Measuring the Gains to Groundwater Management with Recursive Utility

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/20/05.Recursive Utility, Dynamic Games, Groundwater Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, D91, C73, Q25,

The total assessment profile, volume 1

A methodology is described for the evaluation of societal impacts associated with the implementation of a new technology. Theoretical foundations for the methodology, called the total assessment profile, are established from both the economic and social science perspectives. The procedure provides for accountability of nonquantifiable factors and measures through the use of a comparative value matrix by assessing the impacts of the technology on the value system of the society

Management of irrigation water storages: carryover rights and capacity sharing

The intertemporal management of irrigation water involves a consumption-storage decision, where the benefits of using water today are evaluated against the uncertain benefits of storing water for future use. Traditionally in Australia, state governments have centrally managed the major water storages: making decisions on water allocations given prevailing storage levels. However, in practice there are a number of factors which may prevent a centralised approach from achieving an optimal allocation of water. This paper considers in detail two decentralised approaches to storage management: carryover rights and capacity sharing. This paper also presents a quantitative analysis of storage management, involving the application of a stochastic dynamic programming model.

Do Quasi-Hyperbolic Preferences Explain Academic Procrastination? An Empirical Evaluation

Traditional neoclassical thought fails to explain questions such as problems of self-control. Behavioural economics have explained these matters on the basis of the intertemporal preferences of individuals and, specifically, the so-called (β, δ) model which emphasises present bias. This opens the way to the analysis of new situations in which people can adopt incorrect indecisions that make it necessary for the government to intervene. The literature which has developed the (β, δ) model and its implications has generated a categorisation of people that is widely used but which lacks a systematic empirical evaluation. It is important to value the need for this public action. In this article, we develop a method which makes it possible to verify the main implications that this model has to explain the procrastination of university students. Using an experimental time discount task with real monetary incentives, we estimate the students’ β and δ parameters and we analyse their correlation with their answers to a series of questions concerning how they plan to study for an exam. The results are ambiguous given that they back some of the model’s conclusions but reject others, including a number of the most basic ones, such as the relation between present biases and some of the categories of people, these being essential to predict their behaviour

Quality Measures of Parameter Tuning for Aggregated Multi-Objective Temporal Planning

Parameter tuning is recognized today as a crucial ingredient when tackling an optimization problem. Several meta-optimization methods have been proposed to find the best parameter set for a given optimization algorithm and (set of) problem instances. When the objective of the optimization is some scalar quality of the solution given by the target algorithm, this quality is also used as the basis for the quality of parameter sets. But in the case of multi-objective optimization by aggregation, the set of solutions is given by several single-objective runs with different weights on the objectives, and it turns out that the hypervolume of the final population of each single-objective run might be a better indicator of the global performance of the aggregation method than the best fitness in its population. This paper discusses this issue on a case study in multi-objective temporal planning using the evolutionary planner DaE-YAHSP and the meta-optimizer ParamILS. The results clearly show how ParamILS makes a difference between both approaches, and demonstrate that indeed, in this context, using the hypervolume indicator as ParamILS target is the best choice. Other issues pertaining to parameter tuning in the proposed context are also discussed.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1305.116