Imprecise preferences and the WTP-WTA disparity

This article reports the results of a study designed to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) values for changes in the risk of nonfatal road injuries. We examine the possibility that individuals' preferences over combinations of wealth, risk, and safety are imprecise, and that this imprecision might result in the observed disparity between WTP and WTA measures of value. The results confirm that individuals' preferences for safety are significantly imprecise, but that this alone is insufficient to explain more than part of the disparity. Indeed, respondents' estimates of the minimum that they would be prepared to accept for a risk increase frequently exceed the maximum that they would be prepared to pay for an equivalent risk reduction.     

Public Perceptions of Risk and Preference-Based Values of Safety

This article reports the results of two studies aimed at estimating preference-based values of safety in three contexts—namely rail, domestic fires and fires in public places—relative to the corresponding value for roads using matching (or equivalence) questions. In addition, both studies included a variety of questions intended to shed light on respondents' perceptions of risk and attitudes to safety in the various contexts. While the two studies were, to all intents and purposes, identical in the procedure that they employed, the essential difference between them was that the first study took place in late 1998, whereas the second study was carried out in early 2000 in the aftermath of a major rail accident at Ladbroke Grove near London's Paddington station which occurred in October 1999 and in which 29 passengers and 2 train drivers died. In addition, the second study sample was deliberately weighted to contain an above-average proportion of regular rail users. These studies demonstrated how certain factors which have been shown to affect people's perception of risk (see Slovic, P. (1992). In S. Krimsky and D. Golding (eds.), Social Theories of Risk, Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 117–152) also affected our respondents' priorities over safety programs. The results also showed however, that the impact of these perceptions upon the trade-offs between preventing deaths in different hazard contexts was a good deal less pronounced than has been suggested by the value differentials that are currently implicit—and in some cases, explicit—in public policy making.     

OLIGOPOLY CAPITALISM, LABOR ORGANIZATION, AND WAGES OF WORKERS IN AMERICAN MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES

This article investigates the interaction between oligopoly power, labor unionization, and worker wages. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for workers in manufacturing industries little evidence is found that workers are exploited by oligopolistic employers, but rather wages for production workers increase with both unionization and employer's market power. There is evidence, however, that unionization reduces variation in wages due to increased oligopoly power.     

Children's Career Development: Metaphorical Images of Theory,Research, and Practice

This summative article discusses 5 invited contributions on children's career development. The authors of these articles were asked to consider the status quo of children's career development, issues facing this field, and future directions. Several emergent themes focused on theory, research, and practice and their interactive potential in children's career development. Suggestions for future direction in the study of children's career development include the need for greater contextualization and interdisciplinary collaboration, the revision and innovation of theory, and the need for organizing frameworks for theory, research, and practice.     

BEYOND MANIPU LATION:

Critical social histories of consumption often attribute the rise of consumer culture largely to the success of advertising and marketing while leaving unexplored a wide range of consumer education practices that aimed not to minimize but to maximize thoughtful consumer conduct. In this article I move beyond the manipulation hypothesis that I find embedded in these critical histories in order to investigate how one woman's consumer education practices contributed toward a discourse and subjectivity for the modem, urban, middle-class woman consumer. Lillian Gilbreth (1878–1972) developed her own psychology of work satisfaction as a scientific management consultant in the 1910s and applied this industrial psychology to women consumers in the late 1920s. Michel Foucault's image of "government" as "the conduct of conduct," along with newer lines of analysis developed by scholars interested in governmentality, provide useful tools for showing how Gilbreth attempted to make women into careful organizers of family consumption. Her story allows us to glimpse a whole dimension of governmental power that has been overshadowed by a preoccupation with manipulative power in many sociological and historical studies.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
                    Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack ¹
Through the various campaigns for Wise Spending, the woman consumer has come to know that while as an individual she may have a small budget, she belongs to a group which controls vast sums of money. She can use this power to help or to hinder.
                    Lillian Moller Gilbreth, "Know the Facts"     

ON THE USE OF X2 AS A TEST OF INDEPENDENCE IN CONTINGENCY TABLES WITH SMALL CELL EXPECTATIONS

When an r×c contingency table has many cells having very small expectations, the usual χ² approximation to the upper tail of the Pearson χ² goodness-of-fit statistic becomes very conservative. The alternatives considered in this paper are to use either a lognormal approximation, or to scale the usual χ² approximation. The study involves thousands of tables with various sample sizes, and with tables whose sizes range from 2×2 through 2×10×10. Subject to certain restrictions the new scaled χ² approximations are recommended for use with tables having an average cell expectation as small as 0·5.     

Lest power be forgotten: networks, division and difference in the city

Over the last decade we have seen a notable shift in the urban Society literature from discourses of division to discourses of difference. This shift has opened up new ways of understanding the complexities of city life and the formation of heterogeneous subjectivities and identities in the spaces of the city. There has been, we argue, a worrying tendency in this process to lose an analysis of the workings of power, While early Marxist, feminist and race/ethnicity debates were firmly located within a framework which highlighted power, post‐structuralist debates have operated with a more fluid notion of power, which at times has become so fluid as to evaporate into thin air. Our intention here in to re‐emphasise the significance of power while holding on to the concept of difference. We do this by using the notion of power networks that operate at different temporal and spatial scales. These give the city contrasting spatialities and temporalities that overlap one another. The city is seen as a palimpsest of time‐space networks that capture some of the presence of difference as well as suggesting its absences. These time‐space networks of power are considered in the material, perceived and imaginary realms in relation to bodies, interests and symbols.     

An influence method for outlier detection applied to time series traffic data

The work of Chernick et al. (1982) is extended to form a quantitative outlier detection statistic for use with time series data. The statistic is formed from the squared elements of the influence function matrix, where each element of the matrix gives the influence on the theoretical autocorrelation function at lag k (pk) of a pair of obser vations at time lag k. The approximate first four moments for the statistic are derived and, by fitting Johnson curves to these theoretical moments, critical points are also produced. The statistic is also used to form the basis of an adjustment procedure to treat outliers or estimate missing values in the time series. The nuclear power data of Chernick et al. and the traffic count data of the Department of Transport are used for practical illustration.