Multicriteria decision making applied to waste recycling in Brazil

Waste management, like other environmental issues, tends to be a suitable topic for problem solving using multicriteria decision-making techniques when uncertainty is involved. This paper presents two cases where the decision makers had different preferences. In the first case, social agents required an evaluation of different disposal alternatives for plastic waste. In the second case, existing construction and demolition waste recycling facilities required a performance evaluation.     

Regulatory fit effects on perceived fiscal exchange and tax compliance

Paying taxes can be considered a contribution to the welfare of a society. But even though tax payments are redistributed to citizens in the form of public goods and services, taxpayers often do not perceive many benefits from paying taxes. Information campaigns about the use of taxes for financing public goods and services could increase taxpayers’ understanding of the importance of taxes, strengthen their perception of fiscal exchange and consequently also increase tax compliance. Two studies examined how fit between framing of information and taxpayers’ regulatory focus affects perceived fiscal exchange and tax compliance. Taxpayers should perceive the exchange between tax payments and provision of public goods and services as higher if information framing suits their regulatory focus. Study 1 supported this hypothesis for induced regulatory focus. Study 2 replicated the findings for chronic regulatory focus and further demonstrated that regulatory fit also affects tax compliance. The results provide further evidence for findings from previous studies concerning regulatory fit effects on tax attitudes and extend these findings to a context with low tax morale.     

CONSUMER DEBT STRESS,CHANGES IN HOUSEHOLD DEBT,AND THE GREAT RECESSION

This research examines psychological debt stress and changes in household debt holdings for consumers during the Great Recession using data from a monthly national U.S. household survey covering the period 2006 through 2012. Debt stress measures in the population rose by over 50% at the bottom of the recession. Determining relative stress for eight different types of household debt, we find that noncollateralized debts are more stressful than collateralized debt and that during the recession the composition of debt shifted away from collateralized debt and toward noncollateralized. Our empirical results show that women and Hispanics experienced higher measured levels of stress. (JEL D12, D18)     

Blinded by worries: sin taxes and demand for temptation under financial worries

Theory and Decision - Imposing “sin” taxes has been the preferred way governments tried to discourage the over-consumption of temptation goods for decades. However numerous evidence...     

Extreme value regression models: a useful reparameterization for the survival function

In this paper, we consider some aspects of accurate approximate inferences for the survival function at a specifed time t 0 , considering extreme value regression models using a modified form of reparameterization proposed by Guerrero and Johnson, and exploring a non-normality measure for likelihood functions and posterior densities introduced by Kass and Slate. We illustrate the proposed methodology, considering a lifetime data set with two treatments introduced by Lee.     

WHAT DOES REPUTATION REALLY ASSURE? THE RELATIONSHIP OF TRADEMARKS TO EXPECTATIONS AND LEGAL REMEDIES

Theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that trademarks guarantee more than just quality: they assure specific performance, that is, fulfillment of the specific terms of the contract. The specific performance hypothesis implies that a firm's investment in trademark capital varies directly with the damages that its customers expect to bear from a breach and the legal difficulties of obtaining compensation. The hypothesis also helps to explain why competitors of firms whose products are recalled lose wealth, why some damages allowed by law intentionally provide less than full compensation, and why firms who sell only to other firms also invest in trademarks.     

A practical approach for assessing the effect of grouping in hierarchical spatio-temporal models

Hierarchical spatio-temporal models allow for the consideration and estimation of many sources of variability. A general spatio-temporal model can be written as the sum of a spatio-temporal trend and a spatio-temporal random effect. When spatial locations are considered to be homogeneous with respect to some exogenous features, the groups of locations may share a common spatial domain. Differences between groups can be highlighted both in the large-scale, spatio-temporal component and in the spatio-temporal dependence structure. When these differences are not included in the model specification, model performance and spatio-temporal predictions may be weak. This paper proposes a method for evaluating and comparing models that progressively include group differences. Hierarchical modeling under a Bayesian perspective is followed, allowing flexible models and the statistical assessment of results based on posterior predictive distributions. This procedure is applied to tropospheric ozone data in the Italian Emilia–Romagna region for 2001, where 30 monitoring sites are classified according to environmental laws into two groups by their relative position with respect to traffic emissions.