Diminishing marginal utility (DMU) is a basic tenet of economic and psychological models of judgment and choice, but its determinants are little understood. In the research reported here, we tested whether insensitivities in valuations of dollar amounts (e.g., $40, $100) may be due to inexact mappings of symbolic numbers (i.e., "40," "100") onto mental magnitudes. In three studies, we demonstra...

Issues around water – its quality, use, availability and environmental value – can be a major point of tension between mineral projects and local communities. Failure to manage these issues appropriately can jeopardise the obtaining of regulatory approvals for new projects and place at risk the ‘social licence to operate’ of existing operations. Conversely, there may also be significant opportu...

This paper explores the idea that a proper valuing of natural environments is essential to (and not just a natural basis for) a broader human virtue that might be called ʻappreciation of the goodʼ. This kind of valuing can explain, without any commitment to a metaphysics of intrinsic values, how and why it is good to value certain natural phenomena for their own sakes. The objection that such a...

The valuation of insurance liabilities has traditionally been dealt with by actuaries, who closely monitored underlying illiquid features, assumed a long-term perspective, and exercised their own subjective, expert judgment. However, the new EU regulatory regime Solvency II (S2) come to require market-consistent supplemented risk-sensitive capital. This is considered an unwanted shift towards s...

This paper presents a study carried out on a Weighted Fair Queuing implementation for Unix routers the WFQ implementation of the ALTQ project. It shows the WFQ/ALTQ weaknesses and explains why we cannot expect an interesting behavior from a system using such a