarity is explicitly evaluated through unit root testing and model specification is adjusted accordingly the annual percentage change in gdp is found to have a large and significant association with the annual percentage change in net additions to in use stocks model sensitivity and uncertainty are quantified through the application of the fourier amplitude sensitivity test and alternate specifications of product lifetime probability density functions

an empirical analysis of internal and external reference prices using scanner data single source yogurt data are used to examine whether both internal and external reference prices affect purchase decisions internal reference prices are memory resident prices based on actual fair or other price concepts external reference prices are observed stimuli such as regular prices that stores may display along with a sale price for comparability discrete choice models with variables representing the two types of reference prices are estimated and both types of variables are found to have significant effects on purchase probabilities this suggests that consumers may use multiple reference points in evaluating price in purchase decisions in addition a model using an indicator of a sale price discount explains purchase probabilities as well as one that models the actual discount which suggests that consumers may be reacting to the indication of savings rather than to the amount of the discount

developments in non expected utility theory the hunt for a descriptive theory of choice under risk this article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways considerable research effort has now been devoted to the project of developing a superior descriptive model following an overview of non expected utility theories which distinguishes between conventional and non conventional approaches the paper seeks to assess these alternative models in terms of empirical success using laboratory and field data and theoretical usefulness the closing sections reflect on some new directions emerging in this literature

endogenous price expectations as reference points in auctions the paper models auctions with bidders who have reference dependent payos the reference point is endogenised as the expected price of the good in the auction the model predicts that in equilibrium bidders both overbid and underbid in comparison to the standard bidding function without reference dependent utility the model predicts that more bidders overbid than underbid and that bidders bid more aggressively as the number of bidders or the reserve price increases finally it is shown perhaps surprisingly that revenue equivalence continues to hold between rst and second price

procedures and criteria to develop and evaluate household sustainable consumption indicators abstract communication about very complex problems like household sustainable consumption in simple terms is still a major challenge despite the diversity of tools to measure household consumption clearer indicators are needed to more effectively communicate with the general public the main objective of this research was to develop an approach to define the main procedures and criteria to built household sustainable consumption assessment tools based on indicator sets a review of available household sustainable consumption assessment metrics and related initiatives was conducted this included a comparative analysis of the different approaches the review revealed that the majority of these initiatives are focused upon specific domains e g energy or waste but none used an integrated approach in the sustainable consumption domains furthermore it was found that few methods used indicators to measure and assess household sustainable consumption principal components and a checklist of key good practice factors that a household sustainable consumption indicator system should include were developed due to the need to communicate effectively to engage stakeholders and to address the complexity involved in the measurement and assessment of household sustainable consumption the proposed integrated approach was designed to evaluate household sustainable consumption

environmental consciousness of european consumers a segmentation based study abstract sustainable consumption is not a one dimensional phenomenon it entails various attitudinal and behavioural dimensions to promote sustainability decision makers are encouraged to recognise the heterogeneity of sustainable consumers the aim of this study was to examine a model of environmental consciousness and use its variables to segment european union eu consumers the study used a structural equation modelling approach to verify the environmental consciousness model and hierarchical agglomeration method for segmentation it was based on secondary data on environmental issues gathered in 28 eu member states personal attitudinal dimensions in the model explained a relatively high proportion of the variance in sustainable behaviour the segmentation analysis yielded three distinct segments that differ in their environmental consciousness and are affiliated with different eu country clusters the use of secondary data to a certain extent limited the analysis however its strengths are its scope the potential generalisability of the results and comparability based on eu data

economically extended mfa a material flow approach for a better understanding of food production chain abstract in the following article we introduce a method called economically extended material flow analysis ee mfa which aims at studying causal relationships between economically motivated human behaviour and resource consumption for this purpose we expand mfa with economic information this method is evaluated by applying it in a case study on resource efficiency in the food production chain ee mfa reduces the shortcomings of a technically oriented mfa by including a description of the inputs and outputs in money units without changing the system structure this benefit is shown in the status quo analysis of to nourish where data from various sources could be compiled to set up a consistent model of material energy and money flows a further value addition of the method is that it creates a basis for a multi criteria evaluation of strategies to improve resource efficiency on a regional scale one result of this multi criteria evaluation is a classification of strategies according to their influence on the materials energy and money flows

dynamic models for managing durables using a stratified approach the case of tunja colombia in this paper dynamic models for managing durables are applied for the first time to an urban region in developing countries i e tunja in colombia the focus lies on the analysis of the material balance of furniture as an example in private households one of the major problems in calculating the material balances in regions in developing countries is the low availability of reliable data the investigations lead to the following conclusions 1 in developing countries regional stocks and fluxes of durables can be described using a dynamic model based on a stratified approach this allows for understanding the relevance of different social strata i e the use of goods in form of cascades identifying the parameters relevant for the system behavior estimating a plausible development pattern 2 the three behavioral parameters i stock saturation and residence time of the goods ii ratio of reused to new durables and iii ratio of deposited to recycled material drive the development of the regional furniture balance 3 to anticipate changes and problems in the management of durables in the region the potential changes of these behavioral parameters in each stratum have to be included in the analysis

sustainable growth criteria minimum benchmarks and scenarios for employment and the environment abstract the relationship of economic growth and environmental impact has spurred fierce debates between growth optimists referring to the phenomenon of the environmental kuznets curve and pessimists referring to the limits to growth however no operational set of simple criteria has been developed so far to assess the sustainability of a given growth pattern this is all the more true for measures combining environmental and social criteria the paper undertakes to sketch out such criteria and to assess them by applying them to transdiciplinary sustainability scenarios and model simulations with panta rhei one of the most complex models of the german economy theoretical considerations as well as the empirical work with the model demonstrate that there are indeed trade offs between economic growth and environmental impacts and a positive correlation of growth and employment nonetheless it is still possible to develop carefully orchestrated strategies that combine economic competitiveness low unemployment rates and an easing of the pressure on the environment social and technical innovation reduced working time a modernised social security system green taxes and salary increases proportional to labour productivity growth are essential parts of any such strategy the triple effectiveness of such strategies regarding environmental social and economic sustainability is demonstrated by the model runs

effects of seller supplied prices on buyers product evaluations reference prices in an internet auction context a field experiment investigated the impact of two external reference points under the seller s control on the final price of an auction when an item s seller specified a high external reference price a reserve price the final bid was greater than when the seller specified a low external reference price a minimum bid when the seller provided both high and low reference prices the reserve influenced the final bid more the low reference price led to a lower outcome compared to when the seller did not communicate any reference price the number of bidders influenced outcomes in the absence of seller supplied reference prices

correlates of price acceptability the cognitive tradeoff between price and product quality is used as a basis for hypothesizing interrelationships between two individual difference variables and two price related responses results of a correlational study support the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between price consciousness and product involvement and the hypotheses that price consciousness and product involvement have opposite implications for several price related constructs results also indicate a positive relationship between price acceptability level and the width of the latitude of price acceptance

philippine resource efficiency in asian context status trends and driving forces of philippine material flows from 1980 to 2008 abstract resource efficiency and sustainable resource management is critical to transitional economies to forward their pathway to sustainable development to date material flows analysis mfa and its database has become mature tools to diagnose the national resource utilization and efficiency but still few attentions and systematical analysis have been done for developing countries with this circumstance this paper conducted an innovative try on the in depth mfa research on philippines and its comparison in the asian context as an added value to current global mfa studies firstly philippine material flows from 1980 to 2008 and designed indicators reflecting resource utilization intensity and efficiency were analyzed and compared with other typical asian economies dematerialization analysis based on modified environmental kuznets curve ekc was further applied so as to investigate the coupling statements and trends of resource consumption and economic growth in philippines and compared with other asian countries finally driving forces for the changes of material flows were investigated with decomposition approach based on ipat impacts population amenity technology in periods divided according to key domestic development stages results highlighted a fluctuation of material flows which in line with the unstable development 1980s to early 2000s periods in philippines while in its stable development after early 2000s the ekc like curve was revealed indicating increasing resource consumption stage and requirement on strengthening resource efficiency countermeasures ipat analysis highlighted the critical role of economic instability on the fluctuation of dmc in the periods of 1980 1986 1986 1996 and 1996 2002 while in the period of 2002 2008 with economy recovery and stable development dmc increased and significantly offset by resource efficiency enhancement dmc gdp in asian context compared with mature developed countries like japan philippines didn t reach the real dematerialization stage yet while with comparison to fast developing countries like china and malaysia philippines was by far achieving the material prosperity together with economic prosperity therefore with setting stable economic as priority to enhance resource efficiency measures like cleaner production and regional eco industrial development market measures on resource price and tax as well as decision support tool development are critical to philippines future sustainable resource management with above highlights this paper expects to provide critical insights to the ever improvement of philippines and other southeast asian countries resource efficiency and resource management

economic evaluation of miscanthus production a review this paper reviews the peer reviewed literature dealing with the economics of miscanthus cultivation to identify factors influencing the adoption of miscanthus and to reveal shortcomings in research in total 51 studies have been identified for this review the majority of these publications are recent i e the majority is published after 2009 and concern case studies in europe particularly the uk and ireland and north america this review reveals that the economic viability of miscanthus depends on largely uncertain assumptions especially concerning yields 10 48 t dry matter per ha and prices 48 134 t dry matter but also concerning the lifespan 10 20 years and different cost items a lack of established markets high establishment costs and uncertainties arising to a large extent from the long term commitment are identified as major barriers to miscanthus adoption in addition the level of support for miscanthus production e g via subsidies is identified as crucial for miscanthus profitability but is found to be highly heterogeneous across countries next to diversity in agronomic and economic assumptions also the assessment criteria and research techniques used to investigate the profitability of miscanthus differ widely while the net present value criterion was most frequently used we identify a lack of approaches that account for risks and uncertainties which seem to potentially play a critical role in the uptake of miscanthus by farmers

a time use perspective on the materials intensity of consumption abstract the ecological requirements to drastically increase the productivity of materials use call for improvements in the efficiency of consumption this eco efficiency discussion often takes a functional view on consumption noting that present consumption is inefficient and that it is not the products that the consumers want but the services that the products yield however contemporary consumption serves many needs that are not functional and universal but subjective and obscured from the producers this paper develops a time use approach towards consumption which makes allowance for the subjectivity of needs while still enabling the analysts to approach the concept of a sustainable lifestyle a distinctive premise of the analysis is that it assumes time and money not to be interchangeable and consumption to be limited by available consumption time instead of purchasing power this approach is demonstrated by linking the direct and the indirect energy use of finnish two person households to the data of a national time use survey the results are used to point out some of the potential time use rebound effects of such new eco efficient services that transfer activities from private households to the market actors

representing in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in beijing abstract it is expected that in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in a household might be correlated with each other probably due to the existence of household budget constraints ownership and usage of energy saving technologies for in home appliances or vehicles might lead to the increase in out of home or in home energy consumption it is therefore necessary to jointly represent in home and out of home energy consumption in the same modeling framework with this consideration we first build a new type of energy consumption model based on the multiple discrete continuous extreme value mdcev modeling framework next we conducted a questionnaire survey in beijing in 2009 and successfully collected the information about households energy consumption ownership usage of in home appliances and vehicles and households and their members attributes from 1014 households throughout an empirical analysis it is confirmed that the mdcev model is effective to simultaneously describe the in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in addition it is revealed that a set of household and personal attributes affect the ownership and usage of in home appliances and vehicles furthermore it is shown that the unobserved factors play a much more important role in explaining energy consumption behavior than the observed attributes of households and their members

the sufficiency strategy would rich world frugality lower environmental impact abstract one alleged weapon against unsustainable environmental impact is for the wealthy to consume less this sufficiency strategy is to complement the efficiency strategy of lowering ratios of resource inputs to economic outputs the former would reduce the affluence factor in i pat the latter the technology factor that the latter strategy suffers from a consumption rebound is widely recognized this paper identifies a similar rebound when the affluence factor is autonomously lowered the lower initial demand lowers prices which in turn stimulates new demand by others the strategy moreover addresses only the rich raising questions of its theoretical maximum efficacy its proponents usually conflate frugality with the north south dichotomy and intra generational with inter generational equity moreover there are difficulties with the supporting arguments that frugality is good for one s own sake as well as for the environment and that the rich should lead the way to living more lightly personal behaviour change is furthermore not a substitute for international political efforts finally since all changes in right side factors of the i pat equation change other right side factors such indirect attacks on impact should be abandoned in favor of supply and emissions quotas