Three essays on contingent valuation method

The objective of this research was to examine some incentive and informational properties of contingent valuation surveys and provide some suggestions in survey design. The contingent valuation method uses survey questions to elicit individuals\u27 preferences for nonmarket goods. The essential task of a contingent valuation exercise is to design a questionnaire which elicits respondents\u27 preference for the good being valued.;This dissertation includes three essays that contribute to the contingent valuation literature. The contingent valuation method is widely used in estimating the economic value of nonmarket goods. The first essay offers an empirical test of a theoretical result in the contingent valuation literature, which argues that respondents will respond to survey questions truthfully, if they perceive the survey as being consequential , regardless of the degree of consequentiality. The second essay tests the commitment cost theory suggested by Zhao and Kling (2001, 2004). They argue that a respondent\u27s willingness to pay for a good at a particular point of time depends not only on the intrinsic value of the good, but also on the timing of the decision and the characteristics of the market environment. The third study examines whether three value elicitation formats---the dichotomous choice question, the multinomial choice question, and a modified multinomial choice question suggested by Carson and Groves (2007)---provide comparable welfare estimate

Search for serendipitous TNO occultation in X-rays

To study the population properties of small, remote objects beyond Neptune's orbit in the outer solar system, of kilometer size or smaller, serendipitous occultation search is so far the only way. For hectometer-sized Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), optical shadows actually disappear because of diffraction. Observations at shorter wave lengths are needed. Here we report the effort of TNO occultation search in X-rays using RXTE/PCA data of Sco X-1 taken from June 2007 to October 2011. No definite TNO occultation events were found in the 334 ks data. We investigate the detection efficiency dependence on the TNO size to better define the sensible size range of our approach and suggest upper limits to the TNO size distribution in the size range from 30 m to 300 m. A list of X-ray sources suitable for future larger facilities to observe is proposed.Comment: Accepted to publish in MNRA

Influence factor of Chinese elders' wealth management behaviour: an empirical study

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the influential demographic variables of elders’ wealth management behaviour. Purpose sampling for 122 older consumers (aged over 65) who participate in wealth management programme with instrument, was conducted in April 2007 in China (Taiwan area). Regression was performed for the data analysis. The results showed gender, educational background, and living location being key factors affecting elder consumers’ wealth-management behaviours, including consumers’ familiarity with financial products/services, sources of professional information, sources of word-of-mouth information, investment intention, and investment confidence. The main contributions of this not only include enhancing existing literature concerning wealth management, marketing, and elder behaviours (especially for clarifying how the controversial factors work), but unveiling elders’ behaviour tendency in such a blooming emerging market. Practical implications to bank marketers are also given

Low-energy electronic recoil in xenon detectors by solar neutrinos

Low-energy electronic recoil caused by solar neutrinos in multi-ton xenon detectors is an important subject not only because it is a source of the irreducible background for direct searches of weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), but also because it provides a viable way to measure the solar $pp$ and $^{7}\textrm{Be}$ neutrinos at the precision level of current standard solar model predictions. In this work we perform $\textit{ab initio}$ many-body calculations for the structure, photoionization, and neutrino-ionization of xenon. It is found that the atomic binding effect yields a sizable suppression to the neutrino-electron scattering cross section at low recoil energies. Compared with the previous calculation based on the free electron picture, our calculated event rate of electronic recoil in the same detector configuration is reduced by about $25\%$. We present in this paper the electronic recoil rate spectrum in the energy window of 100 eV - 30 keV with the standard per ton per year normalization for xenon detectors, and discuss its implication for low energy solar neutrino detection (as the signal) and WIMP search (as a source of background).Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

An Indoor Video Surveillance System with Intelligent Fall Detection Capability

This work presents a novel indoor video surveillance system, capable of detecting the falls of humans. The proposed system can detect and evaluate human posture as well. To evaluate human movements, the background model is developed using the codebook method, and the possible position of moving objects is extracted using the background and shadow eliminations method. Extracting a foreground image produces more noise and damage in this image. Additionally, the noise is eliminated using morphological and size filters and this damaged image is repaired. When the image object of a human is extracted, whether or not the posture has changed is evaluated using the aspect ratio and height of a human body. Meanwhile, the proposed system detects a change of the posture and extracts the histogram of the object projection to represent the appearance. The histogram becomes the input vector of K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN) algorithm and is to evaluate the posture of the object. Capable of accurately detecting different postures of a human, the proposed system increases the fall detection accuracy. Importantly, the proposed method detects the posture using the frame ratio and the displacement of height in an image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can further improve the system performance and the fall down identification accuracy

What Are the Consequences of Consequentiality?

We offer an empirical test of a theoretical result in the contingent valuation literature. Specifically, it has been argued from a theoretical point of view that survey participants who perceive a survey to be ``consequential'' will respond to questions truthfully regardless of the degree of perceived consequentiality. Using survey data from the Iowa Lakes Project, we test this supposition. Specifically, we employ a Bayesian treatment effect model in which the degree of perceived consequentiality, measured as an ordinal response, is permitted to have a structural impact on willingness to pay (WTP) for a hypothetical environmental improvement. We test the theory by determining if the WTP distributions are the same for each value of the ordinal response. In our survey data, a subsample of individuals were randomly assigned supporting information suggesting that their responses to the questionnaires were important and will have an impact on policy decisions. In conjunction with a Bayesian posterior simulator, we use this source of exogenous variation to identify the structural impacts of consequentiality perceptions on willingness to pay, while controlling for the potential of confounding on unobservables. We find evidence consistent with the ``knife-edge'' theoretical results, namely that the willingness to pay distributions are equal among those believing the survey to be at least minimally consequential, and different for those believing that the survey is irrelevant for policy purposes.nonmarket valuation