More than 41 000 water bodies are listed as impaired by the US Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act. Implementation and enforcement of regulations designed to address these ...impairments can be costly, raising questions about the value of the public benefits derived from improved surface water quality. Here, we assess the recreational value of changes in water quality using freely available geotagged photographs, taken by members of the public, as a proxy for recreational visits to lakes. We found that improved water clarity is associated with increased numbers of visits to lakes and that lake users were willing to incur greater costs to visit clearer lakes. Lake users were willing to travel 56 minutes farther (equivalent to US$22 in travel costs) for every one-meter increase in water clarity in Minnesota and Iowa lakes, when controlling for other lake attributes. Our approach demonstrates the potential for social-media data to inform social-ecological research, including assessment of the recreational benefits of improvements in water quality.
The metabolic costs of animal movement have been studied extensively under laboratory conditions, although frequently these are a poor approximation of the costs of operating in the natural, ...heterogeneous environment. Construction of “energy landscapes,” which relate animal locality to the cost of transport, can clarify whether, to what extent, and how movement properties are attributable to environmental heterogeneity. Although behavioral responses to aspects of the energy landscape are well documented in some fields (notably, the selection of tailwinds by aerial migrants) and scales (typically large), the principles of the energy landscape extend across habitat types and spatial scales. We provide a brief synthesis of the mechanisms by which environmentally driven changes in the cost of transport can modulate the behavioral ecology of animal movement in different media, develop example cost functions for movement in heterogeneous environments, present methods for visualizing these energy landscapes, and derive specific predictions of expected outcomes from individual- to population- and species-level processes. Animals modulate a suite of movement parameters (e.g., route, speed, timing of movement, and tortuosity) in relation to the energy landscape, with the nature of their response being related to the energy savings available. Overall, variation in movement costs influences the quality of habitat patches and causes nonrandom movement of individuals between them. This can provide spatial and/or temporal structure to a range of population- and species-level processes, ultimately including gene flow. Advances in animal-attached technology and geographic information systems are opening up new avenues for measuring and mapping energy landscapes that are likely to provide new insight into their influence in animal ecology.
Public transit accounts for 1 percent of US passenger miles traveled but attracts strong public support. Using a simple choice model, we predict that transit riders are likely to be individuals who ...commute along routes with severe roadway delays. These individuals' choices thus have high marginal impacts on congestion. We test this prediction with data from a strike in 2003 by Los Angeles transit workers. Estimating a regression discontinuity design, we find that average highway delay increases 47 percent when transit service ceases. We find that the net benefits of transit systems appear to be much larger than previously believed.
Last year was the 25th anniversary of two seminal transportation hub location publications, which appeared in 1986 in
Transportation Science
and
Geographical Analysis
. Though there are related hub ...location and network design articles that predate these works, the 1986 publications provided a key impetus for the growth of hub location as a distinct research area. This paper is not intended as a comprehensive review of hub location literature; rather, our goal is to reflect on the origins of hub location research, especially in transportation, and provide some commentary on the present status of the field. We provide insight into early motivations for analyzing hub location problems and describe linkages to problems in location analysis and network design. We also highlight some of the most recent research, discuss some shortcomings of hub location research and suggest promising directions for future effort.
We propose entertainment and travel costs (ETC) expenditures as a measure of corruption in Chinese firms. These expenses are publicly reported in firms’ accounting books, and on average they amount ...to about 3 percent of a firm’s total value added. We find that ETC is a mix that includes grease money to obtain better government services, protection money to lower tax rates, managerial excesses, and normal business expenditures to build relational capital with suppliers and clients. Entertainment and travel costs overall have a significantly negative effect on firm productivity, but we also find that some components of ETC have substantial positive returns to firms.
The authors explore the drivers of multichannel shopping and the impact of multichannel shopping on customer profitability. Through a longitudinal analysis, the authors provide evidence that ...multichannel shopping is associated with higher customer profitability. Using the social exchange theory, they develop hypotheses regarding the impact of several customer-firm interaction characteristics on customer channel adoption duration. They propose a shared-frailty hazard model for testing the proposed hypotheses. They use the customer database of an apparel manufacturer that sells through three distinct channels for the empirical analysis and find that frequency-related interaction characteristics have the greatest influence on second-channel adoption duration. In contrast, proportion of returns, a purchase-related interaction characteristic, has the greatest influence on third-channel adoption duration. Variation across customers in purchase-related attributes has a greater impact on the duration to adopt the second channel than the duration to adopt the third channel. In contrast, variation across customers in the channel-related attributes has a greater impact on the third-channel adoption duration than on the second-channel adoption duration. The customer-firm interaction characteristics identified in this study and the proposed model framework allow for forward-looking allocation of multichannel marketing resources.
Households incur transaction costs when choosing among off-line stores for grocery purchases. They may incur additional transaction costs when buying groceries online versus off-line. We integrate ...the various transaction costs into a channel choice framework and empirically quantify the relative transaction costs when households choose between the online and off-line channels of the same grocery chain. The key challenges in quantifying these costs are (i) the complexity of channel choice decision and (ii) that several of the costs depend on the items a household expects to buy in the store, and unobserved factors that influence channel choice also likely influence the items purchased. We use the unique features of our empirical context to address the first issue and the plausibly exogenous approach in a hierarchical Bayesian framework to account for the endogeneity of the channel choice drivers. We find that transaction costs for grocery shopping can be sizable and play an important role in the choice between online and off-line channels. We provide monetary metrics for several types of transaction costs, such as travel time and transportation costs, in-store shopping time, item-picking costs, basket-carrying costs, quality inspection costs, and inconvenience costs. We find considerable household heterogeneity in these costs and characterize their distributions. We discuss the implications of our findings for the retailer's channel strategy.
We compare two approaches for estimating the distribution of consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) in discrete choice models. The usual procedure is to estimate the distribution of the utility ...coefficients and then derive the distribution of WTP, which is the ratio of coefficients. The alternative is to estimate the distribution of WTP directly. We apply both approaches to data on site choice in the Alps. We find that the alternative approach fits the data better, reduces the incidence of exceedingly large estimated WTP values, and provides the analyst with greater control in specifying and testing the distribution of WTP.
This inductive study offers an examination of 23 cases in which informants from firms engaged in large-scale global projects reported unforeseen costs after failing to comprehend cognitive-cultural, ...normative, and/or regulative institutions in an unfamiliar host societal context. The study builds on the conceptual framework of institutional theory. The findings, which include propositions and a generic narrative model, contribute to theoretical knowledge of how institutional exceptions arise, how they are resolved, and how they typically involve three general phases: ignorance, sensemaking, and response. The findings also articulate the kinds of institutional transaction costs that an entrant incurs in each of the three phases, and the conditions that lead to the growth of these costs.
Investigating emerging transportation services is critical to forecasting mode choice and providing appropriate infrastructure. One such infrastructure is parking, as parking demand may shift with ...the availability of ride-hailing services. This study uses ethnographic methods—complemented with passenger surveys collected when driving for Uber and Lyft in the Denver, Colorado, region—to gather quantitative and qualitative data on ride-hailing and analyze the impacts of ride-hailing on parking, including changes in parking demand and parking as a reason to deter driving. The study also examines relationships between parking time and cost. This includes building a classification tree-based model to predict the replaced driving trips as a function of car ownership, destination land type, parking stress, and demographics.
The results suggest that: i) ride-hailing is replacing driving trips and could reduce parking demand, particularly at land uses such as airports, event venues, restaurants, and bars; ii) parking stress is a key reason respondents chose not to drive; and iii) respondents are generally willing to pay more for reduced parking time and distance. Conversely, parking supply, time, and cost can all influence travel behavior and ride-hailing use. This study provides insight into potential benefits and disadvantages of ride-hailing as related to parking.
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