In preparation for the 1998 soccer World Cup, France banned the use of soccer balls made with child labor. As a result of that ban, Baden Sports, the company that supplied the soccer balls, closed down its Pakistani soccer ball operations, which used child labor, and moved production to China,...

This work aims at analysing the value of recreational water uses for the Idro Lake (Lombardy, Northern Italy), which has been experiencing dramatic fluctuations in its levels in recent years, due to excessive productive withdrawal that affected recreational uses. It estimates the economic...

This paper proposes a flexible modelling approach for either stated or revealed preference nonmarket valuation studies based on Generalized Additive Models (GAMs). GAMs encompass non-linear relationships via smooth functions, thereby avoiding imposing restrictive parametric specifications, which...

Traditional recreation demand models do not make a distinction between a household and an individual as the reference decision-making unit, thus assuming that a family maximizes a single utility function, even if the family consists of different individuals. Such models ignore the possibility of...

We propose a combined revealed and stated behavior estimation method to measure recreation benefits of a fixed quality improvement that directly addresses the issues of variation in environmental quality beyond the observed range and new participation induced by higher quality. We survey a...

This paper examines conceptions of the individual in recent economics (including prospect theory, preference reversal/construction approaches, social preference theory, Bacharach's team view, Ross's neuroeconomics view, and the Sugden/Bruni civil happiness approach). The first three are...

Uskali Mäki has long argued that realist interpretations of economics do not face a challenge regarding the ontological status of non-observable theoretical entities. He argues that in economics, unlike physics, the theoretical entities are "commonsensibles" – entities familiar from our...

This paper examines methodological issues raised by revealed preference theory in economics: particularly contemporary revealed preference theory. The paper has three goals. First, to make the case that revealed preference theory is a broad research program in choice theory – not a single...

Three concepts from psychology -- cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, and confirmation bias -- are perhaps surprisingly closely related, and have been used productively in a variety of fields in economics, more so over time. These concepts are relevant to the field of industrial...