nep-sea New Economics Papers
on South East Asia
Issue of 2011‒02‒12
three papers chosen by
Kavita Iyengar
Asian Development Bank
  1. Devolution and Accountability Effects in the Public Provision of Water Services in Indonesia By Catherine Rodríguez; Patricia Meirelles
  2. Experimentally-validated survey evidence on individual risk attitudes in rural Thailand By Hardeweg, Bernd; Menkhoff, Lukas; Waibel, Hermann
  3. Multivariate concave and convex stochastic dominance By DENUIT, Michel; EECKHOUDT, Louis; TSETLIN, Ilia; WINKLER, Robert L.
  1. By: Catherine Rodríguez; Patricia Meirelles
    Abstract: This paper separately evaluates how devolution and accountability, two distinct aspects of the decentralization reforms implemented in Indonesia in the year 2001, influenced the public provision of water services. Using household level data it is found that the devolution of responsibility does not necessarily affect the provision of public services. Our findings show that the quality of publicly provided water decreased only in cities in which devolution was accompanied by a change in accountability. Robustness checks suggest that these results are driven by changes in the accountability framework rather than trends in the health services.
    Date: 2010–11–04
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000089:007905&r=sea
  2. By: Hardeweg, Bernd; Menkhoff, Lukas; Waibel, Hermann
    Abstract: This study validates a survey-based measure of general risk attitude by an incentive compatible experiment among more than 900 participants in rural Thailand. The survey measure of self-assessed risk attitude provides a useful approximation of the experimentally derived risk attitude. This holds when we add various socio-demographic control variables to the survey-experiment-relation which are available from the representative household survey and which are related to risk attitude in plausible ways. The survey measure also predicts individual behavior towards risk in other cases; the survey measure even outperforms the experimental measure in this respect.
    Keywords: field experiment, socio-economic survey, risk attitude
    JEL: C93 D81 O1
    Date: 2011–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:han:dpaper:dp-464&r=sea
  3. By: DENUIT, Michel (Université catholique de Louvain, Institut des Sciences Actuarielles & Institut de Statistique, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium); EECKHOUDT, Louis (IESEG School of Management, LEM, Université Catholique de Lille, France; Université catholique de Louvain, CORE, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium); TSETLIN, Ilia (INSEAD, Singapore); WINKLER, Robert L. (Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, USA)
    Abstract: Stochastic dominance permits a partial ordering of alternatives (probability distributions on consequences) based only on partial information about a decision maker’s utility function. Univariate stochastic dominance has been widely studied and applied, with general agreement on classes of utility functions for dominance of different degrees. Extensions to the multivariate case have received less attention and have used different classes of utility functions, some of which require strong assumptions about utility. We investigate multivariate stochastic dominance using a class of utility functions that is consistent with a basic preference assumption, can be related to well-known characteristics of utility, and is a natural extension of the stochastic order typically used in the univariate case. These utility functions are multivariate risk averse, and reversing the preference assumption allows us to investigate stochastic dominance for utility functions that are multivariate risk seeking. We provide insight into these two contrasting forms of stochastic dominance, develop some criteria to compare probability distributions (hence alternatives) via multivariate stochastic dominance, and illustrate how this dominance could be used in practice to identify inferior alternatives. Connections between our approach and dominance using different stochastic orders are discussed.
    Keywords: decision analysis: multiple criteria, risk; group decisions; utility/preference: multiattribute utility, stochastic dominance, stochastic orders
    Date: 2010–07–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cor:louvco:2010044&r=sea
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