Salience,Valence, Context,and Integration: Conceptualizing the Needs of Sexually and Gender Diverse Youth in P–12 Schools

A framework for conceptualizing the needs of lesbian, gay male, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other sexually and gender diverse youth is essential for guiding service delivery throughout educational settings. Review and synthesis of the literature reveals that integrating assessment of the salience, valence, and context of issues related to sexual and gender diversity facilitates affirmative practice at the individual student, group, and school-wide levels. The authors describe the components of the salience, valence, context, and integration (SVCI) model with emphasis on practical application. The theoretical and empirical support for each component of the model is also discussed.     

Privatising social housing in Taiwan

This article first reviews how the concept of privatisation has been referred to in the current restructuring of the social housing system, especially in the case of the UK. The term 'privatisation' is then examined in greater detail and its wider meaning is discussed. By using the network approach, privatisation in relation to housing can be understood in terms of the changing combinations of agents involved in providing social housing, which gives rise to the commodified impact on the distribution of social housing. By using the privatisation process of social housing in Taiwan as an example, three distinct combinations in terms of providing social housing are identified. With an increasing number of social housing units being provided by the marketised social housing model where private agents control the process of providing social housing, along with more market rules being involved in the provision and the partial removal of means tests in relation to the distribution of social housing, the privatisation of social housing development in Taiwan is having a major impact on equity.     

Eliciting decision weights by adapting de Finetti’s betting-odds method to prospect theory

This paper extends de Finetti’s betting-odds method for assessing subjective beliefs to ambiguous events. Thus, a tractable manner for measuring decision weights under ambiguity is obtained. De Finetti’s method is so transparent that decision makers can evaluate the relevant tradeoffs in complex situations. The resulting data can easily be analyzed, using nonparametric techniques. Our extension is implemented in an experiment on predicting next-day’s performance of the Dow Jones and Nikkei stock indexes, where we test the existence and nature of rank dependence, finding usual patterns. We also find violations of rank dependence.

Learning in the Allais paradox

Whereas both the Allais paradox, the first empirical challenge of the classical rationality assumptions, and learning have been the focus of many experimental investigations, no experimental study exists today into learning in the pure context of the Allais paradox. This paper presents such a study. We find that choices converge to expected utility maximization if subjects are given the opportunity to learn by both thought and experience, but less so when they learn by thought only. To the extent that genuine preferences should be measured with proper learning and incentives, our study gives the first pure demonstration that irrationalities such as in the Allais paradox are less pronounced than often thought. Paul Anand and Stefan Trautmann made helpful comments.     

Is Transport Safety More Valuable in the Air?

Using a contingent valuation survey, people's willingness to pay for a given risk reduction is found to be much larger, consistently more than two times as large, when traveling by air compared to by taxi. Follow-up questions revealed that an important reason for this discrepancy is that many experience a higher mental suffering from flying, and that they are willing to pay to reduce this suffering. It was also consistently found that people are willing to pay more for a certain risk reduction if the original price was higher. Policy implications are discussed.     

The logic of preference reconsidered

Preferences are an important object of study in economic theory. Their logico-mathematical study has become prominent with the raise of modern decision theory and with the new conceptions of utility-functions and personalistic probabilities. The ‘basic logic’ at the foundation of the more advanced theories of preference, however, has been relatively little investigated. The pioneer work is Hallden's The Logic of ‘Better’ of the year 1957, followed by von Wright's The Logic of Preference in 1963. The topic has turned out unexpectedly problematic and there is as yet little consensus among logicians about the basic laws of preferring. A reason for this is apparently that there exist several concepts of preference which must be disentangled and kept apart in a logical theory. How this is to be done is discussed in the introductory sections (1–5) of the present paper. In Section 8 is sketched a logic for an asymmetric and connected preference-relation which holds between ‘possible worlds’ within a subject's ‘preference-horizon’ (Section 7). Preferences between states of affairs generally are called holistic when they hold ceteris paribus, i.e., when there is a corresponding preference-relation between any pairs of possible worlds which differ only in those two states and in no others. (Section 6.) Holistic preferences between states are asymmetrical and transitive but they do not form a linear preference order. (Section 9.) Failure to notice this, the author maintains, is responsible for much confusion in the traditional treatment of the subject. In the concluding sections (10–12) the author discusses the mutual relations of the value-absolutes, the good and the bad. Can they be defined in the terms of the relative notion of betterness or preference (and logical constants) alone? The definition which says that the goodness of a state is the holistic preference of it over its contradictory, answers the question affirmatively but conflicts with several deep-rooted axiological intuitions of ours. A more satisfying definition of the value-absolutes requires the additional notion of a value-less state (world) with which all the other states may be compared. In this connection some ideas of G. E. Moore about the notion of an ‘empty’ world can be interestingly exploited.     

Consequentialist foundations for expected utility

Behaviour norms are considered for decision trees which allow both objective probabilities and uncertain states of the world with unknown probabilities. Terminal nodes have consequences in a given domain. Behaviour is required to be consistent in subtrees. Consequentialist behaviour, by definition, reveals a consequence choice function independent of the structure of the decision tree. It implies that behaviour reveals a revealed preference ordering satisfying both the independence axiom and a novel form of sure-thing principle. Continuous consequentialist behaviour must be expected utility maximizing. Other plausible assumptions then imply additive utilities, subjective probabilities, and Bayes' rule.     

Discount rates and risky sexual behaviors among teenagers and young adults

This article examines the relationship between personal discount rates and sexual behaviors in a sample of teenagers and young adults. We find that higher discount rates (an indication of less willingness to forego current consumption for future consumption) are significantly associated with a range of sexual behaviors, including ever having sex, having sex before age 16 years, and past or current pregnancy. These associations are consistent with previous studies showing a link between discounting and other, non-sexual health behaviors. JEL Classification D80 · D90 · I10     

Complementary properties of binary relations

After defining the complementary relation R of a binary relation R on a set X, this paper constructs the binary relation C (is a complementary property of) on the set P of nine well known elementary properties that R might possess. It deduces some theorems about C; especially that symmetry is the only one of these possible properties of R on X that is possessed by C on P. The set P may be enlarged to contain other elementary properties of R on X without changing the truth of these theorems, when the symbols of sets are properly modified. Finally, the paper discusses the desirability of a general theory of elementary properties of binary relations for the further development of statistical decision theory.