57 research outputs found
Maintaining (locus of) control? : Assessing the impact of locus of control on education decisions and wages
This paper establishes that individuals with an internal locus of control, i.e., who believe that reinforcement in life comes from their own actions instead of being determined by luck or destiny, earn higher wages. However, this positive effect only translates into labor income via the channel of education. Factor structure models are implemented on an augmented data set coming from two different samples. By so doing, we are able to correct for potential biases that arise due to reverse causality and spurious correlation, and to investigate the impact of premarket locus of control on later outcomes
Assessing the importance of car meanings and attitudes in consumer evaluations of electric vehicles
This paper reports findings from a research study which assesses the importance of attitudinal constructs related to general car attitudes and the meanings attached to car ownership over evaluations of electric vehicles (EVs). The data are assessed using principal component analysis to evaluate the structure of the underlying attitudinal constructs. The identified constructs are then entered into a hierarchical regression analysis which uses either positive or negative evaluations of the instrumental capabilities of EVs as the dependent variable. Results show that attitudinal constructs offer additional predictive power over socioeconomic characteristics and that the symbolic and emotive meanings of car ownership are as, if not more, effective in explaining the assessment of EV instrumental capability as compared to issues of cost and environmental concern. Additionally, the more important an individual considers their car to be in their everyday life, the more negative their evaluations are of EVs whilst individuals who claim to be knowledgeable about cars in general and EVs in particular have a lower propensity for negative EV attitudes. However, positive and negative EV attitudes are related to different attitudinal constructs suggesting that it is possible for someone to hold both negative and positive assessments at the same time
Revisiting consistency with random utility maximisation: theory and implications for practical work
While the paradigm of utility maximisation has formed the basis of the majority of applications in discrete choice modelling for over 40 years, its core assumptions have been questioned by work in both behavioural economics and mathematical psychology as well as more recently by developments in the RUM-oriented choice modelling community. This paper reviews the basic properties with a view to explaining the historical pre-eminence of utility maximisation and addresses the question of what departures from the paradigm may be necessary or wise in order to accommodate richer behavioural patterns. We find that many, though not all, of the behavioural traits discussed in the literature can be approximated sufficiently closely by a random utility framework, allowing analysts to retain the many advantages that such an approach possesses
Quality adjusted price indexes for discrete goods
Abstract:
This paper discusses the construction and computation of a quality adjusted price index when the
commodities are differentiated products, such as different brands of automobiles and refrigerators.
The method we focus on is an extension of Trajtenbergâs approach. A key result obtained in the
paper is that the evolution of the quality adjusted price index depends crucially on the fraction of
consumers that do not purchase a variant of the product. The method is applied to data on
automobile demand in Norway from 1994 to 2002. Both the Laspeyres index and the index based on
hedonic regression yield lower estimates of the pricees from 1999 to 2002 than does the quality
adjusted price index. This is mainly due to variations in the fraction of persons who purchase new
automobiles.
Keywords: Quality adjusted price index, Exact index theory, Hedonic price indexe
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