Two commonly used forms for crop response to inputs are a smooth, differentiable production function and a linear response and plateau (LRP) model. This paper reconciles these two views by showing that smooth functions can be derived by aggregating the effects of heterogenous inputs on LRP functions. Data on com growth are used to test two specific aggregations.

Because of difficulties in measuring effluent from nonpoint pollution, proposals for regulating agricultural runoff often suggest instruments applied to inputs or management practices. When pollution functions vary across sources, uniform input instruments cannot achieve a least-cost pollution reduction, but efficient instruments may be difficult to administer. In this paper we analyze lettuce production on two soils in California's Salinas Valley to consider empirical costs associated with uniform input taxes and regulations. The results suggest that uniform instruments may not be costly relative to an efficient baseline. Though taxes are more efficient, farmers have higher profits with regulations.

Yard-scale landscape designs can influence environmental quality through effects on habitat, stormwater runoff, and water quality. Native plant gardens may have ecological benefits, and previous research has shown that yards using these plants can be designed in ways that people find attractive. This study examines whether people are willing to pay more for more ecologically benign designs than for a lawn. A contingent choice survey was conducted in southeast Michigan in which people were presented with four different yard designs (three of which included native plants) in three different settings, with different monthly maintenance costs for each design. Respondents were asked to rank their choices of the yards while considering the maintenance costs they were presented. Results suggest that people are willing to pay more for well-designed yards including native plants than for lawns, and that their increased willingness to pay exceeds any increase in costs associated with the native plantings. These results should encourage homeowners, landscape designers, and the landscape plant industry to work with native plants. In this study, people were willing to pay more for designs that present gains for the environment, without government intervention and without social cost.

Control of nonpoint source pollution often requires regulation of inputs, but first-best solutions are unattainable. Because inputs are monitored by different agencies and regulatory coordination can be costly, it may be more practical to regulate single inputs. A cost-effectiveness approach to determining the best single-input tax policy is developed and applied to the question of reducing nitrate leaching from lettuce production in California. Water is the best single input to regulate, and efficiency losses from this second-best approach appear not to be great. Conditions for the welfare ranking of policies to be invariant to heterogeneity in production or leaching are identified. Copyright 1996, Oxford University Press.

An integrated life-cycle assessment and life-cycle cost analysis model was developed and applied to enhance the sustainability of concrete bridge infrastructure. The objective of this model is to compare alternative bridge deck designs from a sustainability perspective that accounts for total life-cycle costs including agency, user, and environmental costs. A conventional concrete bridge deck and an alternative engineered cementitious composite link slab design are examined. Despite higher initial costs and greater materialrelated environmental impacts on a per mass basis, the link slab design results in lower life-cycle costs and reduced environmental impacts when evaluated over the entire life cycle. Traffic delay caused by construction comprises 91% of total costs for both designs. Costs to the funding agency comprise less than 3% of total costs, and environmental costs are less than 0.5%. These results show life-cycle modeling is an important decision-making tool since initial costs and agency costs are not illustrative of total life-cycle costs. Additionally, accounting for construction-related traffic delay is vital to assessing the total economic cost and environmental impact of infrastructure design decisions.

How consumers evaluate trade-offs between the cost of buying additional fuel economy and the expected fuel savings that result is an important underlying determinant of the overall cost of national fuel economy standards. Models of vehicle choice are a means to predict the change in consumers' vehicle purchase patterns, as well as the effects of these changes on compliance costs and consumer surplus. This paper surveys the literature on vehicle choice models and finds a wide range in methods and results. A large puzzle raised is whether automakers build into their vehicles as much fuel economy as consumers are willing to purchase. This paper examines possible reasons why there may be a gap between the amount consumers are willing to pay for fuel economy and the amount that automakers provide, though there is insufficient evidence on the relative roles of these various hypotheses. Further research on the role of fuel economy in consumer vehicle purchases is needed to assist in understanding the welfare effects of fuel economy regulation.

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As standards for vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy have become more stringent, concerns have arisen that the incorporation of fuel-saving technologies may entail tradeoffs with other vehicle attributes important to consumers such as acceleration performance. Assessing the effects of these tradeoffs on consumer welfare requires estimates of both the degree of the tradeoffs, and consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for the foregone benefits. This paper has two objectives. The first is to review recent literature that presents, or can be used to calculate, marginal WTP (MWTP) for vehicle attributes to describe the attributes that have been studied and the estimated MWTP values. We found 52 U.S.-focused papers with sufficient data to calculate WTP values for 142 different vehicle attributes, which we organized into 15 general groups of comfort, fuel availability, fuel costs, fuel type, incentives, model availability, non-fuel operating costs, performance, pollution, prestige, range, reliability, safety, size, and vehicle type. Measures of dispersion around central MWTP values typically show large variation in MWTP values for attributes. We explore factors that may contribute to this large variation via analysis of variance (ANOVA) and find that, although most have statistically significant effects, they account for only about one third of the observed variation. Case studies of papers that provide estimates from a variety of model formulations and estimation methods suggest that decisions made by researchers can strongly influence MWTP estimates. The paper's second objective is to seek consensus estimates for WTP for fuel cost reduction and increased acceleration performance. Meta-analysis of MWTP for reduced fuel cost indicates that estimates based on revealed vs. stated preference data differ, as do estimates from models that account for endogeneity and those that do not. We find greater consistency in estimates of MWTP for acceleration despite substantial uncertainty about the overall mean. We conclude with recommendations for improving the understanding of consumers' MWTP for vehicle attributes.