While service-dominant logic prescribes consumer participation with firms, some theorists of elitist democracy oppose citizen participation in governance because these theorists perceive citizens as being incompetent in political matters. This study, grounded in political marketing theory, suggests that citizens do, indeed, have the competence for participating in governance through the thin-participation methods (i.e., those not requiring citizen interaction in groups) presented herein. These methods feature relatively short amounts of time needed for individual respondents to learn about issues in an online environment and to take a survey including trade-off tasks as part of a discrete-choice experimental design. Set in the context of a budget crisis for a state (Wyoming), this study assessed citizens’ thoughts about the state’s political processes as well as about policy preferences for seven important policy areas of state budgeting. The results of this study provide evidence that citizens have the crucial operant resources (knowledge and skills) to participate in all types of political markets (electoral, governmental, and intragovernmental). The study offers researchers knowledge for further developing service-dominant logic in government ecosystems of service.
The expansion of wind-generation in the United States poses significant challenges to policy-makers, particularly because wind’s intermittency and unpredictability can exacerbate problems of congestion on a transmission constrained grid. Understanding these issues is necessary if optimal development of wind energy and transmission is to occur. This paper applies a model that integrates the special concerns of electricity generation to empirically consider the challenges of developing wind resources in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. Given the lack the high frequency data needed to address the special problems of intermittency and congestion, our solution is to create a dispatch model of the region and to use simulations to generate the necessary data, then use this data to understand the development patterns that have occurred as wind resources have been developed.
Wind development offers local economic growth opportunities, and for this reason, reducing the tax burden on wind development may be a policy advocated by communities wishing to attract such investment. Alternatively, increased local public costs, and the potential externalities caused by wind development may create a reason to raise taxes on wind. Increased taxation on wind presents a potential policy tradeoff as efforts to raise taxes and revenues from wind can reduce a state’s ability to attract wind development. Local tax environments can affect which regions successfully attract wind investment due to their effect on developer’s costs. Estimates of the potential tax elasticity of wind development are undeveloped in the academic and policy literatures, thus policy changes with respect to taxation often occur without any estimate of the potential impact on development. Absent such tax elasticity estimates, comparative estimates of regional wind costs and how they may be affected by state tax policy would be useful to policy-makers, but such estimates are also limited. To our knowledge, the only effort to compare state wind costs across western states and how they vary when state tax policies are included was conducted by a private firm in 2010 (see E3 (2010)), and that study is now well out of date. The study presented here develops such state wind cost estimates by describing the financial structure of a typical large utility-scale wind development. Consideration of the capital structure of a wind development is crucial to understand how different taxation and other incentive policies affect wind development, and to develop taxation strategies that minimize wind development and tax-policy tradeoffs.
We test the null hypothesis that involuntary transfers for the provision of a public good will completely crowd out voluntary transfers against the warm-glow hypothesis that crowding-out will be incomplete because individuals care about giving. Our design differs from the related design used by Andreoni in considering two levels of the involuntary transfer and a wider range of contribution possibilities, and in mixing groups every period instead of every four periods. We analyse the data with careful attention to boundary effects. We retain the null hypothesis of complete crowding-out in two of three pairwise comparisions, but reject it in favour of incomplete crowding-out in the comparison most closely akin to Andreoni’s design. Thus we confirm the existence of incomplete crowding-out in some environments, but suggest that the warm-glow hypothesis is inadequate in explaining it.
The expansion of wind-generation in the United States poses significant challenges to policy-makers, particularly because wind’s intermittency and unpredictability can exacerbate problems of congestion on a transmission constrained grid. Understanding these issues is necessary if optimal development of wind energy and transmission is to occur. This paper applies a model that integrates the special concerns of electricity generation to empirically consider the challenges of developing wind resources in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. Given the lack the high frequency data needed to address the special problems of intermittency and congestion, our solution is to create a dispatch model of the region and to use simulations to generate the necessary data, then use this data to understand the development patterns that have occurred as wind resources have been developed. Our results indicate that the price effects caused by changes in power output at intermittent sources are strongly dependent on supply conditions and the presence of market distortions caused by transmission constraints. Peculiarities inherent in electric grid operation can cause system responses that are not always intuitive. The distribution of the rents accruing to wind generation, particularly in unexpectedly windy periods are strongly dependent on the allocation of transmission rights when congestion occurs, which impacts potential returns to developing wind resources. Incidents of congestion depend on the pace of development of wind and transmission capacity. Not accounting for such distortions may cause new development to worsen market outcomes if mistaken estimates of benefits or costs lead to sub-optimal development of wind and transmission facilities.
