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Tasmanian landowner preferences for conservation incentive programs : a latent class approach
No full textLandowners for whom compensation funding contributed to voluntary program choice were also most likely to set aside land for conservation without payment. This raises the possibility that the government’s compensation expenditure could potentially be either reduced or re-allocated to landowners who will not voluntarily take conservation action. Increasing participation in conservation incentive programs and minimizing the welfare losses associated with meeting conservation targets may be best achieved by offering programs that allow flexibility in terms of legal arrangements and other program attributes.
Integrating cognitive process and descriptive models of attitudes and preferences
No full textDiscrete choice experiments—selecting the best and/or worst from a set of options—are increasingly used to provide more efficient and valid measurement of attitudes or preferences than conventional methods such as Likert scales. Discrete choice data have traditionally been analyzed with random utility models that have good measurement properties but provide limited insight into cognitive processes. We extend a well-established cognitive model, which has successfully explained both choices and response times for simple decision tasks, to complex, multi-attribute discrete choice data. The fits, and parameters, of the extended model for two sets of choice data (involving patient preferences for dermatology appointments, and consumer attitudes toward mobile phones) agree with those of standard choice models. The extended model also accounts for choice and response time data in a perceptual judgment task designed in a manner analogous to best–worst discrete choice experiments. We conclude that several research fields might benefit from discrete choice experiments, and that the particular accumulator-based models of decision making used in response time research can also provide process-level instantiations for random utility models.
Interactive agency choice in automobile purchase decisions : the role of negotiation in determining equilibrium choice outcomes
No full textThere is a renewed interest in the development of behavioural models designed to identify the major determinants of household vehicle purchase. This is due, in part, to the growing interest in the economic viability of the automobile industry, rising fuel costs and increasing enhanced greenhouse gas emissions. The focus of all known research activity is on establishing the preferences for specific vehicle attributes from a single member of a household, almost oblivious to a recognised position that automobile purchase choices are commonly made by more than one decision maker. In this paper we briefly review the state of the art in vehicle purchase decision models, and set out a framework for interactive agency review and assessment of alternatives in the context of two agents negotiating the purchase of an automobile. We estimate a sequence of mixed logit models to illustrate how the method is implemented to accommodate the role of each agent.
On the utility of gambling : extending the approach of Meginniss (1976)
No full textJ. R. Meginniss modified expected utility to accommodate a concept of the utility of gambling that led to a representation composed of a utility expectation term plus an entropy of degree κ term. He imposed several apparently strong assumptions. One of these is that a number of unknown generating functions are identical. A second is that he assumed he was working with given probabilities. Here we follow his general framework but weaken considerably those assumptions. Our problem is reduced to solving some functional equations induced by gamble decomposition. From the solutions, we obtain the representation of the utility function. Further axiomatic restrictions are imposed that lead ultimately to Meginniss’ earlier result.
Utility of gambling I : entropy modified linear weighted utility
No full textBehavioral axioms about preference orderings among gambles and their joint receipt lead to numerical representations consisting of a subjective utility term plus a term depending upon the events and the subjective weights. The results here are for uncertain alternatives, in much the same sense as Savage’s usage. Several open problems are described. Results for the risky case are in a second article.
Growing patronage : challenges and what has been found to work
No full textThis paper synthesizes evidence on growing public transport patronage. The paper firstly examines barriers to patronage growth before reviewing evidence on endogenous factors (those within the control of operators and regulators) and exogenous factors (those factors such as socio-economic influences which are not controlled by regulators/operators) which affect public transport patronage. Suggested barriers include capacity, network transfers, perceptions and investment/subsidy needs. Evidence is presented suggesting that reliability, service levels and fares are the principal tools to adopt in growing patronage. Car ownership, income and population growth, employment and urban sprawl are amongst the exogenous factors identified as influencing patronage.
Dissociating speed and accuracy in absolute identification : the effect of unequal stimulus spacing
No full textIdentification accuracy for sets of perceptually discriminable stimuli ordered on a single dimension (e.g., line length) is remarkably low, indicating a fundamental limit on information processing capacity. This surprising limit has naturally led to a focus on measuring and modeling choice probability in absolute identification research. We show that choice response time (RT) results can enrich our understanding of absolute identification by investigating dissociation between RT and accuracy as a function of stimulus spacing. The dissociation is predicted by the SAMBA model of absolute identification (Brown, Marley, Dockin, & Heathcote, 2008), but cannot easily be accommodated by other theories. We show that SAMBA provides an accurate, parameter free, account of the dissociation that emerges from the architecture of the model and the physical attributes of the stimuli, rather than through numerical adjustment. This violation of the pervasive monotonic relationship between RT and accuracy has implications for model development, which are discussed.