Download or read book Essays on Behavioral and Natural Resource Economics written by João Manuel Lameiras Vaz and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two essays on two separate topics: (1) behavioral and (2) natural resource economics. In my behavioral work, I examine the relationship between commitments and cooperation. I build a model that formalizes the extent to which the seriousness, publicness, and believability of a commitment affect the range of people with whom one would be willing to cooperate. Departing from a baseline range of cooperation among individuals who are socially close, the main prediction is that commitments to being cooperative can expand cooperation by both the person making the commitment and her listener. The extent of that expansion depends on whether the listener is gullible or skeptical about his counterpart’s true intentions. Because I assume that commitments change behavior because of changing preferences and since a competing hypothesis is that of changing beliefs, I test which of the two channels is being activated following a commitment. The experimental results indicate that (1) those who commit to being cooperative increase cooperation, but listeners do not, and (2) preferences of those who make a commitment change from pure selfishness to conditional cooperation. The results suggest that individuals become receptive to cooperation not because, but in spite of others' expectations. This work has implications regarding the use of commitments prior to interactions where conflict is predicted to occur, such as the adoption of conservation practices or climate-change negotiations. In my bioeconomic work, I consider the role of adaptation management of a resource with the potential for an ecological restructuring of the resource dynamics (regime shift) whose incidence and severity are outside the control of managers. I define the regime shift in terms of the movement from a convex and uniquely stable ecological system to that of a nonconvex system described by multiple ecological equilibria, each of which characterized by the continued productivity of the resource or extinction. I find that ex-post multi-stability warrants conservation efforts before transition to ensure that the system alights on productive equilibria. This work has implications regarding the timing and optimality of readjusting extraction activities given impending local effects of global climate change.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Industrial Organization and Natural Resource Economics written by Kiriti Kanjilal and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation analyzes firms' side problems in economics using an industrial organization approach to provide analysis and policy tools.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral and Environmental Economics written by Dina Gorenshteyn and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Economics of Natural Resource Management and Experiments written by Wisdom Akpalu and published by Goteborg University. This book was released on 2006 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Environmental and Resource Economics written by Anthony C. Fisher and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume features essays dealing with a range of theoretical, measurement and policy issues in environmental and resource economics. Focusing on the integration of environmental considerations into decisions about extractive resource use, both in theory and practice, the essays range from exercises in the pure theory of resource depletion, to applications of theoretical and empirical techniques and the management of resources. Particular attention is given to uncertainty about environmental values and the irreversibility of certain kinds of resource depletion. The volume should be of interest to researchers, practitioners and policy makers.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Economics and Environmental Policy written by Steven E. Sexton and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social planners have long relied upon non-coercive interventions in order to achieve social welfare improvements that are not obtained by markets or direct policy. Such policies are perhaps nowhere more relevant and common than in environmental economics. Environmental goods and services are typically not traded in markets because of the difficulties of property rights assignment. And yet efforts to create markets or correct market failures by coercive policy are fraught with controversy. Thus, in addition to coercive mechanisms, social planners use information provision campaigns, appeals for cooperation, and "nudges" to improve the efficiency of environmental resource allocations. Non-coercive interventions have grown in popularity among social planners as behavioral economics has gained acceptance within the mainstream of the field. Indeed, such policies typically affect market outcomes and achieve environmental goals only insofar as they can exploit or correct decision making that deviates from standard theory. In this dissertation, agent behavior is analyzed to assess the potential of non-coercive interventions to achieve socially preferred environmental outcomes. In a first essay, the concept of conspicuous conservation is introduced as a modern variant of conspicuous consumption that affords status for displays of austerity meant to signal environmental preferences rather than displays of ostentation meant to signal wealth. I identify conspicuous conservation in the automobile market and estimate a willingness to pay up to several thousand dollars for the "green" signal transmitted by ownership of the Toyota Prius. In a second essay, I demonstrate how automatic bill payment programs can induce excessive consumption of goods and services by boundedly rational consumers who exhibit inattention to prices. As automatic payment programs have spread throughout industries characterized by recurring payments, from utility and telecommunication services to insurance and loan markets, this essay is the first to consider their implications for consumer demand and welfare. It is also the first to test empirically whether enrollment in such programs increases demand, as price salience theory suggests. It is shown that residential electricity consumption increases on average 2-4.5% due to enrollment in automatic payment programs, while commercial electricity consumption grows much as 6%. Moreover, bill-smoothing programs that utilities offer to low-income households are shown to induce an 8-9% increase in electricity consumption. A final essay examines the extent to which free transit fares and appeals for car-trip avoidance reduce car pollution on smoggy days. With data on freeway traffic volumes and transit ridership, public appeals for cooperation are shown to have no significant effect on car trip demand. Free transit fares, however, do have a significant effect on car trip demand. But the effect is perverse in that it generates an increase in car trips and related pollution. Free fares also increase transit ridership. These results suggest that free transit rides do not induce motorists to substitute to transit, but instead subsidize regular transit rides and additional trips. Appeals for cooperation also have no affect on carpooling behavior. Viewed in their totality, these essays communicate the importance of behavioral theories in formulating environmental policies and predicting agents' responses to such policies. Policies formulated without due regard for agents' bounded rationality and multifaceted motivations are doomed to unintended consequeces. However, recognition of these behavioral responses and their incorporation in policy design can result in improved environmental outcomes and efficient policies.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral and Environmental Economics written by Yasha Feferholtz and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores environmental and behavioral economic questions by recognizing unforeseen consequences of economic behavior and policies. I study the under-recognized effects of saliency in taxation, novel motivations for altruism, and the unknown relationship between forest cover and post-treatment drinking water quality to inform the design of more effective and efficient policies. The first 2 chapters use economic experiments to examine drivers of economic behavior like altruism, cooperation, and risk aversion. The third chapter uses an econometric estimation of geospatial datasets to evaluate the provision of clean water by forest ecosystem services.

Download or read book Social and Economic Factors in Decision Making under Uncertainty written by Kinga Posadzy and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of human behavior that goes beyond monetary rewards. In particular, it investigates social influences in individual’s decision making in situations that involve coordination, competition, and deciding for others. Further, it compares how monetary and social outcomes are perceived. The common theme of all studies is uncertainty. The first four essays study individual decisions that have uncertain consequences, be it due to the actions of others or chance. The last essay, in turn, uses the advances in research on decision making under uncertainty to predict behavior in riskless choices. The first essay, Fairness Versus Efficiency: How Procedural Fairness Concerns Affect Coordination, investigates whether preferences for fair rules undermine the efficiency of coordination mechanisms that put some individuals at a disadvantage. The results from a laboratory experiment show that the existence of coordination mechanisms, such as action recommendations, increases efficiency, even if one party is strongly disadvantaged by the mechanism. Further, it is demonstrated that while individuals’ behavior does not depend on the fairness of the coordination mechanism, their beliefs about people’s behavior do. The second essay, Dishonesty and Competition. Evidence from a stiff competition environment, explores whether and how the possibility to behave dishonestly affects the willingness to compete and who the winner is in a competition between similarly skilled individuals. We do not find differences in competition entry between competitions in which dishonesty is possible and in which it is not. However, we find that due to the heterogeneity in propensity to behave dishonestly, around 20% of winners are not the best-performing individuals. This implies that the efficient allocation of resources cannot be ensured in a stiff competition in which behavior is unmonitored. The third essay, Tracing Risky Decision Making for Oneself and Others: The Role of Intuition and Deliberation, explores how individuals make choices under risk for themselves and on behalf of other people. The findings demonstrate that while there are no differences in preferences for taking risks when deciding for oneself and for others, individuals have greater decision error when choosing for other individuals. The differences in the decision error can be partly attributed to the differences in information processing; individuals employ more deliberative cognitive processing when deciding for themselves than when deciding for others. Conducting more information processing when deciding for others is related to the reduction in decision error. The fourth essay, The Effect of Decision Fatigue on Surgeons’ Clinical Decision Making, investigates how mental depletion, caused by a long session of decision making, affects surgeon’s decision to operate. Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that surgeons are less likely to schedule an operation for patients who have appointment late during the work shift than for patients who have appointment at the beginning of the work shift. Understanding how the quality of medical decisions depends on when the patient is seen is important for achieving both efficiency and fairness in health care, where long shifts are popular. The fifth essay, Preferences for Outcome Editing in Monetary and Social Contexts, compares whether individuals use the same rules for mental representation of monetary outcomes (e.g., purchases, expenses) as for social outcomes (e.g., having nice time with friends). Outcome editing is an operation in mental accounting that determines whether individuals prefer to first combine multiple outcomes before their evaluation (integration) or evaluate each outcome separately (segregation). I find that the majority of individuals express different preferences for outcome editing in the monetary context than in the social context. Further, while the results on the editing of monetary outcomes are consistent with theoretical predictions, no existing model can explain the editing of social outcomes.

Download or read book Sustainable Resource Development in the 21st Century written by David Zilberman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-16 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access book. This edited volume discusses topics in environmental economics with a focus on sustainability, conservation, and responsible resource management. Written in memory of Peter Berck, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, the chapters expand upon his insights about the connections between human activities and the natural world. The volume includes a selection of research on agriculture, energy, forestry, fisheries, land use, recycling, and conservation – all parts of the broad question of how natural resources can meet human needs while avoiding environmental degradation. Written from a 21st century perspective, with concerns about climate, renewable energy, biodiversity, and sustainable development, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students of agricultural and resource economics.

Download or read book Three Essays on Natural Resource Economics Agricultural Policy and Food Policy written by Xiangrui Wang and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three independent papers in the field of Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics. The first paper is related to consumer-side water conservation policies. My coauthor and I introduce a structural water demand model based on the assumption that consumers are inattentive and apply a behavioral decision rule in water consumption. We found our model can capture our sample consumers behavior well, suggesting water conservation policies should incorporate non-price instrument to prod consumers for water saving. The second paper relates to the industrial organization and antitrust in the US beer market. My coauthor and I found that in a recent beer merger case, the justice department's divestiture requirement (a popular structural merger remedy tool) may not be effective in prevent merger brands' price from raising, at least in the short-run after the merger. This paper suggests that divestiture may fail as a merger remedy due to its certain idiosyncratic details. The third paper investigates the impact of corn production in US Midwest states on the US Reformulated Gasoline Program. We found that the US Reformulated Gasoline Program caused massive corn production in the Midwest, and the pollution from nitrogen-based fertilizer usage in agriculture reversely affect the efficacy of the Reformulated Gasoline Program, aiming to improve air quality.

Download or read book Essays on Environmental and Behavioral Economics written by Eyoual Demeke and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Environmental Energy and Natural Resource Economics written by Fan Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Modern Agricultural and Resource Economics and Policy written by Harry de Gorter and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-23 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume celebrates the life and career of Gordon Rausser, pioneer and leader in natural resource economics, while critically overviewing the emerging literature in the field. As the chair of the Agriculture and Resource Economics department at UC Berkeley, Rausser led the transformation of the department from a traditional agricultural economics department to a diverse resource economics department addressing issues of agriculture, food, natural resources, environmental economics, energy, and development. This book builds on this theme, showcasing not only the scope of Rausser's work but also key developments in the field. The volume is organized into two parts. The first part speaks about the lessons of Gordon Rausser's career, in particular, his role as a leader in different spheres, his capacity to integrate teaching and entrepreneurship, and his impact on the world food system. The second part will address some of the significant developments in the field he contributed to and how it relates to his work. The chapters include contributions from modern leaders in the economics field and cover diverse topics from many subfields including public policy, public finance, law, econometrics, macroeconomics, and water resources. Providing an excellent reference, as well as a celebration of a pivotal figure in the field, this volume will be useful for practitioners and scholars in agricultural and resource economics, especially the many individuals familiar with Gordon Rausser and his career.

Download or read book Three Essays in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics written by Garth Heutel and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Natural Resources Uncertainty and General Equilibrium Systems written by Alan S. Blinder and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural Resources, Uncertainty, and General Equilibrium Systems: Essays in Memory of Rafael Lusky compiles a collection of works by economists who had been friends and colleagues of Rafael Lusky, a teacher in the University of Florida and contributor to theoretical resource economics. This book is divided into four sections— natural resources, uncertainty, general equilibrium systems, and policy and applications. In these sections, this text specifically discusses the resource depletion with technological uncertainty and the Rawlsian fairness principle; monopoly, uncertainty, and exploration; and price discrimination under uncertainty. The insurance theoretic aspects of workers' compensation; adverse selection and optimum insurance policies; and difficulty with Keynesian models of aggregate demand are also elaborated. This compilation likewise deliberates the exchange model of bilateral trade; optimal taxes on foreign lending; and extended linear permanent expenditure system (ELPES). This publication is a useful reference for economists and students concerned with theoretical resource economics.

Download or read book Essays in Environmental and Behavioral Economics written by Yann Panassié and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies questions in environmental economics by exploring the mechanisms through which government and private decisions interact in the transportation and housing markets. These have important environmental and distributional consequences in terms of mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. In Chapter 1, I compare new vehicle sales in the United States and Canada to determine whether updated EPA fuel economy labels introduced in 2012 succeeded in altering consumers' new vehicle purchase choices. I find small savings in gasoline consumption through a 1.5 percentage point increase in small car market shares, a corresponding decrease in SUV shares, and a 6% increase in the valuation of small SUVs' fuel economies. In Chapter 2, I study gasoline price volatility in California by estimating the gasoline price elasticity of demand for driving, and show that this parameter is both highly inelastic and likely to vary over time. Chapter 3 focuses on the impacts of hurricanes on the Florida housing market. I show that hurricanes cause an equilibrium increase in home prices and a concurrent decrease in transaction probability, lasting up to three years. With supplementary evidence from demographic trends, I conclude that the main driver of these dynamics is a negative transitory shock to the housing supply in the aftermath of hurricanes as homes recover from physical damages. I further observe that new homeowners have higher incomes, resulting in a permanent shift in the demographic composition of disaster-prone areas, and suggesting important implications about the expected costs and distributional impacts of future federal disaster relief spending.

Download or read book Essays on Environmental and Behavioral Economics written by Asadullah Jawid and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: