Evaluating the benefits and costs of regulatory reforms: what questions need to be asked?

In 1984, Portney argued that "[w]e should scrutinize proposed reforms of the rulemaking process every bit as carefully as the regulations that process produces." In the 23 years since then, the regulatory process on the federal level has been continuously reformed by statute, by executive order, and by directives from the OMB. Despite the extensive debate on the need for these reforms, there has been very little analysis of the reforms themselves. This paper updates Portney's work on analyzing cost-benefit analysis and expands it to evaluate reforms of the regulatory process. I use as my primary example the recent peer-review guidelines issued by OMB. I argue that we may have reached a point of diminishing returns in regulatory reforms, that the peer-review guidelines likely have costs that exceed their benefits, and that further regulatory reforms merit closer evaluation.     

Psychology's role in the conserving society

Because the earth's natural resources are finite and are growing increasingly more difficult to exploit, energy and resource conservation will soon become essential to our way of life. Psychologists and other social scientists can help in that transition, and recently they have begun to do relevant research in several areas: environmental pollution, recycling and solid wastes, reducing litter, and energy usage and conservation. Research approaches that have been used include studies of environmental and energy attitudes, behavioral research, social interaction studies, community conservation programs, and large-scale consumer research. More work is especially needed on the topics of transportation energy use, industrial and commercial energy conservation, and community action campaigns. Research efforts should increasingly utilize measures of actual behavior and actual energy usage, long-term longitudinal approaches, realistic field settings, and costeffective procedures. In addition to doing research, psychologists can contribute to the advent of the conserving society through program evaluation studies, proposals for innovation, dissemination of validated scientific knowledge, and offering policy advice.     

Use of propensity score matching to evaluate a national smoking cessation media campaign

Sustained mass media campaigns have been recommended to stem the tobacco epidemic in the United States. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to estimate the effect of awareness of a national smoking cessation media campaign (EX) on quit attempts and cessation-related cognition. Participants were 4,067 smokers and recent quitters aged 18-49 in targeted U.S. media markets. Controlling for potential confounders through PSM and regression analysis, confirmed awareness of EX was not significantly associated with either outcome at 6-month follow-up. Matched analyses excluding 217 quitters resulted in a significant effect of EX on both outcomes.     

Thematic elements underlying the delivery of services in high-contact public service encounters

Earlier research alludes to the fact that enhanced information and systems (IS/IT) functionalities coupled with a lower degree of interaction with customers, the so-called zero- touch, real- time, self-service enhance services engagement. In this article, utilising a series of thematic elements drawn from two exploratory case studies, the authors suggest that the real enhancement of service delivery and increase in customer satisfaction, especially in frontline public service encounters, are not necessarily achieved through infusions of IS/IT, but from the adoption of a service philosophy which allows such organisations to de-emphasise IS/IT and instead focus on significant organisational factors in the area of enhanced human interaction.     

Penalized likelihood inference in extreme value analyses

Models for extreme values are usually based on detailed asymptotic argument, for which strong ergodic assumptions such as stationarity, or prescribed perturbations from stationarity, are required. In most applications of extreme value modelling such assumptions are not satisfied, but the type of departure from stationarity is either unknown or complex, making asymptotic calculations unfeasible. This has led to various approaches in which standard extreme value models are used as building blocks for conditional or local behaviour of processes, with more general statistical techniques being used at the modelling stage to handle the non-stationarity. This paper presents another approach in this direction based on penalized likelihood. There are some advantages to this particular approach: the method has a simple interpretation; computations for estimation are relatively straightforward using standard algorithms; and a simple reinterpretation of the model enables broader inferences, such as confidence intervals, to be obtained using MCMC methodology. Methodological details together with applications to both athletics and environmental data are given.     

Part/whole percentaging as a useful method in policy/program evaluation

Part/whole percentaging analysis is a simple and meaningful way of evaluating alternative policies, decisions, or other options with multiple goals measured on different dimensions. That kind of analysis involves converting the raw scores of each alternative policy on each goal into a part/whole percentage by summing the raw scores for each goal and dividing each raw score by the total. One can then sum the part/whole percentages across the goals for each policy after assigning at least tentative relative weights to each goal. Part/whole percentages are added for goals that one would like to maximize and are subtracted for goals that one would like to minimize. Where the relative weight of a goal or score is too difficult to determine, one can determine the threshold value at which there is a tie between the tentative first choice and the second choice, and then just determine whether the actual value is above or below the threshold value. The aggregated part/whole percentages for each policy can be used to choose the best policy, the best subset of policies, or to allocate a budget across the policies in proportion to their aggregated part/whole percentages.