Responsible consumption: addressing individual food waste behavior

PurposeFood wastage is a major contributor to pervasive world hunger. Cutting global food waste in half by 2030 is one of the United Nation's top priorities. Hence, this paper aims to provide useful insights on how individual behavior might be influenced to help reduce food wastage and hunger by identifying individual food waste determinants.Design/methodology/approachA total of 297 useable responses were obtained from a survey using a food diary method. A logit model was employed to estimate the relationship between leftovers and its determinants (preparedness to take own action, price conscious, food review, religiosity, health conscious, cost, marital status and gender).FindingsResults show that preparedness to be responsible for one's actions, depending on food reviews and being waste conscious had a significant positive relationship with food waste reducing behavior, along with being male and being married.Research limitations/implicationsThe study suggests that there is scope for policy initiatives to reduce the individual utility from discarding food and increase the individual utility from food saving activities. Penalizing individual or household food wastage through a tax will directly raise the cost of wastage and reduce the net utility from discarding food. Reducing food waste could help reduce global hunger.Originality/valueRationally, no one will have any intention to waste when buying food. Instead, in the context of deciding whether or not to leave leftover food, an individual is posited to weigh the potential utility from saving food or throwing it away. Thus, this study examines food waste behavior by utilizing economic tools, which is rare in the food waste literature.

Retrospectives: James Buchanan: Clubs and Alternative Welfare Economics

James Buchanan wrote “An Economic Theory of Clubs” and invented clubs to support a form of welfare economics in which there is no social welfare function (SWF) and individual utility functions cannot be “read” by external observers. Clubs were a means to allow the implementation of individualized prices for public goods and services and to allow each individual to pay exactly the amount he wants to pay. He developed this project to answer and counter Paul Samuelson's analysis of public goods, in which social welfare functions play a crucial role. Buchanan and Samuelson disagreed over the allocation of the costs of the public good to each individual. To Buchanan, it was by relying on individual's preferences. To Samuelson, by using a SWF. Buchanan's clubs are thus foreign and incompatible with the traditional Samuelson-style public economics in which they are used.

A Neural Network Auction For Group Decision Making Over a Continuous Space

We propose a system for conducting an auction over locations in a continuous space. It enables participants to express their preferences over possible choices of location in the space, selecting the location that maximizes the total utility of all agents. We prevent agents from tricking the system into selecting a location that improves their individual utility at the expense of others by using a pricing rule that gives agents no incentive to misreport their true preferences. The system queries participants for their utility in many random locations, then trains a neural network to approximate the preference function of each participant. The parameters of these neural network models are transmitted and processed by the auction mechanism, which composes these into differentiable models that are optimized through gradient ascent to compute the final chosen location and charged prices.

Social policy development based on a combination of agent-oriented and inter-industrial approaches

The article proposes methodological approach for assessing the consequences of state social policy based on an extended agent-based spatial model with a detailed representation of the reaction of agents to changes in social transfers and taxation as the instruments of government policy. Optimization of territorial social policy is ensured by maximizing the iso-elastic function of social welfare (FSW), based on the individual utility functions of households and taking into account the degree of rejection of social inequality. Structural changes resulting from public policy are analyzed by aggregating the decisions of microeconomic agents and calculating the inputoutput balance table, including through a visual representation in the fourth quadrant of redistribution processes when transfers and taxes change. The results of experimental calculations show that at each level of the coefficient of rejection of inequality for both transfers and taxes, local maxima arise that correspond to the optimal levels of transfers and taxes and form monotonically decreasing iso-optimal curves depending on an increase in either the share of transfers or the level of taxation. The proposed approach to the formalization of ideas about the ratio of efficiency and fairness in the construction of FSW provides an opportunity to choose optimal solutions to justify an agent-based social policy.

Anorectal Physiology Testing for Prolapse—What Tests are Necessary?

Rectal prolapse frequently occurs in conjunction with functional and anatomic abnormalities of the bowel and pelvic floor. Prolapse surgery should have as its goal not only to correct the prolapse, but also to improve function to the greatest extent possible. Careful history-taking and physical exam continue to be the surgeon's best tools to put rectal prolapse in its functional context. Physiologic testing augments this and informs surgical decision-making. Defecography can identify concomitant middle compartment prolapse and pelvic floor hernias, potentially targeting patients for urogynecologic consultation or combined repair. Other tests, including manometry, ultrasound, and electrophysiologic testing, may be of utility in select cases. Here, we provide an overview of available testing options and their individual utility in rectal prolapse.

Interpersonal Comparisons and Utilitarian Social Choice

Interpersonal comparisons of utility scales have been considered to be meaningless. Therefore, utilitarian voting consisting of individual preference ratings on some utility scale as inputs has been considered unscientific. We show a particular method consisting of a hybrid of utilitarian and approval voting or choosing for which individual utility scales need not be comparable since the results are the same for any affine linear transformation of the utility scale. Therefore, the issue of interpersonal comparisons is moot.

Interpersonal Comparisons and Utilitarian Social Choice

Interpersonal comparisons of utility scales have been considered to be meaningless. Therefore, utilitarian voting consisting of individual preference ratings on some utility scale as inputs has been considered unscientific. We show a particular method consisting of a hybrid of utilitarian and approval voting or choosing for which individual utility scales need not be comparable since the results are the same for any affine linear transformation of the utility scale. Therefore, the issue of interpersonal comparisons is moot.

Economic Theories of Justice

Social justice considerations are incorporated into welfare economics via properties of the social welfare function and measures of individual utility. The ethical issues underlying various approaches are illustrated through intriguing paradoxes that have emerged in the literature. Such puzzles point to the tensions among certain important values (such as respecting preferences, giving priority to the worse off, personal responsibility, and informational simplicity) and suggest the relevant ways in which reasonable compromise can be sought. Welfare economics is now able to accommodate a large range of conceptions of justice, including utilitarianism and various forms of egalitarianism and libertarianism.

Creation of Optimal Performance of the Investment Project

The selection of an investment project is seen as a problem of multi-criteria decision-making. In this paper, a decision-maker uses six attributes i.e. criteria most used by the international companies in practice (net present value, internal rate of return, payback period, accounting rate of return, operating profit margin and return on equity).Individual utility functions are made for each attribute separately and the global utility function as a weighted sum of individual utility functions. For each criterion a final set of arranged pairs i.e. points of utility is determined based on the decision-maker’s assessments. Then, the points obtained are approximated by the utility function.Finally, the optimization issue solved in order to obtain the optimal performance of the selected project according to decision-maker’s opinion. The negotiation procedure enables the offered performances to approach optimal performance of the selected project aimed at decision-maker and investor reaching an agreement.

On a Theorem due to Alan D. Taylor about Aggregation of Preferences

In this paper, we show that there does not exist any triple acyclic preference aggregation rule that satisfies Majority property, weak Pareto criterion and a version of a property due to Alan Taylor. We also show that there are non-dictatorial preference aggregation rules and in particular non-dictatorial social welfare functions which satisfy the weak Pareto criterion and Taylor’s Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. Further, we are able to obtain analogous results for preference aggregation functionals by suitably adjusting the desired properties to fit into a framework which uses individual utility functions rather than individual preference orderings. Our final result is a modest generalisation of Sen’s version of Arrow’s impossibility theorem which is shown to hold under our mild domain restriction. JEL: D71