understanding heterogeneous preferences in random utility models a latent class approach a finite mixture approach toconditional logit models is developed in whichlatent classes are used to promoteunderstanding of systematic heterogeneity the model is applied to wilderness recreationin which a branded choice experiment involvingchoice of one park from a demand system wasadministered to a sample of recreationists the basis of membership in the classes orsegments in the sample involved attitudinalmeasures of motivations for taking a trip aswell as their stated preferences overwilderness park attributes the econometricanalysis suggested that four classes of peopleexist in the sample using the model toexamine welfare measures of some hypotheticalpolicy changes identified markedly differentwelfare effects than the standard singlesegment model and provided insight into thedifferential impact of alternative policies

compulsory versus voluntary voting an experimental study abstract we report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions if voting is compulsory then voters may find it rational to vote insincerely i e against their private information if voting is voluntary so that abstention is allowed then sincere voting in accordance with a voter s private information is always rational while participation may become strategic we find strong support for these theoretical predictions in our experimental data moreover voters adapt their decisions to the voting institution in place in such a way as to make the group decision accuracy differences between the two voting institutions negligible the latter finding may serve to rationalize the co existence of compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in nature

information aggregation and turnout in proportional representation a laboratory experiment abstract this paper documents a laboratory experiment that analyzes voter participation in common interest proportional representation pr elections comparing this with majority rule consistent with theoretical predictions poorly informed voters in either system abstain from voting thereby shifting weight to those who are better informed a dilution problem makes mistakes especially costly under pr so abstention is higher in pr in contrast with private interest environments and welfare is lower deviations from nash equilibrium predictions can be accommodated by a logit version of quantal response equilibrium qre which allows for voter mistakes

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

four models for determining environmental quality effects on recreational demand and regional economics abstract underestimation of regional economic effects associated with the improvement of recreation facilities or environmental quality at a recreation site is likely to result unless all four recreation choice decisions are included in estimates of the first round or direct changes in final demand these four related recreation choices are 1 decision to participate in a given recreation activity 2 decision about which of the available sites to visit 3 decision about the frequency of trips to take to a given site and 4 decision about length of stay at the recreation site recent advances in statistical techniques for modeling each one of these four recreation choice decisions is presented we emphasize how recreation facilities and site environmental quality can be incorporated into such models lastly an empirical example of using a related multinomial logit site selection model and trip frequency model for deer hunting allows us to illustrate how linking two of the four recreation choices yields more complete estimates of the change in number of trips income and employment

welfare losses due to livestock grazing on public lands a count data systemwide treatment backcountry hikers willingness to pay for removing grazing from trails in the hoover wilderness is analyzed using a multinomial dirichlet negative binomial distribution this multivariate discrete distribution allows the direct calculation of seasonal welfare measures that are derived from an incomplete demand specification the welfare maximizing choice of activities is examined on a trail by trail basis using the results of the analysis our findings suggest that a mix of hiking and grazing activities provide the greatest social welfare

technological change occupational tasks and declining immigrant outcomes implications for earnings and income inequality in canada the earnings and occupational task requirements of immigrants to canada are analyzed the growing education levels of immigrants in the 1990s have not led to a large improvement in earnings as one might expect if growing computerization and the resulting technological change was leading to a rising return to non routine cognitive skills and a greater wage return to university education controlling for education we find a pronounced cross arrival cohort decline in earnings that coincided with cross cohort declines in cognitive occupational task requirements and cross cohort increases in manual occupational task requirements the immigrant earnings outcomes had only a small effect on overall canadian earnings inequality resume changement technique t ches occupationnelles et resultats declinants pour les immigrants implications pour l inegalite des gains et des revenus au canada les auteurs analysent les gains et les prerequis des t ches occupationnelles des immigrants les niveaux d education croissants des immigrants dans les annees 1990 n ont pas entraine une grande amelioration dans les gains comme on aurait pu s y attendre si l informatisation accrue et les changements techniques qui s ensuivent ont entraine un rendement croissant sur des habiletes cognitives non routinieres et un rendement salarial plus grand sur l education universitaire normalisant pour le niveau d education on decouvre un declin entre cohortes dans les gains qui coincide avec un declin dans ce que reclament les t ches en termes d habiletes cognitives et un accroissement de ce que reclament les occupations manuelles l effet de ces changements sur les gains des immigrants n a eu qu un faible impact sur l inegalite des gains au canada

modelling winners and losers in contingent valuation of public goods appropriate welfare measures and econometric analysis contingent valuation is now the most widely used method for valuing non marketed goods in cost benefit analysis yet despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others most studies restrict willingness to pay to being non negative this can result in significant errors in policymaking this paper examines the importance of this explores appropriate welfare measures for assessing losses and gains demonstrates how these can be elicited explicitly highlights the sensitivity of the results of such studies to the econometric specification employed and suggests ways of dealing with it finally the implica tions for policy are examined assessment including passive use values this technique has become the most widely used method for placing values on non marketed goods this paper examines some outstanding issues in relation to the validity of the method as a basis for policy making in particular most studies ignore the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others in addition the results of contingent valuation studies are often quite sensitive to the econometric specification assumed the significance of these issues is examined techniques for their resolution are outlined and the implications for public policy are highlighted the importance for economists of the debate on the validity of contingent valuation was emphasised in a series of papers from a symposium on the contingent valuation method cvm published in the journal of economic perspectives in 1994 in his paper portney 1994 predicted that whether the economics profession liked it or not the cvm would inevitably play a role in public policy formulation and therefore it was important that economists be aware of the controversies and have their say on the topic portney s prediction was correct and contingent valuation has become a routine approach to valuing environmental goods with hundreds of studies being produced each year 1 the cvm places a value on a change in the provision of a public good by asking households in a survey how much they are willing to pay for the change or the minimum compensation they would require if the change were not to happen the role that contingent valuation studies play in public policy is

the case for nil votes voter behavior under asymmetric information in compulsory and voluntary voting systems in an informational voting environment we study the impact of an explicit nil vote option on the ballot when some voters are uninformed and face the swing voters curse we postulate a simple model of strategic voting in which voters entertain heterogeneous thresholds on legitimacy of different voting actions we predict that introducing a nil vote option reduces the number of uninformed and invalid votes increasing expected welfare in both voluntary and compulsory voting we test our model in a pen and paper laboratory experiment and find that the predictions of the model hold in the data for both voting systems

in defense of unanimous jury verdicts mistrials communication and strategic voting the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials is widely believed to reduce the likelihood of convicting the innocent this belief depends largely upon the assumption that jurors will vote nonstrategically based on their impression of the trial evidence recent literature however has questioned this assumption and feddersen and pesendorfer propose a model in which it is never a nash equilibrium for jurors to vote nonstrategically under unanimity rule and equilibrium behavior produces higher probabilities of both convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty under unanimity rule than under numerous alternatives i extend this work by incorporating two additional features of actual jury procedure the possibility of mistrial and communication among jurors under each circumstance i demonstrate that nonstrategic voting is a nash equilibrium under fairly general conditions and that unanimity performs better than any alternative rule in minimizing probability of trial error and maximizing expected utility

determinants of demand for recreational walking trails in ireland abstract the purpose of this work is to explore how recreational walkers marginal willingness to pay for or travel to irish trails is affected by trail attributes we use principal components data reduction z score data normalization and ols regression analyses on two stated preference datasets covering 302 irish and foreign visitors and recreational experts across 15 sites in ireland between 2005 and 2010 findings reveal that endowment and infrastructure attributes emerge as primary influences affecting demand in particular flat or valley endowed trails and infrastructure including signage amenities and maps or leaflets positively affect demand additionally robustness checks suggest farmer access agreements may also be important on the other hand we find that mountain or hill forest and coastal or lake trails as well as income seem to be negatively associated with demand finally we are able to use these in sample results to extrapolate demand for a set of new relatively unimproved trails in an out of sample demand prediction exercise

let the experts decide asymmetric information abstention and coordination in standing committees abstract we examine abstention when voters in standing committees are asymmetrically informed and there are multiple pure strategy equilibria swing voter s curse svc equilibria where voters with low quality information abstain and equilibria when all participants vote their information when the asymmetry in information quality is large we find that voting groups largely coordinate on the svc equilibrium which is also pareto optimal however we find that when the asymmetry in information quality is not large and the pareto optimal equilibrium is for all to participate significant numbers of voters with low quality information abstain furthermore we find that information asymmetry induces voters with low quality information to coordinate on a non equilibrium outcome this suggests that coordination on letting the experts decide is a likely voting norm that sometimes validates svc equilibrium predictions but other times does not

information aggregation and strategic abstention in large laboratory elections this paper compares strategic abstention in ad hoc committees versus standing committees ad hoc committees meet only once and then dissolve while standing committees the central finding from this study is that most of the predictions of swing voter curse theory hold up in large elections conducted under controlled laboratory conditions there is significant abstention and significant balancing of partisans by uniformed voters and vote balancing increases with the partisan imbalance elections with no partisan imbalance successfully aggregate information and lead to efficient outcomes consistent with swing voter curse theory this efficiency falls off as partisan imbalance increases but to a significantly greater extent than is predicted in equilibrium it is instructive to compare these findings in large elections with results from the elections reported in battaglini et al 2007 all of the qualitative results are the same concerning the comparative statics balancing and abstention one slight difference is that there was less irrational voting for in the small elections than in the large elections except for the 5 9 m 0 treatment where we observed 20 voting for in the small elections compared with 10 voting for in the large elections these differences were reflected in slightly different efficiency results between small and large elections with the comparisons mirroring the differences in voting for more irrational voting results in lower e ciency we conclude that this scaled up study successfully replicates the initial swing voter s curse experiment reported in battaglini et al 2007 obtaining very similar findings in laboratory committees that are three times the size of those in the original study the one caveat is that we found evidence of a slight increase in irrational nonequilibrium behavior voting for in the larger elections whether this trend would continue as election size is further scaled up is an open question a swing voter s curse environment

what influences the probability of wind farm planning approval evidence from ireland the purpose of this work is to explore the extent to which wind farm planning approvals in the republic of ireland are influenced by project technology institutional processes and site endowments we use principal components data reduction z score data normalization and probit regression analyses on a unique revealed preference dataset covering 354 wind farm applications and planning authority decisions between 1990 and 2011 notably a unique measure of variable importance is employed that mitigates statistical problems and allows for the ranking of predictors according to their relative influences findings reveal that the duration of the local appeal process decisions of local authorities and inspectors identities of the appellants and projects that conflict with strategic development plans or generate visual externalities emerge as key influences affecting planning approval project technology features such as area rated output capacity and hub height as well as site wind endowments appear to be of less but significant importance alternatively we find that proximity to dwellings towns or protected habitats does not influence planning outcomes

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

the swing voter s curse in the laboratory this paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter s curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on pivotal voter models our experiment controls for different information levels of voters as well as the size of the electorate the distribution of preferences and other theoretically relevant parameters the design varies the share of partisan voters and the prior belief about a payoff relevant state of the world our results support the equilibrium predictions of the feddersen pesendorfer model and clearly reject the notion that voters in the laboratory use naive decision theoretic strategies the voters act as if they are aware of the swing voter s curse and adjust their behavior to compensate while the compensation is not complete and there is some heterogeneity in individual behavior we find that aggregate outcomes such as efficiency turnout and margin of victory closely track the theoretical predictions

property rights and sustainable nature tourism adaptation and mal adaptation in dalarna sweden and maine usa abstract tourism is viewed in many industrial nations as an environmentally friendly way to revitalize distressed rural economies and communities in the forest regions of dalarna and interior maine hopes are pinned on nature based tourism with the presumption that natural capital is underutilized this paper explores the potential and pitfalls of nature tourism as a basis for sustainable rural development in regions where most land is held privately but quasi open access for recreation has been either a right dalarna or a customary entitlement maine the paper applies theories of common pool resources and impure public goods to show that both property regimes are mal adapted for sustainable nature tourism limited exclusion combined with rivalness in land uses mis aligns incentives facing landowners tourists and recreation businesses short term effects include congestion reduced economic opportunity and depressed production of non recreational goods longer term effects include environmental degradation and weak incentives for value added investment tourism development is further impeded by a scale mis match between small ownerships and large efficient recreation management units the analysis suggests that sustainable nature tourism faces four land use challenges

information aggregation in standing and ad hoc committees this paper reports results from a laboratory experiment comparing voting behavior and decision making efficiency in standing and ad hoc committees where decisions are made by unanimity rule we also compare sequential and simultaneous secret ballot voting procedures the data are remarkably consistent across treatments in both qualitative comparative statics and quantitative terms the different procedures and the ad hoc or standing nature of the committees generally do not seem to lead to the selection of different equilibria with the exception of some evidence of bandwagon effects in the sequential procedure

advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty we study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters preferences to uninformed political candidates we conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are initially unknown and change over time in the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections in the advocacy treatments voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences we find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group in fact we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups which convey new information and uninformative advocacy groups which do not overall advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter however advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation

get out the costly vote institutional design for greater participation institutions designed to increase turnout appeal to democratic sentiments but are highly debated as they entail two potentially countervailing eects while generating more pieces of information they may decrease the average voter s information quality we examine two commonly discussed institutions inducing participation abstention penalties used in 32 countries around the world and lotteries providing a prize to one randomly chosen participant as proposed on the 2006 arizona ballot we analyze a benchmark rational choice model in which voters vary in their information quality and participation is costly we illustrate that both institutions can improve collective outcomes though lotteries are a more eective instrument asymptotically in an array of lab experiments we empirically assess institutional performance we nd strong evidence for selective participation lab voters participate more when better informed or when institutionally induced however because subjects vote more often than the equilibrium predictions these institutions entail less welfare benets than theory prescribes lotteries do fare better than nes suggesting that they may be a useful alternative to commonly used compulsory

understanding the uptake of organic farming accounting for heterogeneities among irish farmers abstract this paper examines the decisions of irish farmers to convert to organic farming by applying the theory of planned behaviour to control for social influence and technical constraints cluster analysis and principal component analysis are utilised to account for sample heterogeneity and to identify heterogeneities in farmer beliefs regarding adoption of organic methods the results indicate that the impact of economic incentives and technical barriers varies while social acceptance of organic farming constrains adoption these findings suggest that policy incentives mainly based on subsidy payments may be insufficient to increase the organic sector in the presence of social and technical barriers

expert information and majority decisions this paper shows theoretically and experimentally that hearing expert opinions can be a double edged sword for collective decision making we present a majoritarian voting game of common interest where committee members receive not only private information but also expert information that is more accurate than private information and observed by all members in theory there are bayesian nash equilibria where the committee members voting strategy incorporates both types of information and access to expert information enhances the efficiency of the majority decision however there is also a class of potentially inefficient equilibria where a supermajority always follow expert information and the majority decision does not aggregate private information in the laboratory the majority decisions and the subjects voting behaviour were largely consistent with those in the class of inefficient equilibria we found a large efficiency loss due to t he presence of expert information especially when the committee size was large we suggest that it may be desirable for expert information to be revealed only to a subset of committee members

the marginal voter s curse an intuitive explanation for voter abstention is that a voter is uncertain which policy or candidate to vote for and so defers to the rest of the electorate to make the decision in majoritarian elections this has been formally modelled as a strategic response to the swing voter s curse which arises because the rare event of a pivotal vote conveys substantial information in electoral systems other than majority rule however the standard pivotal voting calculus may not apply this paper analyzes one such system namely proportional representation where additional votes continue to push the policy outcome in one direction or the other a new strategic incentive for abstention arises in that case to avoid the marginal voter s curse of pushing the policy outcome in the wrong direction intuitively conditioning on the rare event of a pivotal vote might seem to have a greater impact on behavior but the marginal voter s curse actually presents a larger disincentive for voting than the swing voter s curse this and other predictions of the model are con rmed empirically by a series of laboratory experiments

combining ecological and recreational aspects in national park management a choice experiment application increasing pressure to diversify development of national parks emphasizes the need for new and relevant information for park management decisions in this paper we use choice experiment to value different tradeoffs that evolved in park development scenarios specifically we examine which kind of development profiles are worth considering and which paths not to follow we focus on biodiversity and recreational services provided by oulanka national park in finland which represents a popular recreation site attracting a large number of visitors the increase of biodiversity was the most highly valued feature by the respondent national park visitors thus our results show that the protection of biodiversity and recreational and tourism use of national parks can cause conflicting welfare effects if managed in inappropriate ways increasing the number of visitors expanding present resting places constructing new resting places and an intense increase in information boards especially if combined with shrinking biodiversity are welfare reducing managerial actions in national parks

common value elections with private information and informative priors theory and experiments abstract we study efficiency and information aggregation in common value elections with contin uous private signals and informative priors we show that small elections are not generally efficient and that there are equilibria where some voters vote against their private signal even if it provides useful information and abstention is allowed this is not the case in large elections where the fraction of voters who vote against their private signal tends to zero in an experiment we then study how informativeness of priors and private signals impact efficiency and information aggregation in small elections we find that there is a substantial amount of voting against the private signal moreover while most experimental elections are efficient we find that it is not generally the case that better private information leads to better decisions

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

valuing the recreational benefits from the creation of nature reserves in irish forests abstract data from a large scale contingent valuation study are used to investigate the effects of forest attributes on willingness to pay for forest recreation in ireland in particular the presence of a nature reserve in the forest is found to significantly increase the visitors willingness to pay a random utility model is used to estimate the welfare change associated with the creation of nature reserves in all the irish forests currently without one the yearly impact on visitors economic welfare of new nature reserves approaches half a million pounds per annum exclusive of non recreational values

aggregating information by voting the wisdom of the experts versus the wisdom of the masses this article analyzes participation and information aggregation in a common value election with continuous private signals in equilibrium some citizens ignore their private information and abstain from voting in deference to those with higher quality signals even as the number of highly informed peers grows large however citizens with only moderate expertise continue voting so that voter participation remains at realistic levels e g 50 to 60 percent for simple examples the precise level of voter turnout along with the margin of victory are determined by the distribution of expertise improving a voter s information makes her more willing to vote consistent with a growing body of empirical evidence but makes her peers more willing to abstain providing a new explanation for various empirical patterns of voting equilibrium participation is optimal even though the marginal voter may have very little e g below average expertise and even though nonvoters information is not utilized copyright oxford university press