Economic Incentives Versus Command and Control: What's the Best Approach for Solving Environmental Problems?

Now, decades after the first environmental laws were passed in this country, policymakers face many choices when seeking to solve environmental problems. Will taxing polluters for their discharges be more effective than fining them for not meeting certain emissions standards? Will a regulatory agency find it less costly to enforce a ban or oversee a system of tradable permits? Which strategy will reduce a pollutant the quickest? Clearly, there are no "one-size-fits-all" answers. Many factors enter into the decision to favor either policies that lean more toward economic incentives (EI) and toward direct regulation, commonly referred to as command-and-control (CAC) policy. Underlying determinants include a country's governmental and regulatory infrastructure, along with the nature of the environmental problem itself. Even with these contextual factors to consider, we thought it would be useful to compare EI and CAC policies and their outcomes in a real-world setting. To do this, we looked at six environmental problems that the United States and at least one European country dealt with differently (see box on page 14.) For each problem, one approach was more of an EI measure, while the other relied more on CAC. For example, to reduce point-source industrial water pollution, the Netherlands implemented a system of fees for organic pollutants (EI), while the United States established a system of guidelines and permits (CAC). It turned out, in fact, that most policies had at least some elements of both approaches, but we categorized them as EI or CAC based on their dominant features. We then asked researchers who had previously studied these policies on either side of the Atlantic to update or prepare new case studies. We analyzed the 12 case studies (two for each of the six environmental problems) against a list of hypotheses frequently made for or against EI and CAC, such as which instrument is more effective or imposes less administrative burden

Heat metering: socio-technical challenges in district-heated social housing

Individual heat metering and charging (IMC) are seen as promising methods to reduce domestic heating and hot water use through the provision of financial incentives. The heat consumption measured by meters is influenced by both the dwelling characteristics and the behaviour of the occupant, but heating charges would ideally relate to occupant behaviour only. This dilemma can be especially relevant under two circumstances: if the thermal performance of the dwelling is poor and/or if heating costs represent a substantial part of the occupants’ income, i.e. in social housing. The case of a district-heated council block in London is presented where the installation of individual heat meters was planned in 2010 but had to be suspended due to concerns about implications for occupant heating costs in light of the thermal performance of the building. It illustrates a technically and socially complex environment where fairness in allocating heating costs is an important concern. The case also shows how lack of funding or other issues on the infrastructure side can hinder behaviour-orientated measures such as IMC. A holistic energy conservation strategy addressing both physical building properties and occupant behaviour is therefore essential and should be supported by policy

Structure and variability of earth's atmosphere Final report

Structure and density variations of earth atmosphere associated with solar flu

Multivariate regression analysis of atmospheric density in the region 30 to 110 km

Multivariate regression analysis of atmospheric density in region 30 to 100 k

Draft Auctions

We introduce draft auctions, which is a sequential auction format where at each iteration players bid for the right to buy items at a fixed price. We show that draft auctions offer an exponential improvement in social welfare at equilibrium over sequential item auctions where predetermined items are auctioned at each time step. Specifically, we show that for any subadditive valuation the social welfare at equilibrium is an $O(\log^2(m))$-approximation to the optimal social welfare, where $m$ is the number of items. We also provide tighter approximation results for several subclasses. Our welfare guarantees hold for Bayes-Nash equilibria and for no-regret learning outcomes, via the smooth-mechanism framework. Of independent interest, our techniques show that in a combinatorial auction setting, efficiency guarantees of a mechanism via smoothness for a very restricted class of cardinality valuations, extend with a small degradation, to subadditive valuations, the largest complement-free class of valuations. Variants of draft auctions have been used in practice and have been experimentally shown to outperform other auctions. Our results provide a theoretical justification

Analysis of several relations among atmospheric statistics

Statistical equation relating mean values of pressure, temperature, and density with correction term proportional to covariance between density and temperatur

Global Classical Solutions of the Boltzmann Equation with Long-Range Interactions and Soft Potentials

In this work we prove global stability for the Boltzmann equation (1872) with the physical collision kernels derived by Maxwell in 1866 for the full range of inverse power intermolecular potentials, $r^{-(p-1)}$ with $p>2$. This completes the work which we began in (arXiv:0912.0888v1). We more generally cover collision kernels with parameters $s\in (0,1)$ and $\gamma$ satisfying $\gamma > -(n-2)-2s$ in arbitrary dimensions $\mathbb{T}^n \times \mathbb{R}^n$ with $n\ge 2$. Moreover, we prove rapid convergence as predicted by the Boltzmann H-Theorem. When $\gamma + 2s \ge 0$, we have exponential time decay to the Maxwellian equilibrium states. When $\gamma + 2s < 0$, our solutions decay polynomially fast in time with any rate. These results are constructive. Additionally, we prove sharp constructive upper and lower bounds for the linearized collision operator in terms of a geometric fractional Sobolev norm; we thus observe that a spectral gap exists only when $\gamma + 2s \ge 0$, as conjectured in Mouhot-Strain (2007).Comment: This file has not changed, but this work has been combined with (arXiv:0912.0888v1), simplified and extended into a new preprint, please see the updated version: arXiv:1011.5441v

Range and structure of ambient density from 30 to 120 km altitude

Range and structure of atmospheric density from 30 to 120 km - analysis of statistical models and deviations from U.S. standard and Patrick reference atmosphere