Taking real-life seriously : an approach to decomposing context beyond 'environment' in living labs

The maturity of Living Labs has grown and several researchers have tried to create a uniform definition of what Living Labs are by emphasizing the multi-method and real-life, contextual approach. Although researchers thus recognize the importance of context in Living Labs, they do not provide insights into how context can be taken into account. The real-life context predominantly focuses on the in-situ use of a product during field trials where users are observed in their everyday life. The contribution of this paper will be twofold. By means of a case study we will show how context can be evaluated in the front end of design, so Living Lab researchers are no longer dependent on the readiness level of a product, and we will show how field trials can be evaluated in a more structured way to cover all components of context. By using a framework to evaluate the impact of context on product use, Living Lab researchers can improve the overall effectiveness of data gathering and analysis methods in a Living Lab project

Hierarchical contracting in grant decisions: ex-ante and ex-post evaluation in the context of the EURegional Policy

This paper applies incentive theory to the context of the European Union (EU) Regional Policy. The core instruments of the policy are the Structural Funds, capital grants that ?ow from the European Commission (EC) to Mem- ber States and regional authorities to promote investment and growth at local level. The EU grants need a co-payment by the regional government and do not cover in full the investment cost. We model this situation, similar to several other supra- national or federal contexts, as a simple principal-supervisor-agent model of the investment game between a supranational player (the principal), such as the EC, a non (fully) benevolent regional government (the supervisor), and a private ?rm (the executing agency). We show how the role of providers of additional information, the region (ex-ante) and an evaluator (ex-post) is crucial to reducing the optimal value of the grant and to improving the inef- ?ciencies caused by asymmetric information at the grant decision stage in a federal hierarchyHierarchical contracting, project evaluation, EU Regional Policy

Incentive Regulatory policies: The Case of Public Transit Systems in France

We assess the empirical relevance of the new theory of regulation, using a principal-agent framework to study the regulatory schemes used in the French urban transport industry. Taking the current regulatory schemes as given, the model of supply and demand provides estimates for the firms’ inefficiency, the effort of managers, and the cost of public funds. It allows us to derive the first-best and second-best regulatory policies for each network and compare them with the actual situation in terms of welfare loss or gain. Fixed-price policies lie between fully informed and uninformed second-best schemes. Cost-plus contracts are dominated by any type of second-best contract. From these results, we may conjecture that fixed-price contracts call for better-informed regulators.Publicad