The main objective of the study outlined in this paper was to examine how the inclusion ofan additional labelled alternative, to provide respondents with more choice in a statedpreference survey, impacted on choice complexity. The valuation context was to elicitpreferences for improvements in...

The thesis develops flexible Bayesian choice models and these models are often highly-parameterised. All inference is obtained from the posterior density and evaluated using computationally intensive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation. The models are applied to health economics studies...

Given the credence nature of functional food attributes labelling plays a key role inallowing consumers to make informed choices about foods with enhanced health attributes.The degree to which a particular jurisdiction permits health claims for food products and the type of allowable health...

A unique discrete choice experiment (DCE) is used to estimate the relative importance ofquality attributes to Australian beef consumers. In the DCE, consumers choose theirpreferred beef steaks from options varying in a large number of intrinsic (marbling and fattrim) and extrinsic/credence...

Policy analysis of nonmarket goods requires accurate knowledge about the behavior of economic agents. This dissertation explores several facets of behavior models in recreational angling for three New England groundfish species.Stated preference methods are used frequently for nonmarket...

Thesis (MPhil (Information Science))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011.

Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was to determine the incentives of companies in either sponsoring or not sponsoring professional sports teams. The review of literature regarding the identification of incentives to sponsor professional sports teams revealed a lack of attention to this aspect....

This paper reports on the restructuring of a large, private nonprofit, child welfare agency, and includes a description of the change objectives, the process of planning and implementing the changes, and the impact of the changes. The findings discussed here focus on changes in staff turnover...

In this paper, we develop a decision-theoretic frameworkfor evaluating data mining systems, which employ classification methods, in terms of their utility in decision-making. The decision-theoretic model provides an economic perspective on the value of â extracted knowledge,â in terms of its...