Located approximately 100km west of Brisbane, Toowoomba is home to approximately 95,000 people. Surface water from dams is the main source of water for the city. In 2006 the residents of Toowoomba were invited to vote in a referendum (plebiscite) concerning whether or not an indirect potable wastewater reuse scheme should be constructed to supply additional water to the area. At that stage dam ...

This paper compares contingent values for a hypothetical landscape protection programme with respondents’ voting behaviour in an actual referendum. We use the example of a proposed increase of expenditures for landscape protection in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. In particular we examine (i) CVM bid magnitudes of the different voter groups, (ii) relationships between qualitative response c...

The result of a referendum delivers a signi…cant amount of information about social preferences to each composite member of the society. This paper argues that, beyond this obvious fact, the choice not to o¤er a referendum by an authority, although permitted to do so, may enhance as well the information individuals posses about social preferences. The addition of a referendum option in the rule...

The result of a referendum delivers a signi…cant amount of information about social preferences to each composite member of the society. This paper argues that, beyond this obvious fact, the choice not to o¤er a referendum by an authority, although permitted to do so, may enhance as well the information individuals posses about social preferences. The addition of a referendum option in the rule...

In a review into automated and malicious activity Twitter released a list of accounts that they believed were connected to state sponsored manipulation of the 2016 American Election. This list details 2,752 accounts Twitter believed to be controlled by Russian operatives. In the absence of a similar list of operatives active within the debate on the 2016 UK referendum on membership of the Europ...

Traditional economic valuation approaches assume that each individual has a single "true" value for a good or service in her mind that can be retrieved at will. Instead, we contend that an individual’s maximum willingness to pay (WTP) is best viewed as a random variable with an associated distribution. To measure individuals’ valuation distributions, we propose a new contingent valuation (CV) e...

The result of a referendum delivers a signi…cant amount of information about social preferences to each composite member of the society. This paper argues that, beyond this obvious fact, the choice of an authority not to o¤er a referendum, although permitted to do so, may enhance the information individuals posses about social preferences as well. The addition of a referendum option in the rule...

Hugo Chávez dominated the Venezuelan electoral landscape since his first presidential victory in 1998 until his death in 2013. Nobody doubts that he always received considerable voter support in the numerous elections held during his mandate. However, the integrity of the electoral system has come into question since the 2004 Presidential Recall Referendum. From then on, different sectors of so...

Risk tolerance is fundamental to decision-making and behaviour. Here we show that individuals' tolerance of risk follows a weekly cycle. We observed this cycle directly in a behavioural experiment using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (Lejuez et al., 2002; Study 1). We also observed it indirectly via voting intentions, gathered from 81,564 responses across 70 opinion polls ahead of the Scottish ...