Does gender matter for demand revelation in threshold public goods experiments?

We examine the effect of gender on real and hypothetical contributions in a threshold public goods experiment using heterogeneous induced-values approach. Our analysis of the experimental data leads to several findings. First, gender differences in contributions are found for hypothetical payments, but not for real payments. This result is obtained while controlling for subjects' true values (induced-values) as well as socio-economic variables. Second, females are more likely to truthfully reveal their true value than males for hypothetical payments, but this effect is not significant for real payments. One could interpret these results as suggesting that females are more likely to state their value through hypothetical payments.Contingent valuation

Student Demand for Streaming Lecture Video: Emprical Evidence from Undergraduate Economics Classes

Real-time lectures recorded on video and streamed over the Internet are a useful supplement to non-classroom learning. However, because recording confines the instructor to the podium, the classroom experience is diminished when there is less social interaction. This study uses choice experiment data to estimate economics students' willingness to pay for streaming lecture video and instructor movement away from the podium. Results show a divide between students who like the flexibility of catching up on missed classes with video and students who do not. For this former group, video enhances the learning experience and students are willing to pay an additional $90 per course for video. An important source of streaming lecture video's value to students is its impact on performance. Knowledge equation estimates show a positive correlation between students' use of video and their cumulative final grade.

The Effect of Choice and Degree of Participation on Customer Value and Performance Outcomes

The importance of understanding customer value and the process of enabling the co-creation of value has advanced to the point of being considered vital for marketing and organizational success. Presently, a gap in the literature exists that pertains to understanding how the design and management of mechanisms that enable co-creation processes affect co-produced customer value and, consequently, performance outcomes. By investigating how two specific elements of customer participation enabling platforms, choice and degree of participation, impact customer value and performance outcomes in an online context, this study helps address the extant research gap. Specifically, this study examines how choice and degree of participation impact satisfaction and willingness to engage in future co-production through the development of individual, relational, and economic value. In addition, this study contributes to a broader understanding of the sources of value developed through the experience of customer participation. Using data collected from 314 users of financial service websites, this study found that simply offering a choice for customers to use a website based service to co-produce a service or to have an employee of the service complete the service for them enhances individual, relational, and economic value for customers who chose to engage in co-producing the service. A higher degree of participation in the co-production context was also found to enhance the three sources of co-created value. Also, the importance of enhanced value for customers is illustrated by the finding that value fully mediates the relationship between choice and degree of participation, respectively, and the performance outcomes of satisfaction and willingness to engage in future co-production. Each value creation source investigated in this study was found to strongly affect the performance outcomes

Developing long-term monitoring of natural areas for a Unesco world heritage site: study case of la Reunion

La Réunion island, in the Mascarenes, has been recognized as a World Heritage site for its Piton, Cirques and Remparts since 2010. The site, coinciding with the core zone of La Réunion National Park, represents 100000 ha, equivalent to 40 % of the island. These dramatic landscapes of rugged terrain, impressive escarpments, forested gorges are dominated by three cliff-rimmed cirques and two volcanoes ― a dormant massif forming the highest peak, Piton des Neiges (3069 m), and in the eastern part of the island lies the very active volcano, the Piton de la Fournaise (2632 m). The island harbours a wide variety of natural habitats (tropical montane cloud forests, subalpine shrublands, lowland forests, dry forest…), now all remnant in the Mascarene archipelago, that host high levels of endemism for both flora and fauna. Thereby, La Réunion is the most significant contributor towards conservation of terrestrial biodiversity in the Mascarene islands. The Divines project (FEDER) aims at developing innovative methods for characterizing and monitoring terrestrial biodiversity in the long term for conservation managers to ensure the protection of this world heritage site. In this poster, a description of the goals, actions and preliminary results of the DIVINES project will be described from gene to ecosystem levels

The Dynamics of Food Fraud: the interactions between criminal opportunity and market (dys)functionality in legitimate business

This article conceptualizes ‘food fraud’ by shifting analytical focus away from popular/policy conceptions foregrounding the centrality of organized crime towards understanding the factors that shape the organization of food frauds. We argue that food fraud, rather than being an ‘exogenous’ phenomenon perpetrated by externally organized (transnational) ‘criminal enterprise’, is better understood as an ‘endogenous’ phenomenon within the food system where legitimate occupational actors and organizations are in some way necessarily involved. Criminal opportunities arise under conducive conditions as part of legitimate actors’ routine behaviours. Our contention is that the common definition of food fraud is too prescriptive and fails to allow space to understand the role of different actors and their motivations. We analyse a case study in soft drinks, presenting the necessary role of legitimate, occupational actors within/between legitimate organizational settings and markets, and demonstrate how criminal behaviours can be concealed and disguised within ‘ready-made’ market and business structures. </jats:p

Vowel deletion in two Aymara varieties

Aymara vowels delete under predictable phonotactic, syntactic, and morphophonemic conditions. We provide a detailed description of each of these processes, with special attention to morphophonemic vowel deletion. In this process, specific suffixes trigger the deletion of the preceding vowel, with no obvious phonological or semantic conditioning. This is both the most common type of vowel deletion in Aymara, and the most unusual one in cross-linguistic terms. We compare vowel deletion in Contemporary Aymara (Coler 2014) and Historical Aymara as attested in the 17th century (e.g. Bertonio 1612a) and reveal that both varieties delete vowels as a result of processes arising from phonotactic and morphophonemic motivation, though some processes of syntactic vowel deletion were not widespread in the historical variety. Notably, while morphophonemic vowel deletion was attested in both Contemporary and Historical Aymara, the suffixes which are lexically pre-specified to delete the preceding vowel are often different in the two varieties. Further, Historical Aymara lacks accusative inflection marking with subtractive disfixation, which is an important and typologically unusual aspect of Contemporary Aymara nominal morphology. In light of the typological rarity of morphophonemic vowel deletion (and disfixation in particular), we expect this description to be of interest to typologists

Hybrid Allocation Mechanisms for Publicly Provided Goods

Motivated by efficiency and equity concerns, public resource managers have increasingly utilized hybrid allocation mechanisms that combine features of commonly used price (e.g., auction) and non-price (e.g., lottery) mechanisms. This study serves as an initial investigation of these hybrid mechanisms, exploring theoretically and experimentally how the opportunity to obtain a homogeneous good in a subsequent lottery affects Nash equilibrium bids in discriminative and uniform price auctions. The lottery imposes an opportunity cost to winning the auction, systematically reducing equilibrium auction bids. In contrast to the uniform price auction, equilibrium bids in the uniform price hybrid mechanism vary with bidder risk preferences. Experimental evidence suggests that the presence of the lottery and risk attitudes (elicited through a preceding experiment) impact auction bids in the directions predicted by theory. Finally, we find that theoretically and experimentally, the subsequent lottery does not compromise the efficiency of the auction component of the hybrid mechanisms

Casimir force in discrete scalar fields I: 1D and 2D cases

We calculate the Casimir force between parallel plates for a discrete massless scalar field. The scalar field forms a periodic lattice in continuous spacetime. The dispersion relation for both the square and triangular lattices allows for the accurate reproduction of the subtle Casimir effect without encountering infinite quantities. Our findings demonstrate that the Casimir force is independent of the type of periodic lattice used. At low frequencies, we observe a high level of rotational symmetry in both lattices. However, at high frequencies, both lattices lose their rotational symmetry, although the propagation of high-frequency waves becomes significantly limited as their group velocity approaches zero. We claim that the behavior of physics in discrete fields becomes similar to that in the continuous case, with the exception that we now have a natural and smooth cutoff mechanism that proves useful in cases requiring regularization. It appears that we have found an alternative approach to regularization using lattices with different symmetries in the background of continuous spacetime.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure