The management of water resources is today one of the main issues in most countries. In Italy, as in many other European countries, irrigation is the main sector using water and hence it is at the centre of the water policy agenda. Water management for irrigation requires suitable policy tools...

This paper identifies information that may be important in determining the benefits of preventing toxic water contamination (or equivalently cost of nonaction) when a given toxification occurs. It attempts to identify information and behavior issues that need to be considered when we estimate...

This paper outlines DEBET (Decision Based Economic Theory), a method for determining revealed preferences of governments. DEBET is applied to US wheat policy decisions in the 1980s. This method has a number of advantages over alternative approaches to the analysis of revealed preferences of...

Decision based economic theory stresses the central position of the objective function in the behavior of economic agents. Insufficient knowledge of objective functions hampers the development of economic theory. In this article, a methodology for deriving objective functions from conscious...

In the last decades, problems related to environmental protection have become more and more important, involving a growing number of economic and social actors. The new role played by agriculture in this context requires not only innovations concerning policy instruments, but also an evolution...

Buse’s concept of total response is extended to advertising effects. Results suggest that partial advertising elasticities overstate advertising’s ability to increase market demand. One implication is that advertising bans (e.g., for alcohol and tobacco) are apt to be less effective than...