Ante mortem and post mortem carcass condemnation records could be of use as a potential database for the study of swine diseases, epidemiology or animal welfare. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the causes of ante mortem rejections and post mortem carcass condemnation of pigs intended for human consumption during a 78-month period. The records considered for study were, date of sl...

Citation: Luedeling E, Oord AL, Kiteme B, Ogalleh S, Malesu M, Shepherd KD and De Leeuw J (2015) Fresh groundwater for Wajir—ex-ante assessment of uncertain benefits for multiple stakeholders in a water supply project in Northern Kenya. Front. Environ. Sci. 3:16. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2015.00016 Fresh groundwater for Wajir—ex-ante assessment of uncertain benefits for multiple stakeholders in a wat...

This article examines a tradeoff between ex ante preparedness costs and ex post costs of response to a potential introduction of an infectious animal disease. In a simplified case study setting we examine the conditions for optimality of enhanced detection system considering various characteristics of a potential infectious cattle disease outbreak, costs of program implementation, severity of t...

Environmental policies employ metaphoric objectives such as ecosystem health, resilience and sustainable provision of ecosystem services, which influence corresponding sustainability assessments by means of normative settings such as assumptions on system description, indicator selection, aggregation of information and target setting. A heuristic approach is developed for sustainability assessm...

Alien or genetically altered species, purposefully released to generate various benefits, may contribute to unanticipated damage to the delicate balance of an existing ecosystem. In an ideal world, harm can be avoided in either of two ways: (1) perfect ex ante information would allow the choice of only beneficial releases; and (2) perfect revocability would allow ex post revocation of any relea...

We consider collective choice from two alternatives. Ex ante, each agent is uncertain about which alternative she prefers, and may be uncertain about the intensity of her preferences. An environment is given by a probability distribution over preference-profiles that is symmetric across agents and neutral across alternatives. In many environments, the majority voting rule maximizes agents’ ex-a...

Traditional measures of consumer surplus (CS) have implicitly assumed that the quality expected is the same as the quality that is paid for ex ante. However, when product or service quality cannot be perfectly verified ex ante by consumers in markets with asymmetric information, and actual quality received may not necessarily equal quality expected, CS would not be precisely measured. In this p...

Traditional measures of consumer surplus (CS) have implicitly assumed that the quality expected is the same as the quality that is paid for ex ante. However, when product or service quality cannot be perfectly verified ex-ante by consumers in markets with asymmetric information, and actual quality received may not necessarily equal quality expected, CS would not be precisely measured. This may ...