The Determinants of Trust and Credibility in Environmental Risk Communication: An Empirical Study

This study examines a key component of environmental risk communication; trust and credibility. The study was conducted in two parts. In the first part, six hypotheses regarding the perceptions and determinants of trust and credibility were tested against survey data. The hypotheses were supported by the data. The most important hypothesis was that perceptions of trust and credibility are dependent on three factors: perceptions of knowledge and expertise; perceptions of openness and honesty; and perceptions of concern and care. In the second part, models were constructed with perceptions of trust and credibility as the dependent variable. The goal was to examine the data for findings with direct policy implications. One such finding was that defying a negative stereotype is key to improving perceptions of trust and credibility.     

中国FDI进入模式的影响因素

本文综合交易费用理论和谈判力量理论分析框架,探讨了FDI进入中国市场模式(合资／独资)的影响因素。应用两分Logit模型进行实证分析,结果显示区位因素、来源地因素、投资项目的经营期限以及投资规模都对FDI进入中国市场模式产生了重要的影响,而产业因素的影响则统计不显著。     

Communicating future water needs to an at-risk population: lessons learned following defeat of the Applewhite Dam and Reservoir Project in San Antonio,Texas

San Antonio, Texas, the seventh largest city in the United States, has experienced steady population growth, since the “boom” of the 1960s. Projected water shortages due to this growth were realized as early as the 1970s by city leaders and south-central Texas regional development decision makers. To reduce dependence on the already over-taxed, Edwards aquifer, a solution, the Applewhite Dam and Reservoir Project, was developed with wide acceptance by federal, state, and city leaders who regarded the project as a necessary measure for regional growth and development. However, opposition by taxpayer and environmental groups led to referendums of 1991 and 1994 in which voters blocked construction of the dam and reservoir leaving the city with limited options for water provision. This case study investigated the factors which led to a clear mismatch in communication between decision makers—those who were aware of the actual and quantifiable risk to the region in terms of reduced water supplies—and the general public, a population that did not have complete and/or adequate knowledge of their actual risk regarding future water shortages, nor, of solutions being developed, such as the Applewhite project. The findings from this case study indicate that when municipal leadership fails to adequately communicate risk regarding resource shortage to an affected public, as well as, openly planned solutions, that voters are likely to underestimate future impacts of water shortages, heed last-minute opposition, and reject long-standing, publicly proposed projects. The intent of this research is not to support either side in the Applewhite controversy, but to shed perspective on the process of adequately and effectively communicating future water needs to an at-risk population. Decision makers in cities across the United States who are faced with solving problems of limited resources needed by a large populace may be informed by the results of this research.     

风险，创新激励政策中被忽视的关键要素

创新是经济持续增长的核心动力,鼓励创新是各国国家创新战略的关键.现行的创新相关政策忽视了如何从风险管理的角度,系统地控制和分散从事创新活动的参与者所面临的风险.本文试图从这个被人忽视的视角,探讨如何鼓励人们进行自主创新的逻辑框架;并对相关理论研究假设进行了实证检验,以期为政府决策者提供新思路.     

基于分位点回归模型的条件VaR估计以及杠杆效应分析

 在文献中,分析杠杆效应时大多数都是基于ARCH类模型,本文应用分位点回归模型及其变点检测模型分析了“已实现”波动率条件下的CVaR,并尝试从CVaR的角度对杠杆效应进行分析。最后,对中国股票市场进行了实证研究,得到了“已实现”波动率条件下的CVaR估计,并对中国股市的杠杆效应进行了分析。     

跨期消费与投资理论对新古典经济学的超越

经济学理论是时代的产物,必将随着社会的发展而不断被补充、修正和完善。新一轮经济危机的爆发对新古典经济学理论提出了挑战,自由放任、少政府干预、有效需求理论、理性人假设、一般均衡理论等遭到了质疑。本文从跨期消费和投资理论两个视角出发,分析其对新古典经济学理论的超越,揭露集聚性跨期消费和投资行为的时代缺陷,为改进和完善经济理论服务,从而合理引导跨期消费和投资理论的走向,为今后经济发展提供参考。     

我国社会福利的发展取向:走进福利国家——基于风险社会理论的分析

风险社会理论是西方学者关于晚期现代性社会问题的一种思考。它虽然不能直接应用到我国语境中来,但能够促进我们对转型中的社会问题加以反思。从这个意义上,我国解决转型中的社会问题与社会风险的方略也与西方是不同的。当前中国正面临着多重社会风险,并且这些风险是不平等地分配的。要化解风险,需要我们建立制度化的社会福利制度,促进劳动力的去商品化、满足社会需要和维护社会公平。从长期来看,我们需要重返福利国家。     

Social perception of natural risks by local residents in developing countries—The example of the coastal area of Benin

Risk management and planning activities cannot be sustainably and efficiently implemented unless being based on a participative approach resulting from the problem consciousness and perception of the local inhabitants. This requires that the measures linked to problem perception and assessment by local stakeholders, above all by the population affected, are known. This investigation conducted in the flat Beninese coastal lagoon areas aims to assess the local inhabitants’ risk perception. The results are the following: (i) the stakeholders have group-specific ways of risk perception (according to ethnicity, social group, age); (ii) every risk management strategy should be based on the group-specific ways of risk perception and assessment; (iii) the acceptance of a given risk management strategy including interactive ways of participation can be advanced through education, dissemination of risk information as well as through communication between stakeholders.     

Setting tolerance limits for statistical project control using earned value management

Project control has been a research topic since decades that attracts both academics and practitioners. Project control systems indicate the direction of change in preliminary planning variables compared with actual performance. In case their current project performance deviates from the planned performance, a warning is indicated by the system in order to take corrective actions.Earned value management/earned schedule (EVM/ES) systems have played a central role in project control, and provide straightforward key performance metrics that measure the deviations between planned and actual performance in terms of time and cost. In this paper, a new statistical project control procedure sets tolerance limits to improve the discriminative power between progress situations that are either statistically likely or less likely to occur under the project baseline schedule. In this research, the tolerance limits are derived from subjective estimates for the activity durations of the project. Using the existing and commonly known EVM/ES metrics, the resulting project control charts will have an improved ability to trigger actions when variation in a project׳s progress exceeds certain predefined thresholdsA computational experiment has been set up to test the ability of these statistical project control charts to discriminate between variations that are either acceptable or unacceptable in the duration of the individual activities. The computational experiments compare the use of statistical tolerance limits with traditional earned value management thresholds and validate their power to report warning signals when projects tend to deviate significantly from the baseline schedule.     

A Tiered Framework for Risk‐Relevant Characterization and Ranking of Chemical Exposures: Applications to the National Children's Study (NCS)

A challenge for large‐scale environmental health investigations such as the National Children's Study (NCS), is characterizing exposures to multiple, co‐occurring chemical agents with varying spatiotemporal concentrations and consequences modulated by biochemical, physiological, behavioral, socioeconomic, and environmental factors. Such investigations can benefit from systematic retrieval, analysis, and integration of diverse extant information on both contaminant patterns and exposure‐relevant factors. This requires development, evaluation, and deployment of informatics methods that support flexible access and analysis of multiattribute data across multiple spatiotemporal scales. A new “Tiered Exposure Ranking” (TiER) framework, developed to support various aspects of risk‐relevant exposure characterization, is described here, with examples demonstrating its application to the NCS. TiER utilizes advances in informatics computational methods, extant database content and availability, and integrative environmental/exposure/biological modeling to support both “discovery‐driven” and “hypothesis‐driven” analyses. “Tier 1” applications focus on “exposomic” pattern recognition for extracting information from multidimensional data sets, whereas second and higher tier applications utilize mechanistic models to develop risk‐relevant exposure metrics for populations and individuals. In this article, “tier 1” applications of TiER explore identification of potentially causative associations among risk factors, for prioritizing further studies, by considering publicly available demographic/socioeconomic, behavioral, and environmental data in relation to two health endpoints (preterm birth and low birth weight). A “tier 2” application develops estimates of pollutant mixture inhalation exposure indices for NCS counties, formulated to support risk characterization for these endpoints. Applications of TiER demonstrate the feasibility of developing risk‐relevant exposure characterizations for pollutants using extant environmental and demographic/socioeconomic data.