Suchergebnisse

Does the Government's right hand know what its wrong hand is doing? Ken Willis of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne argues that it is spurring nationalised industries to increased efficiency in investment while allowing local and regional authorities to squander their resources.

AbstractThis paper investigates people's preferences for live theatre, and heterogeneity in willingness‐to‐pay (WTP). A stated preference discrete choice model estimates utility and WTP for different attributes of theatre productions. Previous studies assumed fixed coefficients across all theatre‐goers. This study allows coefficients of attributes to vary across individuals in the population, providing information on the heterogeneity of tastes. Theatre‐goers' choices are used to estimate individual‐based parameters for a person's tastes in theatre productions. The analysis reveals the heterogeneity of tastes for different types of plays and ticket price; and the significance of 'reviews' by critics and 'word of mouth' opinions as important variables determining choice.

This paper examines and compares households' willingness to accept (WTA)/willingness to pay (WTP) ratio for solar power equipment on their premises through both a novel experimental approach and conventional techniques. The experimental approach was administered by using a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method and cheap talk, with open-ended questions of WTA/WTP. The results were quite striking. The ratio for the incentivised approach was 1.08:1; whereas for the conventional approach it was 3.5:1. The findings suggest that the hypothesis that WTP equals WTA cannot be rejected for the incentivised mechanism, and it appears to control for the individual's strategic behaviour bias as a treatment against over-estimating WTA and under-estimating WTP. The findings also provide some policy implications for Northern Cyprus: the government can set lower financial incentives to increase the solar power installed capacity on the island.

Much empirical work has been undertaken on housing production, investment levels and on the changes necessary to increase the supply of housing at a national level. The implicit assumption in these perspectives, that owners buy and sell housing as an adjustment process, is not realised in all housing markets around the world. In fact, in a number of developing countries houses are seldom bought or sold: one such country is Ghana. Here traditional economic perspectives on modelling an owner's decision to extend by comparing it with his decision to sell and move are largely irrelevant. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the analysis of housing supply by developing a housing extension model for the Asante culture in Ghana. The model is evaluated in a two-step econometric analysis of the decision to extend. In the first stage the probability of extending is modelled as a function of household characteristics, while the second stage predicts the amount spent on the extension.