choice modeling at the market stall individual versus collective interest in environmental valuation the market stall or valuation workshop has recently been proposed as a way of addressing some of the limitations of conventional stated preference analysis in this paper we attempt to combine a participatory technique similar to the citizens jury with choice modelling a stated preference technique increasingly being applied in environmental economics our focus is on how changes in the context of decision making between choices made in isolation and those made in a group setting and between choices made on individual well being versus collective criteria produce differences in estimated welfare measures the empirical context used is that of water quality improvements under the water framework directive the most significant reform in water legislation in the european union for many years we find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a valuation workshop and that moving from individual to collective choice produces in this instance a rather interesting change in both values and preferences which depends on the respondent s interests

strategic behavior and partial cost sharing abstract the main objects here are games in which players mainly compete but nonetheless collaborate on some subsidiary activities play assumes a two stage nature in that first stage moves presume coordination of some subsequent tasks specifically we consider instances where second stage coordination amounts to partial cost sharing anticipated and sustained as a core solution examples include regional cournot oligopolies with joint transportation we define and characterize equilibria and inquire about their existence

deliberative monetary valuation in search of a democratic and value plural approach to environmental policy the use of deliberative methods to assess environmental values in monetary terms has been motivated by the potential for small group discussion to help with preference formation and the inclusion of non economic values in this review two broad approaches are identified preference economisation and preference moralisation the former is analytical concentrates upon issues of poor respondent cognition and produces a narrow conception of value linked to utilitarianism the latter emphasises political legitimacy appeals to community values and tends to privilege arguments made in the public interest both approaches are shown to embrace forms of value convergence which undermine the prospects for value pluralism as a result exclusion and predefinition of values dominates current practice in order to maintain democratic credentials the importance attributed to monetary value needs to be left as an open question to be addressed as part of a process determining an agreement to pay to this end we identify a discourse based approach as a third way consistent with the democratic and value plural potential of deliberative monetary valuation

improving the process of valuing non market benefits combining citizens juries with choice modelling we attempt a first combination of the participatory technique known as the citizens jury with choice modelling a stated preference technique increasingly favored by environmental economists our application is conducted in the context of water quality improvements under the water framework directive the most significant reform in water legislation in the european union for many years we compare results with those of a conventional choice experiment we find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a jury setting and that moving from an individual to a collective choice setting produces a change in both values and preferences

how deliberation affects stated willingness to pay for mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions an experiment respondents reported willingness to pay wtp for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions after structured group discussion or without this deliberation deliberation did not affect mean or median wtp but it increased the number of issues respondents considered with some issues becoming more frequently considered and others less survey only respondents considered issues relevant for responding to a request for a charitable contribution group mode participants considered issues relevant for a public policy assessment findings suggest that ordinary citizens can offer valid input to environmental policy decisions but that framing effects in ordinary wtp surveys may prevent them from providing such input

from rational actor to efficient complexity manager exorcising the ghost of homo economicus with a unified synthesis of cognition research it is now commonplace to note that economics canonical model of humans as rational self interested utility maximizers homo economicus is both descriptively misleading and often insufficiently predictive however certain outdated assumptions tied to homo economicus persist often influencing discourse and research design even in sustainability oriented fields we argue this ghost of homo economicus endures because the diversity of findings that confound the canonical model has surfaced across multiple behavioral and cognitive sciences each with its own terminology and focus area as such a unified accessible synthesis of this new information has yet to emerge in this paper we review recent insights from across the behavioral and cognitive sciences and propose an efficient complexity manager ecm model homo efficens as the best synthesizing option the crux of this model is that our species works within biological limits to efficiently filter massive environmental complexity this is achieved largely through analogical or case based reasoning we explain this synthesized model using a series of accessible metaphors finally we speculate on how this model may enrich future sustainable development research insofar as it points to fruitful units of analysis can stimulate methodological innovation and provide a more explicit theoretical foundation for the field

an integrated production distribution model for a multi national company operating under varying exchange rates research modeling the production planning and logistics decisions for multi national companies mnc s operating under varying inflation and exchange rates is scanty decisions regarding the products to be made in different facilities and the markets which these facilities would serve are critical to the mnc s success also decisions regarding when to open retain and close facilities are equally important these decisions are sensitive to both inflation and exchange rates accordingly we incorporate these parameters in the development of an integrated production planning and distribution model for an mnc we elicit the performance of the model through examples our results indicate profit reduces by as much as 45 77 depending on the exchange rates initial capacities and restrictions imposed on the more profitable facility

do contingent valuation estimates pass a scope test a meta analysis abstract this paper considers the scope test proposed to judge the internal consistency of contingent valuation estimates the test is shown to be quite sensitive to the maintained hypotheses required to derive fairly precise expectations for the properties of wtp functions and therefore a different approach may be needed in gauging the reliability of cv this paper describes an approach that relies on a weight of the evidence criterion and uses meta analysis to develop a systematic appraisal of what the economic values of changes in amenity resources are the approach is illustrated for the case of estimating people s willingness to pay for improving or maintaining visibility at the national parks

making decisions on offshore outsourcing and backshoring a case study in the bicycle industry abstract small and medium sized enterprises smes are expected to generate new innovations as well as future growth and employment for the european economy in the last two decades a large number of european manufacturing companies have offshored their production operations to low cost countries outside of the eurozone however also bringing back home the once offshore outsourced manufacturing i e backshoring has become a notable phenomenon even if it has received less attention in research until very recently this paper reports research on consecutive offshoring and backshoring decisions of a northern european bicycle manufacturing company we identified an over 30 percent cost advantage from offshore outsourcing that turned over a two year period into an advantage for the firm s own manufacturing in the home country the main reasons for the rediscovered advantage of in house manufacturing were 1 the increasing accuracy of cost allocation procedures 2 changes in external factors such as exchange rate variations and supplier costs 3 growing sales volumes and the simultaneous requirement for shorter lead times resulting from the redefinition of the product and 4 the network level learning to combine factory and network level operations the contribution of this paper is the insight that it provides into how companies can overvalue the cost benefits of offshore outsourcing as well as highlighting factors to be considered and the sensitivity analysis to be carried out in evaluating such decisions

cost sharing under increasing returns a comparison of simple mechanisms a technology with decreasing marginal costs is used by agents with equal rights each agent demands a quantity of output and costs are divided by means of a fixed formula several such mechanisms are compared for the existence of nash equilibrium demand profiles and for the equity properties of these equilibria among three mechanisms average cost pricing the shapley shubik cost sharing and serial cost sharing only the latter two possess at least one nash equilibrium on a reasonable domain of individual preferences only the serial cost sharing equilibria pass the equity tests of no envy and stand alone cost journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 d63

approaches to economic equilibrium abstract we study mechanisms that help to explain why and how equilibrium may eventually be attained in many economic settings examples include competitive markets and many noncooperative games the main object is an adaptive process reflecting repeated adjustment of individual strategies which under monotonicity conditions leads to equilibrium environmental uncertainty is accommodated but agents need neither know the probability law nor invoke any statistical learning theory nor compute mean values in fact everyone can act perhaps without precedent maybe among strangers within unidentified frames nonetheless we show under reasonable conditions that individual optimality and system equilibrium obtains in the long run

giving respondents time to think in contingent valuation studies a developing country application abstract this paper evaluates whether the time given people to think about their responses to cvm valuation questions influences their answers our study was conducted in nigeria as part of an evaluation of rural households willingness to pay for public taps and private connections to improved drinking water systems respondents who were allowed time to evaluate the proposed water system bid significantly less than those who did not have that time moreover this conclusion was upheld regardless of whether the water system was a public tap or a private connection

valuation in morally charged situations the role of deontological stances and intuition for trade off making abstract the contingent valuation method is a widely used yet controversial approach for valuating unpriced public goods in environmental and ecological economics there is ongoing debate about the validity of the willingness to pay statements this method elicits particularly then when ethically or morally charged public goods are assessed it has been assumed that a considerable portion of the public holds deontological stances toward and applies analytical moral reasoning to such goods which distort willingness to pay statements and subsequent cost benefit analyses based on stated economic values results from studies in developmental and moral psychology however indicate that the majority of people base moral choice and subsequently trade offs on social norms affective reactions and moral intuition rather than on analytical moral reasoning this article presents a small focus group study of people in the uk n 18 exploring whether their responses supports the idea that a considerable percentage of the public holds deontological stances towards the environment that influence their willingness to pay for environmental goods the article contributes to the discourse on the validity of willingness to pay statements from a broader perspective it scrutinizes the importance of analytical moral reasoning and suggests that affective judgments and intuition are relevant to environmental valuation

internationalization and firm risk an upstream downstream hypothesis corporate international diversification theory posits that multinational corporations mncs should have lower risk and higher financial leverage than purely domestic corporations dcs we suggest an alternative upstream downstream hypothesis according to which the overall effect of internationalization on the risk and leverage of mncs is expected to vary with home and target market conditions the empirical results are consistent with the suggested hypothesis

quantifying public preferences for agri environmental policy in scotland a comparison of methods abstract this paper compares two methods for determining policy priorities for reform of scottish agricultural support multifunctional agriculture attempts to establish a new balance between traditional commodity support and payment for the production of non market goods and services that are increasingly demanded by the public supplying non market goods presents particular problems for optimal policy design not least the elicitation of consumer demand for those goods from public focus groups a range of attributes was derived as central to the scottish public s preferences for future agri environmental reform this information was then combined in two separate survey methods using the analytical hierarchy process ahp and choice experiments ce both applications suggest that the public has defined preferences and a willingness to pay using general income taxation to affect changes beyond the status quo and that policy payments should be targeted towards both environmental and social benefits the divergent preference orderings derived from the alternative methods can be considered in the light of previous methodological debates on question framing bounded rationality and respondent uncertainty we speculate about the validity of alternative methodologies for informing particular policy questions

decision structuring to alleviate embedding in environmental valuation abstract embedding is the widely observed phenomenon that a good is assigned a higher value if evaluated on its own rather than as part of a more inclusive set embedding is considered a serious problem affecting the quality of many environmental management and health risk policy judgments this paper presents the results of an experiment involving of a structured small group approach for conducting environmental policy evaluations it focuses on eliciting problem specific values and discussion among participants about the pros and cons of multiple project alternatives in the context of tradeoffs between fisheries production and electricity generation from dams study results show a significant reduction in embedding which is viewed as an improvement in the quality of the preference judgments compared with a standard contingent valuation cv approach

joint ownership of a convex technology comparison of three solutions a given set of agents jointly own and operate a decreasing returns to scale technology with a single input and a single output they all contribute some input and receive some of the output what first best allocation is equitable we discuss three allocation mechanisms the equal benefits solution gives every agent the same benefit computed at the supporting price the equal returns solution equalizes returns output shares input contributions across agents the constant returns equivalent solution gives every agent his indirect utility level at some common price of output relative to input a lower and an upper bound on individual welfares play a key role in these axiomatic characterisation results

sequencing and nesting in contingent valuation surveys abstract the term embedding is ill defined and has been applied to distinct phenomena some predicted by economic theory and others not this paper lays out a theoretical framework for looking at these phenomena and provides a set of well defined terms included is a discussion of survey design problems which may induce spurious evidence in favor of the hypothesis that respondents are insensitive to the scope of the good being valued an empirical example of the component sensitivity is provided this test rejects the hypothesis that respondents are insensitive to the scope of the good being valued

adequate responsiveness to scope in contingent valuation the standard test for scope sensitivity in contingent valuation studies determines whether the response to changes in scope is statistically significant it does not address whether the magnitude of response is appropriate given the specified changes in scope we examine contingent valuation studies that implemented scope tests to determine what they imply about the adequacy of response to scope we find that in the vast majority of studies the magnitude of response cannot be assessed only three studies permit such an assessment samples and hollyer 1990 diamond et al 1993 and chapman et al 2009 the first two papers find that responses to their surveys did not vary adequately with scope the third study passed the standard scope test but we show that the magnitude of response in this study is inadequate by straightforward methods of assessment and cannot be explained by diminishing marginal utility or substitution more research is needed on this issue including wider application of adding up tests on incremental parts as well as the development of other methods that permit an assessment of the magnitude of response or other tests of rationality

how people respond to contingent valuation questions a verbal protocol analysis of willingness to pay for an environmental regulation abstract this paper investigates what a respondent is thinking when answering a willingness to pay question in a contingent valuation using a think aloud technique from psychology called verbal protocol analysis the willingness to pay responses we observed seem to be constructed from a variety of considerations including an obligation to pay a fair share of the cost of the solution and signaling concern for a larger set of environmental issues the finding that respondents seem to construct their values at the time they are asked rather than reporting a more well defined value is seen as consistent with over two decades of research on the psychology of decision making potential uses of verbal protocols in contingent valuation studies are also discussed

a hierarchical process industry production distribution planning model abstract global and multinational companies are subject to government regulations in addition to other international uncertainties due to operation in diverse geographic locations such government regulations often affect the cost of raw materials adversely which in turn creates adverse impact on product cost and forces the decision makers to re evaluate current production distribution plan this paper presents an integrated supply chain model for simultaneous strategic and operational planning of a strategic business unit sbu in a global supply chain affected by government regulations the model incorporates impact of changes in cost of inputs on expected product cost and solves for an optimal strategic and operational plan for the entire supply chain in addition the model includes exchange rates border crossing costs and solves a multi period model with due consideration of uncertainties in demand and transportation time

bounded rationality in contingent valuation empirical evidence using cognitive psychology abstract survey based valuation techniques like the contingent valuation method cvm rely particularly on the premise of respondents rationality when answering willingness to pay wtp questions results of cvm surveys have repeatedly put this fundamental assumption into question this study adopts a more realistic view of rationality accounting for respondents limited capacities to process information based on cognitive psychology a technique to detect and analyze the bounds of rationality inherent in wtp statements is developed using an empirical example the influence of bounded rationality on the validity of cvm results is analyzed it is shown that individual differences in information processing play a major role for the validity of cvm responses the results allow new insights into response behavior in dichotomous choice versus payment card elicitation formats from the results of this study recommendations for future survey designs taking into account respondents different information processing modes are developed

the obsolescing bargaining model mnc host developing country relations revisited the traditional bargaining model of mnc host developing country relations has become obsolete today those relations are better understood as the result of a two tier multi party bargaining process tier 1 bargaining between the governments of host and home countries occurs bilaterally or through multilateral institutions it produces macro rules on fdi that affect micro negotiations in tier 2 per the traditional bargaining model the extent of fdi liberalization resulting from tier 1 bargaining varies predictably across home host country pairs and industries suggestions for testing the two tier bargaining model are also presented

modeling manufacturing and marketing options in international operations abstract in this paper we model and compare eight manufacturing marketing options that a firm with operations in two countries termed as an international enterprise may adopt manufacturing factors incorporated in the model include factory location inventory economies of scale product design and postponement marketing factors include product positioning and pricing the model also includes international factors such as the exchange rate and transportation cost the first two options are termed core product options where the international enterprise manufactures a core product in a single facility located in one of the countries under the first core product option this facility also performs additional operations on the core product to develop custom tailored products under the second core product option customization of the core product takes place in facilities located in both countries the other six options are characterized by standardization customization of product and pricing policies as well as centralization decentralization of the production function the main result of the analysis is that under certain production related conditions the core product options dominate the other six manufacturing marketing options this result has significant managerial implications since it suggests that the core product options exploit the best of both worlds customized pricing and product policies as well as savings derived from economies of scale from the centralized production of the core product

an integrated location production distribution and investment model for a multinational corporation abstract we present a mixed integer linear formulation that extends published models on multinational corporation facility location decisions by including exogenous variables such as exchange rates and tariff rates and incorporating production distribution and investment decisions the model provides insights on production levels facility configurations distribution strategies and levels of investment needed at these facilities and explores factors that influence the facility s configuration decisions several scenarios are considered based on various facility configurations and levels of exchange and tariff rates the results obtained from these show that the model s performance and results are in complete agreement with accepted economic theories