Searching for new ways to use existing ideas is an important aspect of innovation and can involve a great deal of ex ante uncertainty. The paradox is that the outcomes of this search often seem obvious when viewed in hindsight. I examine the degree to which hindsight bias affects the evaluation of obviousness in the patent examination process. If examiners are relying only on ex ante knowledge ...

in the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing, there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities, because such discoveries can be easily imitated. two failures of the laissez – faire outcome are being highlighted: there is too little investment and entrepreneurship ex ante, and too much production diversi-fication ex post. optimal policy ...

The co-existence of conventional and transgenic products in the food chain introduces new elements in the evaluation of the profitability of transgenic crops and, consequently, on the farmer’s adoption decision. In particular, one emerging problem farmers are facing in Europe is related to the legal liability of transgenic-crop cultivation. In Europe, a mixture of ex-ante regulations and ex-pos...

The ultrasound examination is a diagnostic tool of choice for ante mortem evaluation of heart diseases. Specific anatomical features of the ophidian heart such as mobility in the coelomic cavity, a single ventricular cavity, a tubular sinus venosus opening into the right atrium, and the presence of three arterial trunks, have direct consequences on the echocardiographic examination. We propose ...

Democratic and participatory evaluation raises questions of power. Power lies not only in agenda setting and problem definition but also in formulating alternatives. The latter seems to have been forgotten in the literature on democratic evaluation. This may be partly due to the general neglect of assessing alternatives in evaluations, whether ex ante or ex post. The article distinguishes diffe...

This paper presents comparative review of existent (inter-)national approaches to e-government projects evaluation with the stress on intangible/hidden costs and public value dimension which are the two components usually missed out in traditional investments evaluation methods (e.g., net present value, cost/benefit analysis, return on investment). Based on the literature review and weaknesses ...

This paper considers an issue that has received little attention in the literature on health state evaluation: the relevance of the ex ante/ex post distinction in the assessment of quality of life. Ex post evaluations are based on experience of the health state being evaluated. Ex ante evaluations are made in anticipation of actually experiencing the health state, and are able to capture source...

r&d; is one of the most important and suitable strategies government’s policies for increasing of agricultural production and supply. in this study, in addition of economic evaluation of agricultural r&d; and determination of its rate of return, optimal iran’s agricultural r&d; expenditure is determined. so, in this article, ex-post and ex-ante evaluation by using of mathematical programming ap...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of “program” in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of Thistlethwaite and Campbell (1960). We organize our discussion of these various research designs by how t...