Internet Privacy and Self-Regulation: Lessons from the Porn Wars

The availability and adequacy of technical remedies ought to play a crucial role in evaluating the propriety of state action with regard to both the inhibition of Internet pornography and the promotion of Internet privacy. Legislation that would have restricted Internet speech considered indecent or harmful to minors has already faced and failed that test. Several prominent organizations dedicated to preserving civil liberties argued successfully that self-help technologies offered less-restrictive means of achieving the purported ends of such legislation, rendering it unconstitutional. Surprisingly, those same organizations have of late joined the call for subjecting another kind of speech--speech by commercial entities about Internet users--to political regulation. With regard to privacy no less than pornography, however, self-help offers Internet users a less-restrictive means of preventing the alleged harms of free speech than does state action. Indeed, a review of privacy-protecting technologies shows them to work even more effectively than the filtering and blocking software used to combat online smut. Digital self-help in defense of Internet privacy makes regulation by state authorities not only constitutionally suspect but, from the more general point of view of policy, functionally inferior

The American Assembly: Art, Technology, and Intellectual Property

Examines intellectual property issues as the arts sector joins other sectors in the race to deal with an increasingly information-driven economy

The Role of Trust in Explaining Food Choice: Combining Choice Experiment and Attribute Best−Worst Scaling

This paper presents empirical findings from a combination of two elicitation techniques—discrete choice experiment (DCE) and best–worst scaling (BWS)—to provide information about the role of consumers’ trust in food choice decisions in the case of credence attributes. The analysis was based on a sample of 459 Taiwanese consumers and focuses on red sweet peppers. DCE data were examined using latent class analysis to investigate the importance and the utility different consumer segments attach to the production method, country of origin, and chemical residue testing. The relevance of attitudinal and trust-based items was identified by BWS using a hierarchical Bayesian mixed logit model and was aggregated to five latent components by means of principal component analysis. Applying a multinomial logit model, participants’ latent class membership (obtained from DCE data) was regressed on the identified attitudinal and trust components, as well as demographic information. Results of the DCE latent class analysis for the product attributes show that four segments may be distinguished. Linking the DCE with the attitudinal dimensions reveals that consumers’ attitude and trust significantly explain class membership and therefore, consumers’ preferences for different credence attributes. Based on our results, we derive recommendations for industry and policy

WTP and WTA in relation to irrigation development in the Fitzroy Basin, Queensland

Estimates of the compensating surplus generated by changes in non-marketed environmental amenities can be estimated using stated preference valuation techniques. These are typically framed in terms of WTP tradeoffs, even if the situation of interest involves a property right vestment that calls for a WTA question. The differences created by the two questioning formats are explored in this paper using the results of two choice modelling applications. Both applications were framed on the potential for irrigation development and environmental losses in the Fitzroy River Basin, Central Queensland. The scenarios used in the applications differed only in that they used alternatively WTP and WTA questioning formats. The results indicate that robust models could not be constructed from either WTP- or WTA-based data sets when only two alternatives were used in the choice sets. In contrast, a strongly fitting model was derived from WTP-based data where three alternatives formed the choice sets.choice modelling, compensating surplus, WTP, WTA, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,