a r t i c l e i n f o Absent or weak income effects reported in many contingent valuation studies have cast doubt on the reliability of the survey method. We find that the income effect depends on the type of public good in question: there is a negative income effect for willingness to pay for recycling, which requires time and effort for sorting, but a positive effect for the more convenient i...

To help the civil servants in both central and local governments in Taiwan operating administrative works smoothly under a new digitalized system launched in 1994, a series of courses related to information technology were offered free to them annually by the central governments. However, due to the budget deficit in recent years, the government is considering decreasing or completely canceling...

BACKGROUND The identification of the attribution of economic value that users of a health system assign to a health service could be useful in planning these services. The method of contingent valuation can provide information about the user's perception of value in monetary terms, and therefore comparable between services of a very different nature. This study attempts to extract the economic ...

The Willingness-to-Pay approach is the basic justi...cation for the use of the Contingent Valuation method to evaluate public mortality risk reduction programs. However, aggregating unweighted willingness-to-pay is a valid method only when individuals have the same marginal value of money, an unrealistic assumption in the presence of heterogeneity. We show that heterogeneity on wealth and basel...

Utility based methods provide a very general theoretically consistent approach to pricing and hedging of securities in incomplete financial markets. Solving problems in the utility based framework typically involves dynamic programming, which in practise can be difficult to implement. This article presents a Monte Carlo approach to optimal portfolio problems for which the dynamic programming is...

Semiotic Engineering is a semiotic theory of HCI that views humancomputer interaction as a contingent process of designer-to-user metacommunication. The theory currently has two evaluation methods, Communicability Evaluation and Semiotic Inspection. The aim of our research is to do a critical analysis of both methods in order to align them with each other, especially in ontological and epistemi...

This paper compares in depth the effectiveness of two conjunctive belief state representations in contingent planning: prime implicates and minimal CNF, a compact form of CNF formulae, which were initially proposed in conformant planning research (To et al. 2010a; 2010b). Similar to the development of the contingent planner CNFct for minimal CNF (To et al. 2011b), the present paper extends the ...

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