Losing ownership and control over the development of and connection to our own person detaches us from the most innate embodiment of ourselves, our person. Without being able to develop and connect to our person, we become detached from expressing our identity, exercising our autonomy, and formulating our own values, the most intrinsic features our person encapsulates. While we yearn to act on our own projects to express our identity, exercise our autonomy, and formulate our own values the way we want, morality imposes huge demands on our person that restrain us from doing so. Morality’s major requirement to always act on morally significant projects to produce the overall good puts us at risk of forfeiting our identity, autonomy, and values. Despite these features being the most innate embodiment of ourselves, morality neglects them so that we always participate in its domain of beneficence to further the interests of others who are in need. Even though great benefits result from always acting on morally significant projects to produce the overall good, we are at odds with moral beneficence because of the demands it imposes on our person. In this thesis, it is argued what makes a moral theory too demanding. Arguments by Bernard Williams, Samuel Scheffler, Liam B. Murphy, and Richard W. Miller are evaluated to construct views of what makes a moral theory too demanding for them. Afterwards, differences and commonalities are drawn from their views to frame the final view of what makes a moral theory too demanding that is argued here. All of the philosophers’ views contribute to the claim that we are entitled to our lives outside of morality’s domain of beneficence. Afterwards, it is explained why we are entitled to our lives outside of morality’s domain of beneficence. The most compelling explanation is that the potential development of our own person entitles us to do so outside of morality’s domain of beneficence. By developing our person to its fullest height on our own terms and conditions, we can connect to it in the best way possible. Nonetheless, because we are forced to always participate in morality’s domain of beneficence, we lack the ownership and control over the development of and connection to our own person. The demandingness of morality holds the reins over this relation between the development of and connection to our person when in fact we should.

Demand participation is a basic ingredient of the next generation of power exchanges in electricity markets. A key challenge in implementing demand response stems from establishing reliable market frameworks so that purchasers can estimate the demand correctly, buy as economically as possible and have the means of hedging the risk of lack of supply. System operators also need ways of estimating responsive load behaviour to reliably operate the grid. In this context, two aspects of demand response are addressed in this study: scheduling and baseline estimation. The thesis presents a market clearing algorithm including demand side reserves in a two-stage stochastic optimization framework to account for wind power production uncertainty. The results confirm that enabling the load to provide reserve can potentially benefit consumers by reducing electricity price, while facilitating a higher share of renewable energy sources in the power system. Two novel methods, Bayesian Linear regression and Kernel adaptive filtering, are proposed for baseline load forecasting in the second part of the study. The former method provides an integrated solution for prediction with full accounting for uncertainty while the latter provides an online sequential learning algorithm that is useful for short term forecasting. / Graduate / 0544 / nimahtehrani@gmail.com

The domestic sector currently accounts for approximately a third of the UK s energy use and so energy demand reduction in the domestic sector is a key part of the UK s strategy for carbon reduction. However, energy demand reduction has typically been addressed from an engineering perspective, with little consideration of the requirements of users. This PhD submission aims to identify how qualitative information about users experiences, values and practices relating to UK domestic energy demand reduction can be collected and presented effectively to an engineering audience and incorporated into engineering-focused energy research. User centred design is presented as a viable approach to understanding the context of energy use in UK homes and specifying requirements of the householders; as a way of ensuring user needs are included in this socio-technical problem space. This requires presentation of information about human behaviour in a form that is timely and appropriate to the engineering audience, who take a positivist view, preferring facts and figures to descriptions and anecdotes. A collection of nine publications, mostly peer-reviewed journal papers, by the thesis author and her co-authors is presented. Publications spanning from 2006 to 2014 illustrate a range of approaches to providing user centred information, from literature review to complex householder studies, which can provide information to enhance the engineering data and so provide additional insight and understanding. The research findings within the individual papers add to the body of knowledge on domestic energy use. In addition, the research identifies a number of roles where user centred design contributes to understanding of home energy use. From providing background and raising awareness of the presence of users within a system, to contextual understanding and the specification of user requirements, through to more sophisticated user characterisation, it is argued that user centred design can offer a significant contribution to the field. Future application of user information into engineering models, together with large scale, longitudinal studies of home energy use are proposed, building on the contributions of this thesis.

Anthropogenic climate change is arguably the greatest challenge of modern times posing significant risks to natural resources and the environment. Socio-economic change, severe droughts, and environmental concerns focus attention upon sustainability of water supplies and the ability of water utilities to meet competing demands worldwide. The 2012 Climate Change Risk Assessment identified water security as one of the most significant climate threats facing the UK. It is now recognised that household water demand management could offer a low regret adaptation measure (both financially and environmentally) given large uncertainties about future climate and non-climatic pressures. This thesis uses Anglian Water Services (AWS) Golden 100 dataset to explore the climate sensitivity of historic micro-component water-use. This work contributes to a larger integrated assessment of the South-East England water system under the EPSRC Adaptation and Resilience to a Changing Climate Coordination Network (ARCC CN). The Golden 100 is a metered record of 100 households daily water consumption by basin, bath, dishwasher, external, kitchen sink, shower, WC and washing machine use. The archive also includes socio-economic information for each household, dates of the year and daily time series of observed minimum temperature, maximum temperature, sunshine hours, soil moisture deficit, concurrent, and antecedent rainfall amounts. The methodology developed within this research provides a portable approach to error trapping, formatting and mining large, complex water sector datasets, for exploring the relative sensitivities of micro-component metered water-use to weather/non-weather variables. This research recognises both the importance of the choice to use a micro-component and the volume used. As such, logistic and linear generalised regression techniques are employed to explore the relative sensitivity of these two aspects of water-use to climatic and non-climatic variables. The 2009 UK Climate Projections (UKCP09) projections and climate analogues are then used to bound a climate sensitivity analysis of the most weather-sensitive micro-components using temperature and rainfall scenarios for the 2050s and 2080s. This research provides empirical evidence that the most weather sensitive micro-components are external and shower water-use. A key contribution of this research to existing knowledge is the non-linear response of likelihood and volume of external water-use to average air temperatures. There is an abrupt increase in the likelihood of external water-use on days above ~15??C. Climate sensitivity analysis further suggests that by the 2080s, under a hotter/drier climate, average unmetered households could be 8% more likely to use external-water and expend ~9 litres more per day during the summer. For the same parameters, high water users (defined here as the 90th percentile) could consume ~13 litres more external water per day. Importantly, this research has re-affirmed the relative importance of behavioural drivers of water-use as manifested by pronounced day of week and bank holiday signatures in both the likelihood and volume of use statistics. As such, this prompts future studies and water management efforts to consider the impact of behavioural drivers as well as climate. It must be recognised that the small sample size of the Golden 100 combined with the Hawthorn effect, self-selection and sample biases in factors such as socio-economic status, billing method and occupancy rate all limit the sample representativeness of the wider population. As such, any predictions based on the data must be treated as illustrative rather than definitive. Furthermore, the results are probably specific to the demographic and socio-economic groups comprising the sample. Nonetheless, this research sheds new light into water-use within the home thereby adding value to a dataset that was not originally collected with household-level, weather-related research in mind.

This thesis comprises three principal essays, each of which provides a contribution to the literature on the nonparametric approach to demand analysis. In each essay, I develop novel techniques that follow in the revealed preference tradition, and apply them to tackle a series of questions that concern the mechanisms underlying consumer spending decisions. Each technique developed is tightly linked to a particular nonparametric theory of choice behaviour and is explicitly designed for use with a finite set of observations. My work draws heavily upon results from finite mathematics, into which I integrate insights from information theory and integer programming. The output of this endeavor is a set of methodologies that are largely free of auxiliary assumptions over the form of the unobserved structural functions of interest. Providing greater detail on the work to come, my first essay extends and clarifies the nonparametric approach to forecasting demand behaviour at new budget regimes. Using insights from information theory and integer programming, I construct an operational nonparametric definition of global rationality and develop a methodology that facilitates the recovery of globally rational individual demand predictions. This is the first attempt in the literature to develop a systematic methodology to impose global rationality on nonparametric demand predictions. The resulting forecasts allow for unrestricted preference heterogeneity in the population and I demonstrate how these predictions can be used for coherent welfare analysis. In my second and third essays, I prove new revealed preference testability axioms for models that extend the traditional neoclassical choice framework. Specifically, in my second essay, I address the intertemporal allocation of spending by collectives, whilst my final essay integrates taste variation into the utility maximisation framework. In both of these essays, I develop my testable results into practical algorithms that allow one to recover salient features of individual preferences. In my second essay, a methodology is developed to recover the minimal intrahousehold heterogeneity in theory-consistent discount rates, whilst my final essay develops a quadratic programming procedure that facilitates the recovery of the minimal interpersonal and intertemporal heterogeneity in tastes that is required to rationalise observed choice patterns. Applying these techniques to consumption micro-data yields new empirical insights that are of relevance to the applied literatures on time discounting, family economics and the public policy debate on tobacco control.

La thèse se propose d'intégrer deux approches économiques fondamentales à l'étude de l'économie régionale et de la politique économique des transports en particulier: i) un approche théorique, fondée sur des micromodèles analytiques et soutenue par des applications des méthodes de simulation numérique, et ensuite, ii) un approche empirique pour tester des hypothèses théorétiques. La perspective de microéconomie sur les problématiques et le fonctionnement des mécanismes des transports privés sont, au même temps, nécessaires et ardues à modéliser. Parmi les nombreuses problématiques étudiés dans le cadre de cet domaine de recherche il vaut la peine de mentionner: la taxation des routes, la concurrence parfaite et oligopolistique entre les opérateurs que anime le système des transports privées et de marchandises, la congestion des routes et le comportement des usagers face à l'incertitude relative aux temps de trajet où encore, le processus de décision en matière de transports au sein des ménages. L'approche micro-fondée liée aux problématiques ci-dessus a été intégrée au sein de cet étude avec une vision empirique, menée à l'analyse de l'ensemble des politiques de plani cation au niveau régional et urbain. Les deux applications empiriques présentées montrent deux nouvelles méthodologies d'étude concernant deux problématiques classiques: i) le choix modale, dans une optique de décision conjointe observée sur un échantillon des couples résidents en Ile-de-France et, ii) le choix de route en Moyen Orient, où les temps de trajet sont incertains et dépends d'un scenario politique incertain au niveau macroéconomique. L'intégration des deux approches est réalisée dans le cadre de cette thèse ayant comme exigence celle de mieux répondre aux questions concrètes et actuelles de la recherche européenne, ainsi que pour augmenter la palette des débouchées applicatives des modèles théoriques développées dans la littérature récente. / This thesis aims to integrate two fundamental approaches to the study of regional economics and the transport policy: i) a theoretical approach based on analytic models supported by numerical simulation and ii) an empirical approach to test theoretical assumptions. The microeconomic perspective represents a challenging and a complex task at the same time. Some of the open issues at the center of debate are: the taxation of roads, perfect and imperfect competition among the networks supporting private trips, congestion pricing and the attitude towards risky outcomes as uncertain travel times, the decision making process and resource sharing among different members of a household. The micro approach has been integrated with two empirical experiments in which we propose new approaches to study two traditional problems: i) modal choice, by testing the jointness of decision making on a sample of active couples from Ile-de-France, and ii) route choice in the Middle East - a context in which the travel time, as an input of the decision process, is characterized by uncertainty and depends on the political scenario at the macro level.

This empirical study is aimed to analyze the determinants of residential water demand and performed water use practice at household level in Hawassa. This study will fill the research gap and information on factors affecting household water demand in regions being water scarce and will provide useful information for policy-makers and water utility planners in order to use scarce drinking water resource more efficiently. In this study the proposed potential factors determine household water demand in Hawassa were; Socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, the average monthly household expenditure, use of water appliances and household water use patterns for various purposes, and household awareness towards water source conservation. The cross sectional survey was done in 169 rondomly selected households. The collected Data was analyzed using multiple regression models with different functional forms (linear, semi-log) and heteroskedaticity corrected model was also used in each of functional forms to examine the structural relationship between the quantity of water demand and explanatory variables. The gretl statisitcal software package was used. The descriptive statistics analysis was also followed to present results in tables, charts and graphs (mean, median, minimum, maximum, frequency...

Pas de résumé en français / Pas de résumé en anglais

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / John Crespi / Hybrid seed corn pricing has increased significantly over the past six or seven years and continues to be a topic of conversation amongst farmers. This issue is also an area of concern for Monsanto. The hybrid corn pricing team at Monsanto is concerned that they price current products at a point to maximize profits while continuing to grow market share. The key is to price at a point that captures all the value of the differentiated products Monsanto offers. The objective for this study is to estimate a demand model for the hybrid seed corn industry. The demand model will allow us to look at many different aspects of the hybrid seed corn industry and also evaluate the own-price and cross-price elasticities. The own-price elasticity is especially important because it will be used to determine if current pricing is revenue or profit-maximizing. A hedonic pricing model was also estimated in this study to complement the demand model. It is important for Monsanto to understand what attributes or traits are significant in pricing and demand.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Agricultural Economics / Glynn Tonsor / Few things facing the U.S. meat industry in recent years have garnered more attention of economic researchers than food safety events, policies, and mitigation efforts. This dissertation has two main essays and themes focusing on both domestic and international food safety issues. Contributing new insights to this situation, the impacts of FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service) recalls on consumer meat demand in the United States are estimated by a series of Rotterdam models in the first study using monthly grocery-scanner data. Multiple model specifications are employed to further assess effects across meat products and geographic regions. Recall variables are constructed separately as beef E. coli recall, beef non-E. coli recall, pork recall, and poultry recall variables to facilitate finer assessment of demand impacts. Results suggest beef E. coli recalls significantly reduce the demand for ground beef contemporaneously among most, but not all, regions in the United States. The ultimate finding of food safety effects neither being fully homogeneous nor entirely heterogeneous warrants appreciation. In order to protect domestic consumers and meat industries from potential food safety hazards, some member countries of the WTO implement sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures as non-tariff barriers. The second study focuses on investigating the determinants of red meat trade patterns and associated impacts of SPS regulations. This analysis uses multiple product-level gravity equation models and PPML (Poisson Pesudo Maximum-likelihood estimators to overcome sample selection bias and heteroscedasticity and examine the trade relationship among other factors. Results indicate that, trade values of frozen beef and pork are significantly reduced by the implementation of SPS measures. Also, the spillover effects across meat products on trade were detected which provides essential information to the meat industry, policy makers, and trade representatives.