AN EXPERIMENT IN CONTINGENT VALUATION AND SOCIAL DESIRABILITY

Social desirability (SD) represents the problem of subjects responding with social norms rather than individual values. This paper briefly surveys the SD literature and considers its relevance for contingent valuation (CV) studies. In an empirical study, undergraduate students were administered the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, as well as CV questions. High SD scores were hypothesized to imply a greater likelihood of offering a protest reason for a zero bid and to increase bids for socially desirable commodities. While all hypotheses were not supported, the empirical results suggest that SD can influence CV responses and should not be dismissed prematurely.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

CLASSIFICATION OF RISK PREFERENCES WITH ELICITED UTILITY DATA: DOES FUNCTIONAL FORM MATTER?

Recently, several problems with elicited utility functions have emerged. This paper concerns a fundamental problem in risk preference classification with elicited data. For the sample in this research, different functional forms resulted in reversals in preference classifications. This paper suggests that preference classifications must be interpreted with caution.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Molecular population genetic analysis of emerged bacterial pathogens: selected insights.

Research in bacterial population genetics has increased in the last 10 years. Population genetic theory and tools and related strategies have been used to investigate bacterial pathogens that have contributed to recent episodes of temporal variation in disease frequency and severity. A common theme demonstrated by these analyses is that distinct bacterial clones are responsible for disease outbreaks and increases in infection frequency. Many of these clones are characterized by unique combinations of virulence genes or alleles of virulence genes. Because substantial interclonal variance exists in relative virulence, molecular population genetic studies have led to the concept that the unit of bacterial pathogenicity is the clone or cell line. Continued new insights into host parasite interactions at the molecular level will be achieved by combining clonal analysis of bacterial pathogens with large-scale comparative sequencing of virulence genes

U.S. Corn Producer’s Response to Increased Energy Prices: Evidence from Producer Surveys in 2001 and 2005

Crop Production/Industries, Risk and Uncertainty,

Using the Regular Chains Library to build cylindrical algebraic decompositions by projecting and lifting

Cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) is an important tool, both for quantifier elimination over the reals and a range of other applications. Traditionally, a CAD is built through a process of projection and lifting to move the problem within Euclidean spaces of changing dimension. Recently, an alternative approach which first decomposes complex space using triangular decomposition before refining to real space has been introduced and implemented within the RegularChains Library of Maple. We here describe a freely available package ProjectionCAD which utilises the routines within the RegularChains Library to build CADs by projection and lifting. We detail how the projection and lifting algorithms were modified to allow this, discuss the motivation and survey the functionality of the package