The relationships between health, the scientific approach in medicine and concepts of epidemiology underlie theoretical and cultural attitudes of the nature of behavior and health risks. Medical tests that diagnose risk factors are thought to be predictive of disease. Physicians employ these tests to more accurately assess the health of their patients and convince their charges to change their ...

Although parents often try not to favor one child, we examine whether specific environmental factors might bias parents to favor children of one sex over the other. This research draws on theory in evolutionary biology suggesting that investment in female versus male offspring depends on resource availability. Applying this to consumers, a series of experiments show that poor economic condition...

We investigate the structure of individuals’ rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and their relationship to individual preferences. We examine three interlinked propositions that are fundamental to the standard economic approach to risk: (i) that risk-rankings respect the principle of mean-preserving spreads; (ii) that rankings by risk are simply the reverse of ranking by preference...

Beef food safety events have contributed to considerable market volatility, produced varied consumer reactions, created policy debates, sparked heated trade disputes, and generally contributed to beef industry frustrations. Utilizing data from a total of 4,005 consumers in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Japan in a Double-Hurdle modeling framework, we examine whether consumers altered the...

Previous studies have shown that egalitarianism maximizes expected social welfare in a contractarian original position with equally likely risk-averse agent tastes. The present paper characterizes agents by subsistence needs as well as by tastes, allows infinitely many possible need and taste profiles, and weakens the requirement that all possibilities be perceived as equally likely. Surplus-eg...

The EU Water Framework Directive exerts a major impact on water management structure and aims, and water use activities in the member states. This paper reviews the perceptions of the early WFD implementation in a case study area in southern Sweden. The focus is on the perceptions of both water management and forestry actors, the latter as a potential diffuse source impact on water quality. Thi...

The failure of small firms to grow into large enterprises has been identified as a significant problem for the economy of the UK. This study examines the constraints facing IT firms in the Software and Computing Services sector in particular. Research was undertaken in the form of interviews examining firm attributes and reported constraints. No clear patterns emerged linking specific constrain...

Research on environmental health risks suggests that public perceptions of risk may be greater than quantitative health risk assessments, especially amongst vulnerable groups such as women and immigrants. This study uses the environmental stress and coping framework to examine individual perceptions of air quality amongst Canadian-born and immigrant women in Northeast Hamilton, Ontario, Canada....

This paper reports the results of a detailed investigation of the risk-averse and loss-averse behaviour of UK individual investors. An one-period analytical model of investing behaviour is developed to explore the differences between individuals who are risk averse, and those whose behaviour is better described by Kahneman & Tversky’s Prospect Theory. Questionnaire data on risk perceptions is u...

We present a simple adjustment to the single-factor credit capital model, which recognizes the diversification from a multi-factor credit setting. The model can be applied to extend the Basel II regulatory framework to a general multi-factor setting, thus allowing for more accurate modeling of diversification for portfolios across various asset classes, sectors and regions, and in particular wi...