This dissertation comprises three essays that study online demand coming from local offline markets. In the first essay, I study two social influence effects reflected in physical proximity and in demographic similarity, respectively, on online demand evolution. As these effects can be...

Social interactions in a community influence perceptions and values of members of the community. Recently Web 2.0 technologies have stimulated rapid growth of online communities, where communications between participants are made much easier. It is important to study how participants' behaviors...

While there is current interest in reorienting agricultural policy toward environmental and resource conservation goals, relatively little is known about the influence of cost on conservation adoption decisions or about how farmers combine multiple practices into an overall conservation package....

The study examines cattle keeping households’ preferences for phenotypic cattle traits in trypanosomosis prevalent production systems of Kenya and Ethiopia, using cross-sectional choice experiment survey data of 508 households. The data was collected between September 2004 and May 2005....

Covers conditions under which public-sector policies, programs, and projects succeed in enhancing the economic activities of poorer groups and micro-regions in developing countries. Topics include local economic development; small enterprises; various forms of collective action; labor and worker...

Theoretical reasoning disagrees about what type of bargaining system performs best. We have tested the explanatory power of three competing hypotheses: neoliberalism, coporatism and the hump-shape hypothesis. All of these hypotheses lack empirical support due to two main shortcomings. First,...

During the past two decades, community-based hazard mitigation (CBHM) has been newly proposed and implemented as an alternative conceptual model for emergency management to deal with disasters comprehensively in order to curtail skyrocketing disaster losses. Local community members have been...

"A great challenge facing CPR enthusiasts today is understanding the conditions in which CPRs can be successful. Meeting this challenge requires understanding when and why individuals choose to create and maintain CPRs. Research in this domain often focuses on the relationship between individual...

"The proposed paper synthesises our experience with different economic field experiment from four countries and action research undertaken additionally in two of the countries. The experiments discussed in this paper were carried out in rural communities of Namibia, South Africa, Cambodia and...

"The purpose of this paper is to summarize some of the bargaining issues involved in collective action to address local common-pool problems and to illustrate them in three empirical cases. The importance of riming or the sequence of coalition building and the heterogeneity of the participant's...