O presente trabalho pretende estudar a disposição a pagar do consumidor brasileiro por produtos com maior eficiência energética. Entender o quanto o consumidor está disposto a pagar por um ganho de eficiência pode contribuir na elaboração de políticas públicas para o setor elétrico, e na criação de incentivos à indústria para produção e investimentos neste tipo de tecnologia. O trabalho utiliza-se de uma pesquisa de campo sobre posse de equipamentos e hábitos de uso, realizada pela Eletrobrás/Procel em 2005. A metodologia empregada segue a linha de trabalhos já realizados em outros países, a exemplo dos estudos realizados por Dubin e McFadden (1984) e Sammer e Wüstenhagen (2006). Os resultados encontrados apontam para uma subestimação dos consumidores quanto à avaliação da economia proporcionada por produtos mais eficientes. Sendo assim, abre-se espaço para campanhas de conscientização e valorização dessas tecnologias ou incentivos monetários para consumo dos mesmos. / The focus of this research is to investigate the Brazilian consumer\'s willingness to pay for products with more energy efficiency. Measuring how much the consumer is willing to pay could provide us with good insights that may help in discussing politics regarding the electric sector, plus it may guide politics in taking actions and decisions on incentives in order to promote this kind of more efficient technological products. This investigation is based on a field research regarding the possess of appliances and their uses, consisting of 4310 household questionnaires. The methodology applied follows previous work on this field and similar studies made for other countries. Examples are Dubin e McFadden (1984) for space and water heating in the USA and Sammer e Wüstenhagen (2006) for washing machines in the Switzerland. The results make clear an underestimation of the monetary economy due to the use of more efficient products. Therefore, there\'s an opportunity for the government to motivate and promote this kind of technology, either through advertising for and awareness of the general population, or through subsides to the industry to produce more efficient products or monetary incentives for the their purchases.

O presente trabalho pretende estudar a disposição a pagar do consumidor brasileiro por produtos com maior eficiência energética. Entender o quanto o consumidor está disposto a pagar por um ganho de eficiência pode contribuir na elaboração de políticas públicas para o setor elétrico, e na criação de incentivos à indústria para produção e investimentos neste tipo de tecnologia. O trabalho utiliza-se de uma pesquisa de campo sobre posse de equipamentos e hábitos de uso, realizada pela Eletrobrás/Procel em 2005. A metodologia empregada segue a linha de trabalhos já realizados em outros países, a exemplo dos estudos realizados por Dubin e McFadden (1984) e Sammer e Wüstenhagen (2006). Os resultados encontrados apontam para uma subestimação dos consumidores quanto à avaliação da economia proporcionada por produtos mais eficientes. Sendo assim, abre-se espaço para campanhas de conscientização e valorização dessas tecnologias ou incentivos monetários para consumo dos mesmos. / The focus of this research is to investigate the Brazilian consumer\'s willingness to pay for products with more energy efficiency. Measuring how much the consumer is willing to pay could provide us with good insights that may help in discussing politics regarding the electric sector, plus it may guide politics in taking actions and decisions on incentives in order to promote this kind of more efficient technological products. This investigation is based on a field research regarding the possess of appliances and their uses, consisting of 4310 household questionnaires. The methodology applied follows previous work on this field and similar studies made for other countries. Examples are Dubin e McFadden (1984) for space and water heating in the USA and Sammer e Wüstenhagen (2006) for washing machines in the Switzerland. The results make clear an underestimation of the monetary economy due to the use of more efficient products. Therefore, there\'s an opportunity for the government to motivate and promote this kind of technology, either through advertising for and awareness of the general population, or through subsides to the industry to produce more efficient products or monetary incentives for the their purchases.

This work is concerned with the study of nonlinear nonconvex stochastic programming, in particular in the context of trust-region approaches. We first explore how to exploit the structure of multistage stochastic nonlinear programs with linear constraints, in the framework of primal-dual interior point methods. We next study consistency of sample average approximations (SAA) for general nonlinear stochastic programs. We also develop a new algorithm to solve the SAA problem, using the statistical inference information to reduce numercial costs, by means of an internal variable sample size strategy. We finally assess the numerical efficiency of the proposed method for the estimation of discrete choice models, more precisely mixed logit models, using our software AMLET, written for this purpose.

This dissertation consists of three essays on forms of preference heterogeneity in discrete choice models. The first essay uses a model of heterogeneity conditional on observed individual-specific characteristics to tailor financial incentives to enhance weight loss program participation among target demographics. Financial incentives in weight loss programs have received attention mostly with respect to effectiveness rather than participation and representativeness. This essay examines the impact of financial incentives on participation with respect to populations vulnerable to obesity and understudied in the weight loss literature. We found significant heterogeneity across target sub-populations and suggest a strategy of offering multiple incentive designs to counter the dispersive effects of preference heterogeneity. The second essay investigates the ability of a novel elicitation format to reveal decision strategy heterogeneity. Attribute non-attendance, the behaviour of ignoring some attributes when performing a choice task, violates fundamental assumptions of the random utility model. However, self-reported attendance behaviour on dichotomous attendance scales has been shown to be unreliable. In this essay, we assess the ability of a polytomous attendance scale to ameliorate self-report unreliability. We find that the lowest point on the attendance scale corresponds best to non-attendance, attendance scales need be no longer than two or three points, and that the polytomous attendance scale had limited success in producing theoretically consistent results. The third essay explores available approaches to model different features of unobserved heterogeneity. Unobserved heterogeneity is popularly modelled using the mixed logit model, so called because it is a mixture of standard conditional logit models. Although the mixed logit model can, in theory, approximate any random utility model with an appropriate mixing distribution, there is little guidance on how to select such a distribution. This essay contributes to suggestions on distribution selection by describing the heterogeneity features which can be captured by established parametric mixing distributions and more recently introduced nonparametric mixing distributions, both of a discrete and continuous nature. We provide empirical illustrations of each feature in turn using simple mixing distributions which focus on the feature at hand. / Ph. D.

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Widespread car usage of around 800 million of cars travelling 30 billion of kilometres on a daily basis has led to many benefits but also to significant environmental and societal impacts such as congestion, air and noise pollution and urban sprawl. This thesis aims to investigate the stakeholder values of car parking in order to support and inform the decision makers who are tasked with how best to resolve challenging car parking dilemmas. A two phase progressive methodology is involved. Phase one begins with conducting a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight academics to identify whom the stakeholders are that are affected by car parking. Then a second series of 20 interviews are conducted with sector leaders of stakeholder groups to establish how the stakeholders are affected by car parking and importantly, how they value car parking. Finally a third series of nine interviews are conducted with nine different experts to help to bridge the gap between phase one and phase two. Phase one found that a broader reach of stakeholders (classified into four different groups) are affected by car parking than the literature might imply, and that they value car parking in eight different key ways. It also found that the values emerged from a context of governmental, social and consumer concerns. Phase two of the methodology was quantitative and used the findings from phase one to develop four additional attributes considered meaningful across all four stakeholder groups, namely: safety, politics, public spaces and weekly household council tax. Choice based conjoint analysis was used to incorporate the attributes into three hypothetical scenarios namely; driver, strategy and social, as these were considered to be reflective of the value context unearthed previously in phase one. The scenarios were disseminated across England as part of a wider survey and achieved a sample size of 1107 responses. The results of which were then interpreted through willingness to pay (WTP) values. Key findings included: how a persistent political undertone can impact on car parking policy setting; that the car parking industry is under pressure to provide a service chiefly motivated by a perceived consumer intolerance of market prices; and that stakeholders can not only appreciate but also experience the impact of car parking choices on other stakeholder groups. Conclusions drawn included that the different stakeholder groups took issue with national government leadership believing it to currently be deficient in setting the standards for British car parking. Moreover, decision makers wrongly perceive that consumers of car parking do not pass between the groups and are therefore hostile to policies which do not directly benefit them. The key implication being that decision makers are cautious to implement policies which are not necessarily advantageous to consumers but which may lead to gains for the remaining stakeholder groups. In short, this thesis recommends amongst others that the governmental stakeholder group should seek to provide direction and guidelines for tariff setting which is reflective of the provision of a service that is conscious of the range of parking industry stakeholder values. Furthermore, as safety is an industry held value, practitioners should seek to better understand how it impacts their market. They should explore the relevance of schemes such as Park Mark to operators and their customers, by fundamentally investigating to what extent safety exists as a valid concern inside car parks and how it applies to personal safety, vehicle safety or general perceptions of safety. In addition, where the governmental stakeholder group remain mindful of the significance of securing political backing, the car parking industry would benefit from appreciating the sensitivities of political challenges faced by the governmental group when lobbying for any changes in parking policy programmes. Indeed, the parking industry should collaborate between the two parties and seek to unite in finding agreeable solutions which benefit constituents either directly or indirectly. As car parking values might differ according to their geopolitical context and lead to the extraction of a different set of attributes, further work would include looking beyond England to first the UK and then to abroad to explore the effects of potential cultural differences and learn the relevant lessons.

Background: As rural hospitals in Kentucky face insolvency, stakeholders must assess the value of rural hospitals as well as alternatives such as rural clinics and private physician offices. Objective: To identify the value of attributes of healthcare facilities based on Kentucky’s rural residents’ willingness-to-pay (WTP). Methods: A survey instrument was created and distributed to ten counties in rural Kentucky. A conditional logit model was used to obtain baseline values and then a mixed logit model was used to address heterogeneity among consumers in estimating WTP. WTP values incorporated respondents’ demographic characteristics and their health status from self-reported frequency of use of medical services and distance from these services. Results: The results indicate that on average respondents were willing to pay $69.90 each year for the attribute of a facility that treats patients whether they have health insurance or not, compared to a facility that only accepts patients with private health insurance. Uninsured residents were willing to pay $81.15 for this attribute level. Conclusion: The study suggests that uninsured residents value this attribute level of a facility that grants them access to care. Stakeholders may justify such welfare benefit amounts in support of the establishment or maintenance of such a facility.

This thesis consists of two parts. The first part analyzesthe accessibility, generation and license holding effects incar ownership models. The second part develops a route choicemodeling framework with an attempt to address the differencesin drivers' route choice behavior. These two parts of work areboth based on the discrete choice theory - the car ownershipmodels are built up on the standard logit model, whereas theroute choice models are formulated in a mixed logit form. The study result of the first part shows that measuring theaccessibility by the monetary inclusive value reasonably wellcaptures the mechanism of the accessibility impact. Otheraccessibility proxies such as the parking costs, parking typeand house type are correlated with the accessibility but not toa great extent. Both young and old households are less likelyto have a car. The reduction of the propensity to own a car issignificant for households with average birth year before 1920,whereas this reduction is moderate for households with birthyear between 1920 and 1945. It is also demonstrated thatdriving license holding choice is conditional on the carownership level choice, and that these two choices need to bemodeled in a dynamic framework. The second part of the work investigates the performance ofthe mixed logit model using both simulated data and empiricalroute switching data. The empirical study mainly focused on theimpacts of information and incident related factors on drivers'route switching behavior. The result shows that using mixed logit gives a significantimprovement in model performance as well as a more sensitiveexplanation of drivers' decision-making behavior. For apopulation with greatly varying tastes, simply using thestandard logit model to analyze its behavior can yield veryunrealistic results. However, care must be taken when settingthe number of random draws for simulating the choiceprobability of the mixed logit model in order to get reliableestimates. The empirical results demonstrate that incident relatedfactors such as delay and information reliability havesignificant impacts on drivers' route switching, where themagnitude of the response to the change in the delay is shownto vary significantly between individuals. Other factors, suchas confidence in the estimated delay, gender, frequency of cardriving and attitude towards congestion, also make majorcontributions. In addition, it is found that individual's routeswitching behavior may differ depending on the purpose of thetrip and when the choice is made, i.e. pre-trip oren-route. <b>Keywords</b>: car ownership, accessibility, logit model,route choice, heterogeneity, mixed logit model

<p>In recent years, government aid agencies and international organizations have increased their financial commitments to controlling and eliminating malaria from the planet. This renewed emphasis on elimination is reminiscent of a previous worldwide campaign to eradicate malaria in the 1960s, a campaign which ultimately failed. To avoid a repeat of the past, mechanisms must be developed to sustain effective malaria control programs.</p><p>A number of sociobehavioral, economic, and biophysical challenges exist for sustainable malaria control, particularly in high-burden areas such as sub-Saharan Africa. Sociobehavioral challenges include maintaining high long-term levels of support for and participation in malaria control programs, at all levels of society. Reasons for the failure of the previous eradication campaign included a decline in donor, governmental, community, and household-level support for control programs, as malaria prevalence ebbed due in part to early successes of these programs.</p><p>Biophysical challenges for the sustainability of national malaria control programs (NMCPs) encompass evolutionary challenges in controlling the protozoan parasite and the mosquito vector, as well as volatile transmission dynamics which can lead to epidemics. Evolutionary challenges are particularly daunting due to the rapid generational turnover of both the parasites and the vectors: The reliance on a handful of insecticides and antimalarial drugs in NMCPs has placed significant selection pressures on vectors and parasites respectively, leading to a high prevalence of genetic mutations conferring resistance to these biocides.</p><p>The renewed global financing of malaria control makes research into how to effectively surmount these challenges arguably more salient now than ever. Economics has proven useful for addressing the sociobehavioral and biophysical challenges for malaria control. A necessary next step is the careful, detailed, and timely integration of economics with the natural sciences to maximize and sustain the impact of this financing.</p><p>In this dissertation, I focus on 4 of the challenges identified above: In the first chapter, I use optimal control and dynamic programming techniques to focus on the problem of insecticide resistance in malaria control, and to understand how different models of mosquito evolution can affect our policy prescriptions for dealing with the problem of insecticide resistance. I identify specific details of the biological model--the mechanisms for so-called "fitness costs" in insecticide-resistant mosquitoes--that affect the qualitative properties of the optimal control path. These qualitative differences carry over to large impacts on the economic costs of a given control plan.</p><p>In the 2nd chapter, I consider the interaction of parasite resistance to drugs and mosquito resistance to insecticides, and analyze cost-effective malaria control portfolios that balance these 2 dynamics. I construct a mathematical model of malaria transmission and evolutionary dynamics, and calibrate the model to baseline data from a rural Tanzanian district. Four interventions are jointly considered in the model: Insecticide-spraying, insecticide-treated net distribution, and the distribution of 2 antimalarial drugs--sulfadoxine pyramethamine (SP) and artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). Strategies which coordinate vector controls and treatment protocols should provide significant gains, in part due to the issues of insecticide and drug resistance. In particular, conventional vector control and ACT use should be highly complementary, economically and in terms of disease reductions. The ongoing debate concerning the cost-effectiveness of ACTs should thus consider prevailing (and future) levels of conventional vector control methods, such as ITN and IRS: If the cost-effectiveness of widespread ACT distribution is called into question in a given locale, scaling up IRS and/or ITNs probably tilts the scale in favor of distributing ACTs. </p><p>In the 3rd chapter, I analyze results from a survey of northern Ugandan households I oversaw in November 2009. The aim of this survey was to assess respondents' perceptions about malaria risks, and mass indoor residual spraying (IRS) of insecticides that had been done there by government-sponsored health workers. Using stated preference methods--specifically, a discrete choice experiment (DCE)--I evaluate: (a) the elasticity of household participation levels in IRS programs with respect to malaria risk, and (b) households' perceived value of programs aimed at reducing malaria risk, such as IRS. Econometric results imply that the average respondent in the survey would be willing to forego a $10 increase in her assets for a permanent 1% reduction in malaria risk. Participation in previous IRS significantly increased the stated willingness to participate in future IRS programs. However, I also find that at least 20% of households in the region perceive significant transactions costs from IRS. One implication of this finding is that compensation for these transactions costs may be necessary to correct theorized public good aspects of malaria prevention via vector control.</p><p>In the 4th chapter, I further study these public goods aspects. To do so, I estimate a welfare-maximizing system of cash incentives. Using the econometric models estimated in the 3rd chapter, in conjunction with a modified version of the malaria transmission models developed and utilized in the first 2 chapters, I calculate village-specific incentives aimed at correcting under-provision of a public good--namely, malaria prevention. This under-provision arises from incentives for individual malaria prevention behavior--in this case the decision whether or not to participate in a given IRS round. The magnitude of this inefficiency is determined by the epidemiological model, which dictates the extent to which households' prevention decisions have spillover effects on neighbors. </p><p>I therefore compute the efficient incentives in a number of epidemiological contexts. I find that non-negligible monetary incentives for participating in IRS programs are warranted in situations where policymakers are confident that IRS can effectively reduce the incidence of malaria cases, and not just exposure rates. In these cases, I conclude that the use of economic incentives could reduce the incidence of malaria episodes by 5%--10%. Depending on the costs of implementing a system of incentives for IRS participation, such a system could provide an additional tool in the arsenal of malaria controls.</p> / Dissertation