Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather tend to be concentrated within the same group. This...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

The economic concept of the second-best involves the idea that multiple simultaneous deviations from a hypothetical first-best optimum may be optimal once the first-best itself can no longer be achieved, since one distortion may partially compensate for another. Within an evolutionary framework,...

In many developed countries, abandoned (derelict or underused) industrial areas often occupy important parts of the cities. This raises issues about the possibilities of reusing these areas as well as on the conservation of industrial heritage they often entail. Conjoint Analysis (CA) can shed...

Consider a collection of m indivisible objects to be allocated to n agents, where m ≥ n. Each agent falls in one of two distinct categories: either he (a) has a complete ordinal ranking over the set of individual objects, or (b) has a set of "plausible" benchmark von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM)...

Though reduction is at the top of the waste management hierarchy, EU policies have historically introduced waste management incentives mainly concerning waste recovery and recycling, in addition to actions aimed at reducing disposal in landfills. Only very recently have EU policies started...