Agricultural & Resource Economics Working Papers

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http://hdl.handle.net/1903/19596

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 11
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    Independent vs. Collaborative Fundraising: Understanding the Role of Information
    (2019-02) Eckel, Catherine; Guney, Begum; Uler, Neslihan
    We use “real donation” laboratory experiments to compare independent fundraising, where donation requests from different charities arrive sequentially to potential donors, with collaborative fundraising, where donation requests from different charities arrive simultaneously. We find that collaborative fundraising generates significantly larger total donations compared to independent fundraising. We show that the order of requests affects the level of donations only in independent fundraising; in particular, participants donated larger amounts to charities whose requests arrived earlier. We then test whether these differences might be explained by the informational asymmetry between these two fundraising mechanisms by varying the information received by the subjects.
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    How Consumers Respond to Product Certification and the Value of Energy Information
    (2017-08) Houde, Sébastien
    I study how consumers respond to competing pieces of information that differ in their degree of complexity and informativeness. In particular, I study the choice of refrigerators in the U.S., where a mandatory disclosure labeling program provides detailed information about energy cost, and a certification labeling program provides a simple binary-star rating related to energy use. I find that the coarse certification may help some consumers to pay attention to energy information, but for others, it may crowd out efforts to process more accurate, but complex, energy information. The effect of the certification on overall energy use is thus ambiguous.
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    Estimating Ex Ante Cost Functions for Stochastic Technologies
    (2017-07) Chambers, Robert G.; Serra, Teresa
    This paper revisits the problem of estimating ex ante cost functions previously studied by Pope and Just (1996) and Moschini (2001). An ex ante cost function that generalizes their ex ante cost functions is introduced, and an econometric procedure for estimating a flexible approximation to it is developed. That generalized cost function is economically relevant not only for the Just and Pope (1996) choice setting but for general producer risk preferences, general stochastic technologies, and general forms of price uncertainty. An econometric strategy for estimating the resulting cost structure that adapts Moschini s (2001) "full-information" approach is developed. And that is followed by an econometric application to US agriculture.
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    Incomplete Variational Preferences
    (2017-06) Chambers, Robert G.; Melkonyan, Tigran; Quiggin, John
    We examine incomplete preference structures in a framework that allows for various relaxations of the independence axiom. We derive preference representations in terms of willingness-to-pay measures, and demonstrate how these representation can be used to determine preference incompleteness and to elicit preferences empirically.
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