The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but ...neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr Ostrom uses institutional analysis to explore different ways - both successful and unsuccessful - of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the 'tragedy of the commons' argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.
•We evaluate the econometric and policy benefits of an ICLV model over an appropriately specified reduced form choice model.
Integrated Choice and Latent Variable (ICLV) models are an increasingly ...popular extension to discrete choice models that attempt explicitly to model the cognitive process underlying the formation of any choice. This study was born from the discovery that an ICLV model can in many cases be reduced to a choice model without latent variables that fits the choice data at least as well as the original ICLV model from which it was obtained. The failure of past studies to recognize this fact raised concerns about other benefits that have been claimed with regards to the framework. With the objective of addressing these concerns, this study undertakes a systematic comparison between the ICLV model and an appropriately specified reduced form choice model. We derive analytical proofs regarding the benefits of the framework and use synthetic datasets to corroborate any conclusions drawn from the analytical proofs. We find that the ICLV model can under certain conditions lead to an improvement in the analyst's ability to predict outcomes to the choice data, allow for the identification of structural relationships between observable and latent variables, correct for bias arising from omitted variables and measurement error, reduce the variance of parameter estimates, and abet practice and policy, all in ways that would not be possible using the reduced form choice model. We synthesize these findings into a general process of evaluation that can be used to assess what gains, if any, might be had from developing an ICLV model in a particular empirical context.
The other invisible hand Le Grand, Julian
2008, 2007., 20090110, 2009, 2007, 2007-01-01, 20070101
eBook, Book
How can we ensure high-quality public services such as health care and education? Governments spend huge amounts of public money on public services such as health, education, and social care, and yet ...the services that are actually delivered are often low quality, inefficiently run, unresponsive to their users, and inequitable in their distribution. In this book, Julian Le Grand argues that the best solution is to offer choice to users and to encourage competition among providers. Le Grand has just completed a period as policy advisor working within the British government at the highest levels, and from this he has gained evidence to support his earlier theoretical work and has experienced the political reality of putting public policy theory into practice. He examines four ways of delivering public services: trust; targets and performance management; "voice"; and choice and competition. He argues that, although all of these have their merits, in most situations policies that rely on extending choice and competition among providers have the most potential for delivering high-quality, efficient, responsive, and equitable services. But it is important that the relevant policies be appropriately designed, and this book provides a detailed discussion of the principal features that these policies should have in the context of health care and education. It concludes with a discussion of the politics of choice.
This paper presents empirical findings from the comparison between two principal preference elicitation techniques: discrete choice experiments and profile-based best–worst scaling. Best–worst ...scaling involves less cognitive burden for respondents and provides more information than traditional “pick-one” tasks asked in discrete choice experiments. However, there is lack of empirical evidence on how best–worst scaling compares to discrete choice experiments. This empirical comparison between discrete choice experiments and best–worst scaling was undertaken as part of the Outcomes of Social Care for Adults project, England, which aims to develop a weighted measure of social care outcomes. The findings show that preference weights from best–worst scaling and discrete choice experiments do reveal similar patterns in preferences and in the majority of cases preference weights – when normalised/rescaled – are not significantly different.
► Illustrates key issues that are important in choosing between profile-case best-worst scaling and discrete choice experiment studies. ► Empirical research on the value of outcomes of social care reveals similar patterns in the preference weights obtained from the two approaches. ► In the majority of cases examined, preference weights are not significantly different once the weights have been appropriately normalised/rescaled.
This paper provides with a review of the state of the art of environmental valuation with discrete choice experiments (DCEs). The growing body of literature on this field serves to emphasize the ...increasing role that DCEs are playing in environmental decision making in the last decade. The paper attempts to cover the full process of undertaking a choice experiment, including survey and experimental design, econometric analysis of choice data and welfare analysis. The research on this field is found to be intense, although many challenges are put forward (e.g. choice-task complexity and cognitive effort, experimental design, preference and scale heterogeneity, endogeneity or model uncertainty). Reviewing the state of the art of DCEs serves to draw attention to the main challenges that this methodological approach will need to overcome in the coming years and to identify the frontiers in discrete choice analysis.
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