This paper develops a method for estimating the value of additional information to the individual livestock producer. In doing so it considers as part of the decision made by the farmer to vaccinate animals against B. bovis the decision to collect information on the health status of his herd...

Outlines a simple linear cost-benefit model for determining whether it is economic at the farm-level to vaccinate or dose a batch of livestock against a disease. This model assumes that total benefits and costs are proportional to the number of animals vaccinated. This model is then modified to...

Developing countries often face severe animal health problems, with a number of endemic diseases, and lack resources to put in place the animal health programs of more developed nations. The social costs including lost trade opportunities as a result of animal diseases often exceed the private...

This paper has two goals. First, we demonstrate that standard arguments and methods from production and duality analysis can be used to provide a comprehensive and general treatment of the value of information for a risk-averse firm with expected-utility (linear-in-probabilities) preferences and...

In the past year, climate change has moved from political controversy to political consensus; at least, in relation for price-based policies the need to limit emissions. Uncertainties remain but with both major parties proposing to develop an emissions trading regime, it is timely to highlight...

We consider an asset market traded three types of assets: the risk–free asset, the market portfolio and derivatives written on the market portfolio return. We determine a sufficient condition to guarantee that noise risk monotonically changes their derivatives. The condition is that...

We present a definition of increasing uncertainty, in which an elementary increase in the uncertainty of any act corresponds to the addition of an `elementary bet' that increases consumption by a fixed amount in (relatively) `good' states and decreases consumption by a fixed (and possibly...

Abstract. We define and discuss Savage games, which are ordinal games that are set in L. J. Savage’s framework of purely subjective uncertainty. Every Bayesian game is ordinally equivalent to a Savage game. However, Savage games are free of priors, prob- abilities and payoffs. Players’...

Quiggin and Chambers have introduced the notion of invariant preferences, and shown that the only invariant expected-utility functionals are those associated with a quadratic utility function. This note identifies the class of preferences which simultaneously satisfy invariance, two-fund...

In this chapter, we compare the experience of Australia and New Zealand over the period of microeconomic reform that began in the early 1980s. Of particular concern is the question of how New Zealand, with what were seen at the time as the ‘best’ set of economic policies in the OECD,...