How choice proliferation affects revealed preferences

Theory and Decision - Whereas the literature on choice overload has shown that people tend to defer their choice or experience less satisfaction under choice proliferation, this paper aims to test...     

Does Privatization Protect Natural Resources? Property Rights and Forests in Guatemala

Objectives . Property rights are central to debates about natural resource policy. Governments traditionally have been seen as the appropriate custodians of natural resources for their citizens. More recently, many argue the privatization of property rights will ensure that users have incentives to manage their resources well. Common property, to the extent it is discussed at all, is seen as leading to the tragedy of the commons. We evaluate these claims by assessing property rights and forest conditions in two private and three communal forests in Guatemala. Methods . Data on biological and social phenomena from five forests (151 plots) and their associated communities were collected using the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program protocols. Ordinary least squares regression was used to analyze four models. We examined t -scores for differences in coefficients for the different models. Results . The models demonstrate that de jure property rights are not a powerful predictor of variations among the sampled forests. Conclusions . We argue that de facto institutions and their enforcement are much more important than de jure property rights to forest management. Communities holding a forest in common can, under certain circumstances, create institutions to manage their resources as successfully as—or more successfully than—private owners.     

Tools for decision making under imprecise risk

Generalizing risk, imprecise risk is a situation where available objective information is expressible by a lower probability. We study properties of certain lower probabilities in metrizable spaces. Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for stability of their cores under image and mixture, which are useful features in applying Expected Utility Theory under imprecise risk. Received: December 2000; revised version: March 2001     

Maximum entropy estimation for survey sampling

Calibration methods have been widely studied in survey sampling over the last decades. Viewing calibration as an inverse problem, we extend the calibration technique by using a maximum entropy method. Finding the optimal weights is achieved by considering random weights and looking for a discrete distribution which maximizes an entropy under the calibration constraint. This method points a new frame for the computation of such estimates and the investigation of its statistical properties.     

Tribute to Jean-Yves Jaffray

Tribute to Jean-Yves Jaffray by the French Group of Decision Theory.