This research examines consumer preferences for certification of select credence attributes by different certifying agents. Over two separate study periods, groups of Edmonton consumers participated in sessions comprised of three components a real choice experiment, a stated preference exercise and a survey designed to elicit willingness to pay for select credence attributes of eggs, certification of those attributes and establish attitudes and beliefs that may affect preferences. Results indicate that consumer shopping habits, overall trust levels and certain demographic characteristics influence the preference for an attribute as well as the preference for certification of that attribute. Survey respondents prefer certified to uncertified eggs and government is the preferred certifier. Pasteurized eggs gained the most from certification. Furthermore, an assessment of respondent knowledge about current certification practices indicates that certification schemes be accompanied by an adequate education campaign.

Since the implementation of the National Health Insurance (NHI) in Taiwan, the NHI expenditure has grown dramatically. In order to make the most of the precious NHI resources and improve the medical care quality of diabetes mellitus (DM), the Bureau of the NHI (BNHI) has implemented the ¡§pay-by-quality¡¨ (PBQ) system in an attempt to stabilize the financial viability and increase the medical care quality since October, 2001. They incorporated the indicators of medical care quality to evaluate the medical institutions before making a reasonable insurance payment to them. BNHI encouraged hospitals to form the diabetic care network to improve the diabetic care quality and utilize the NHI resources efficiently with the cooperation of medical professionals. A successfully established network is believed to be beneficial to all the concerned parties, including the patients, hospitals, and the NHI. It is noted that the effectiveness of the policy requires further studies. Therefore, this research aimed to examine two subjects with statistical analyses. It attempted to identify the effects of the PBQ system on the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients and to investigate whether the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients had been significantly lowered by the PBQ system. Furthermore, it aimed to analyze the influences of the characteristics of the patients and hospitals on the outpatient medical resources expenditure of the diabetic patients. The research was a cohort study which analyzed the data of the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients in 2004. The control group was randomly selected from the individuals who did not join the PBQ system. The number of samples was determined by the demographic characteristics of the experimental group, consisted by the individuals who had joined the PBQ system. Based on such criteria, 273,738 samples were selected from the population. After the sampling, the data were analyzed by the independent sample t-test and multiple regression analysis. The main findings of this research were as followed: 1. The PBQ system did restrain the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients. 2. Different characteristics of both the patients and hospitals indeed had significant effects on the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients. However, there were certain limitations of the research. The samples were all selected from the data in 2004 which incurred a less reliable time frame. In addition, merely the independent variables regarding outpatient medical resources expenditure were used in the study. Therefore, it is suggested that future studies should extend the research period and consider other influential elements, such as the inpatient data and the clinic medical care quality indicators, which could provide more insightful and complete findings of the PBQ implementation in terms of diabetic care to both the researchers and practitioners.

Owing to the NASDAQ crash, the development of internet advertisement is somewhat sluggish. The ICP owners have to to find a new model to servive; thus, they plan to gain cashflow from the users. The content of financial websites is relatively uniqe, so this study will focus on the user motive and willingness-to-pay of fincial content website. The study built up the dimensions of website content/services via website observation. And then it also uses the web-based questionnaire to understand the user motive and willingness-to-pay of financial content website. The findings are as fellowed: 1. There are three main motives for the usage of financial website. They are "infornation", "interaction", and "interesting/learning" motives. The most important motive is "information". 2. The users are most willing to pay for the "analyses/reports", "alert", and "full-text database seraching". 3. The user motive is relevent to the willingness- to-pay of financial content websites.Those who are of the "interaction" motive are the most willing to pay ones. 4. Age group, education background, and items of investment are three intervening varieces of the measurement of user motive and willingness-to-pay. 5. The findings would be useful for the planning of financial content website. It also keeps the records of current situiation of the existing financial content websites.

This dissertation contains three essays on risk aversion. In the first essay, we an- alyze comparative risk aversion in a new way, through a comparative statics problem in which, for a cost, agents can shift from an initial probability distribution toward a preferred distribution. The Ross characterization arises when the original distribution is riskier than the preferred distribution and the cost is monetary, and the Arrow-Pratt characterization arises when the original distribution differs from the preferred distribution by a simple mean-preserving spread and the cost is a utility cost. Higher-order increases in risk lead to higher-order generalizations, and the com- parative statics method yields a unified approach to the problem of comparative risk attitudes. In the second essay, we analyze decisions made by a group of terrorists and a government in a zero-sum game in which the terrorists minimize a representative citizen's expected utility and the government maximizes it. The terrorists' strategy balances the probability and the severity of the attack while the government chooses the level of investment reducing the probability and/or mitigating the severity. We find that if the representative citizen is risk neutral, the terrorists' response is not associated with the government's action and the representative citizen's risk attitudes affect the strategies of the government and the terrorists. Risk aversion always in- creases equilibrium severity but does not always increase equilibrium expenditure of the government. In the last essay, we consider a situation in which an individual has to pay for a good before he realizes the state-dependent surplus of the good. This ex-ante willingness to pay is called the option price and the difference between the option price and the expected surplus is the option value. We find that the option value actually is the buying price for a fixed payment of the expected surplus, and there is a special case in which the option value equals the negative of the compensating risk premium. We also find the effects on the option price and the option value when the expected utility assumption is replaced by a rank-dependent expected utility.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of West Florida, 2009. / Submitted to the Dept. of Curriculum and Diversity Studies. Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 116 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

CEO pay-performance relationship is a topic that has been largely discussed and researched. Questions still remain on precisely how CEO remuneration is related to company performance. Recently, attention has shifted from how much executives are paid to how they are paid. The purpose of this paper is to find how CEO compensation structure relates to company performance in the auto industry. In order to achieve this aim, the CEO compensation is broken down into four components, namely: base salary, bonus, stocks and stock options, and pension. The company performance is measured by change in market value, since market information is forward looking, meaning future performance might be anticipated in advance by the markets. As such, decisions made whose positive or negative effects may occur later in the future are, if known by investors, priced into the market value. Each compensation component relative the total was tested for correlation with respective market capitalization change. However, the insignificant statistical results conclude that the compensation structure follows a relatively random pattern. Hence, no statistically significant relationship between CEO compensation structure and firm performance in the auto industry was found. The findings that there are no significant performance improvements for firms having a relatively bigger proportion of performance-based pay means that underlying theories, such as agency theory, may not be applicable in the industry.

This research focuses on the relationships between principal instructional leadership and the change process of teachers while a district is undergoing the implementation of a performance pay program. The researcher utilized a mixed methods approach. The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (Porter, Murphy, Goldring, & Elliott, 2007) developed by researchers at Vanderbilt University and Penn State was one of the quantitative measures. This instrument is designed to measure instructional leadership from the perspective of teachers and the principal. The Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ) (George, Hall, & Stiegelbauer, 2006), based on the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) (Hord, Rutherford, Huling-Austin, & Hall, 1987), is the quantitative instrument used to determine the stage of change of the participants or potential participants of the new performance pay program.Interviews of school district administrators and a review of relevant documents regarding the performance pay implementation serves as the data for the qualitative component of the study. A grounded theory approach was utilized in gathering and analyzing information. This approach allows for discoveries of themes and concepts that are not preconceived by the researcher.Results of the research indicate increased teacher collaboration and fidelity of implementation of the targeted instructional strategies and practices after a performance pay program funded by a United States Department of Education Teacher Incentive Fund Grant was implemented. The monetary incentive and the incentive of professional development may have had equal value to participants. Principals positively impacted the implementation when they were skilled communicators who advocated for teachers and held them to high standards for student performance and supported their efforts in implementation of new instructional strategies to produce higher levels of student achievement. The performance pay implementation was supported by layers of leadership which established and continues to sustain the project.

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