Useless Prevention vs. Costly Remediation

Commitment vs. Flexibility with Costly Verification

A principal faces an agent who is better informed but biased towards higher actions. She chooses whether to audit the agent’s information and his permissible actions. We show that if the audit cost is small enough, a threshold with an escape clause (TEC) is optimal: the agent can select any action below a threshold, or request audit and the efficient action if the threshold is sufficiently bind...

Useless Disinfection

Source Remediation vs. Plume Management: Critical Factors Affecting Cost-efficiency

This summary paper reviews just some of the extensive scientific literature from the past 20 years on the various aspects of contaminant source remediation and plume management. Some of the major findings of the numerous research projects are presented. The first section outlines the controlling mass transfer mechanisms which need to be considered for any in situ source remediation technology. ...

A useless raffle.

A mailed questionnaire was sent to 2712 subjects asking about respiratory symptoms, and a raffle for three prizes of 50 pounds, 30 pounds, and 20 pounds was organised. The response rate in the 1762 who were told about the raffle was no higher than for 950 subjects who served as controls.

Stop Reading (Useless Parts)!

Information overload is one of the biggest problems currently omnipresent in the word largest network, the Internet. No general solution exists therefore it is important to handle this problem at least in certain areas. Large collections of articles are available to the users of the Internet. Since technology is very easy to handle for information providers, literally every person who has acces...