Is the Second Demographic Transition a useful research concept: Questions and answers

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Temporarily New: On Low Fertility and the Prospect of Pro-natal Policies

Concern about the low levels of fertility in Europe appears to be spreading. In political circles voices advocating the design and implementation of pro-natal policies are growing louder. The traditional fear of population decline is refuelled in numerous conference papers and at meetings specifically set up to let policymakers meet demographic experts. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion by arguing that just as in the 1930s, and in the early 1970s when fertility first dropped below replacement level, expressed concerns do not necessarily lead to pro-natal policies. After a brief discussion of the raisons d’êtres of governments, and of the purposes and types of population policies, a series of propositions is presented that make it reasonable, at the very least understandable, that democratically elected governments act with great prudence in such matters. Their basic policy goals are not endangered and they are faced with other more serious priorities. Europe’s past has mainly yielded lamentable examples, the position of national administrations vis-à-vis their population has changed so that fertility is largely beyond governmental control, and it is probably wrong to assume that the common difference between mean desired family size and completed family size is essentially due to the lack of support for families. It is concluded that concern about numbers may be a temporary phenomenon and that in many ways it makes more sense for governments to invest heavily in the children that are being born.

Explaining Standard Dominance: The Effect of Influential Network Positions and Structural Holes

Innovative systems and infrastructures such as smart grids, the internet of things, cities, or highways require generally accepted common compatibility standards to enable components of such systems to interoperate. In some cases, various standards are developed by competing standards organizations, often resulting in standards battles. This paper focuses on factors that affect the outcome of these standards battles, and, specifically, on the effect of an influential position in an industry-wide standards networks and the existence of structural holes in that network on standard dominance. The empirical context is the consumer electronics, telecommunications, and ICT arenas. We conduct a study of 103 standards organizations from 2000 to 2011. We find support for the hypothesis that standards that are supported by standards organizations that have a central position in the industry-wide standards network have a high chance of achieving dominance. Thus, we show that apart from complementary assets and innovation strategies, firms can also adopt specific networking strategies to achieve a successful standard

Timmermans’ Misleading Critique of Prospect Theory Actually Supports its Relevance for Travel Choice Modelling

For a special issue of this journal Timmermans (2010) was asked to make critical comments on the suitability of Prospect Theory for travel behaviour research. His article offers a comprehensive overview of all kinds of criticism that one might encounter in the social sciences. When browsing through it during the preparation of an article about the transferability of Prospect Theories’ assumptions I came across a citation of an alleged inferior explanatory performance of Prospect Theory with respect to people’s choices in the TV game ‘Deal or no Deal’. I curiously downloaded the cited working paper and found that the citation was fabricated. Successively I thoroughly reviewed the argumentations in the article and in several references that support them. This revealed more untruthful citations, inaccuracies in the references, fallacies and selective use of empirical evidence. Most remaining critical comments appeared personal opinions without solid theoretical or empirical support. In this paper I present an in-depth discussion of the foundations of the comments in T and a critical examination of the references advanced to support them. It leads me to the conclusion that Timmermans’ criticism is unjust and that the references that underlie it actually support the suitability of Prospect Theory for travel choice modelling. This article might also offer a guideline for a careful interpretation of conclusions as a contribution to an improved peer-review process aimed to block articles contaminated with bad scientific practice

Prospect Theory and Choice Behaviour Strategies: Review and Synthesis of Concepts from Social and Transport sciences

Utility Theory is commonly considered as the most useful descriptive theory of human choice behaviour. Alternative concepts are only incidentally considered. This paper reviews alternative assumptions and empirical findings about human choice behaviour. To facilitate comparison and synthesis the review starts with the proposal of a generic framework of choice behaviour. The micro-economic assumptions of Utility Theory and Prospect Theory are then mapped onto this framework. These are compared with each other and other assumptions against the background of theoretical and empirical findings from behavioural economics, several other social disciplines and transport sciences. An extension of Prospect Theory with assumptions about the valuation of attributes and the employment of different decision rules yields a functional concept of choice behaviour that is able to describe most of the reviewed empirical findings to a larger extent than Utility Theory

Sign-dependent Value of Time in Stated Preference: Judgment Bias or Exposure of Genuine Preference?

Stated choice surveys may be the most common approach to obtain monetary values of travel time. The large surveys of 1988 and 1997 in the Netherlands and of 1994 in the United Kingdom produced some puzzling outcomes, such as differences in monetary valuation between travel time gains and losses. This has given rise to controversies about the behaviour that might have caused this ‘sign effect’, which are not decisively settled. This paper shows that Prospect Theory and the heuristic judgment concept as developed in behavioural sciences can shed more light on these controversies2. It starts with an introduction of some basic principles of these lines of work before re-examining the Dutch and UK surveys from these points of view. It is concluded that the sign effect is not caused by biases that stem from heuristic judgment but follows from lossaversive valuation of time and money attributes as assumed in Prospect Theory

Importance of freight mode choice criteria: An MCDA approach

Road transportation has been the dominant mode for inland freight transportation for decades. Rail and waterways transportation are less frequently used alternatives, but in general more attractive from an environmental perspective. Even though many policies promoting the use of intermodal transportation have been proposed, they have had little impact to trigger shippers to shift mode from road transportation to rail or inland waterways transportation. One main reason might be that the requirements of shippers towards transportation modes are still not well understood. Hence this research investigates freight transportation mode choice with a new approach, multi-criteria decision analysis, as well as from the perspectives of different types of industries and experts. Reviewing the literature, the requirements for transportation modes are abstracted into a set of criteria, including transportation cost, door-to-door travel time, on-time reliability, flexibility, frequency, and reduction of CO2 emissions. As the importance of these factors might be different for different industries, we consider four segments: the manufacturing industry, the agriculture industry, the perishable food industry, and the chemical industry. Data from practitioners, industry experts, and academics are collected via online questionnaires and analyzed using the ‘best worst method’ (BWM) to identify weights for the mentioned criteria. The results indicate that transportation cost is viewed as the most important, closely followed by on-time reliability, while reduction of CO2 emission is viewed as the least important. Several comparison studies are conducted to see any difference in the importance of these factors with respect to different industries or respondent groups

Narraciones ancladas: historia y resultados de medio siglo de investigaciones sobre los determinantes de la fecundidad

Incluye Bibliografí

Complementor participation in platforms: Evidence from the 7th and 8th Generations of Video Game Consoles

This paper analyses how the factors breadth of content offerings, boundary resources, and exclusive content explain complementor participation in plat-form-based ecosystems, in the context of video game consoles. Fixed effects regressions on a panel com-prising two generations of consoles across six plat-forms show that the breadth of content offerings posi-tively affects complementor participation. We find that breadth of content offerings, but not boundary resources and exclusive content, are positively related to complementor participation. When studied in one model, breadth of content offerings dominates the relationship. Our results show how complementor ecosystems can be orchestrated to proliferate a varie-ty of complementary product offerings