Political Competition in Government Formation: the Effect of Simultaneous Policy Bidding on the Political Outcome

We present an alternative model of government formation in which two parties simultaneously and inpendently announce their polices proposals through a take-it-or-leave-it offer, to a third party - the formateur -, which picks the one that maximizes its own utility. As a consequence, the chosen policy proposal is implemented by a government coalition composed of the formateur and the party associated with the selected policy proposal. The model purposedly captures the political competition arising among the parties other than the formateur for the partnership in the governing coalition. The political equilibria resulting from the model confirm that the intensification of political competition among the parties, implied by the present framework, is beneficial for the formateur.Political competition goverment formation

Comparative Assessment of Supervisory Regulations Related to Appointment, Training and Change of Location

The purpose of this study is to compare and assess the Regulations of Elementary Education Directorates and Education Supervisors Directorates approved in 2011 from structure, process and rationale. In accordance with this purpose, the opinions of education supervisors (N=74) were determined by the questionnaire developed in accordance with the regulations by the researchers and consisted of 35 items. Data gathered was analyzed by mean. As a result, it was reached to the conclusion that supervisors do not agree with the changes related to application requirements to competitive exam. They agreed with the changes related to the items such as organization of written exam, appointment and location changes, extension of scope of duty of supervisors “partially†and they agreed with the changes related to subjects and point weights of competitive exam training and appointments of supervisors

Reserve Capacity Model for Optimizing Traffic Signal Timings with an Equity Constraint

This paper represents a solution algorithm for optimizing traffic signal timings in urban road networks by considering reserve capacity with an equity constraint. It is well known that the variation of signal timings in a road network may cause an inequity issue with regard to the travel costs of road users travelling between origin-destination (O-D) pairs. That is, the users may be influenced differently by changing traffic signal timings. In this context, the bilevel programming model is proposed for finding reserve capacity for signalized road networks by taking into account the equity issue. In the upper level, the reserve capacity is maximized with an equity constraint, whereas deterministic user equilibrium problem is dealt in the lower level. In order to solve the proposed model, a heuristic solution algorithm based on harmony search combined with a penalty function approach is developed. The application of the proposed model is illustrated for an example road network taken from a literature

Modeling and forecasting car ownership based on socio-economic and demographic indicators in Turkey

Since car ownership is an important determinant to analyze car travel behavior especially in developing countries, this paper deals with modeling and forecasting car ownership in Turkey based on socio-economic and demographic indicators such as Gross Domestic Product(GDP) per capita, Gasoline Price (GP), car price and number of employees by using multiple nonlinear regression analysis. Although most of the studies on this subject prefer using annual data, we use monthly data for the analysis of car ownership since all explanatory variables and exchange rates used for the modeling are unstable and vary even in a short period in developing countries such as Turkey. Thus, it may be possible to reflect the effects of socio-economic and demographic indicators on car ownership more properly. During the modeling process, exponential and polynomial nonlinear regression models are set up and then tested to investigate their applicability for car ownership forecasting. Based on results of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, the polynomial models has been selected to forecast car ownership for the year 2035. In order to reveal the possible different trends of the independent variables in future, car ownership is forecasted along the scenarios which are related to the GDP per capita and GP. Results show that Turkey’s car ownership may vary between 230 and 325 per thousand capita in 2035 depending on economic achievements, global oil prices and national taxation policies. The lowest and the highest values of the car ownership may provide insight to car producers and transport planners in Turkey. Another significant result presented in this study is that car ownership rate will be substantially lower in Turkey than that in the European Union countries despite it has an increasing trend in the past two decades

Investigating acceptable level of travel demand before capacity enhancement for signalized urban road networks

Increasing travel demand in urban areas triggers traffic congestion and increases delay in road networks. In this context, local authorities that are responsible for traffic operations seek to strike a balance between traffic volume and capacity to reduce total travel time on road networks. Since signalized intersections are the most critical components of road networks in terms of safety and operational issues, adjusting intersection signal timings becomes an effective method for authorities. When this tool remains incapable of overcoming traffic congestions, authorities take expensive measures such as increasing link capacities, lane additions or applying grade-separated junctions. However, it may be more useful to handle road networks as a whole by investigating the effects of optimizing signal timings of all intersections in the network. Therefore, it would be useful to investigate the right time for capacity enhancement on urban road networks to avoid premature investments considering limited resources of local authorities. In this study, effects of increasing travel demand on Total Travel Cost (TTC) is investigated by developing a bi-level programming model, called TRAvel COst Minimizer (TRACOM), in which the upper level minimizes the TTC subject to the stochastic user equilibrium link flows determined at the lower level. The TRACOM is applied to Allsop and Charlesworths’ network for different common origin-destination demand multipliers. Results revealed that TTC values showed an approximate linear increase while the travel demand is increased up to 16%. After this value, TTC showed a sudden spike although the travel demand was linearly increased that means optimizing signal timings must be supported by applying capacity enhancement countermeasures