Ride-Hailing Platforms: Competition and Autonomous Vehicles

Problem definition: Ride-hailing platforms, which are currently struggling with profitability, view autonomous vehicles (AVs) as important to their long-term profitability and prospects. Are competing platforms helped or harmed by platforms’ obtaining access to AVs? Are the humans who participate on the platforms—driver-workers and rider-consumers (hereafter, agents)—collectively helped or harmed by the platforms’ access to AVs? How do the conditions under which access to AVs reduces platform profits, agent welfare, and social welfare depend on the AV ownership structure (i.e., whether platforms or individuals own AVs)? Academic/practical relevance: AVs have the potential to transform the economics of ride-hailing, with welfare consequences for platforms, agents, and society. Methodology: We employ a game-theoretic model that captures platforms’ price, wage, and AV fleet size decisions. Results: We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions under which platforms’ access to AVs reduces platform profit, agent welfare, and social welfare. The structural effect of access to AVs on agent welfare is robust regardless of AV ownership; agent welfare decreases if and only if the AV cost is high. In contrast, the structural effect of access to AVs on platform profit depends on who owns AVs. The necessary and sufficient condition under which access to AVs decreases platform profit is high AV cost under platform-owned AVs and low AV cost under individually owned AVs. Similarly, the structural effect of access to AVs on social welfare depends on who owns AVs. Access to individually owned AVs increases social welfare; in contrast, access to platform-owned AVs decreases social welfare—if and only if the AV cost is high. Managerial implications: Our results provide guidance to platforms, labor and consumer advocates, and governmental entities regarding regulatory and public policy decisions affecting the ease with which platforms obtain access to AVs.

No More Than Comfort? A logics approach to the 'grip' of cost-benefit analysis in a New Zealand public policy decision

<p>This study explores an apparent paradox: cost-benefit analysis (CBA) requires a series of highly subjective decisions to calculate, yet is employed for its perceived objectivity. The dominant view of CBA in the academic and policy literature is as a neutral technology, offering an objective resolution to difficult resource allocation problems. However, this view has been much challenged, with long-standing and still-unresolved debates on CBA’s technical calculation and methodological approaches, as well as critiques of its underpinning socio-political assumptions and its consequences. Drawing on the literature considering accounting as a form of discourse, this study investigates CBA and its discursive use in the debate between 2006 and 2008 around the public policy decisions regarding New Zealand’s public funding of Herceptin (trastuzumab) for early HER2-positive breast cancer (‘the debate’). The repeated use of cost and CBA in arguments by the participants in this debate was striking, with both those for and those against funding appearing to regard CBA as especially authoritative. This authority – even dominance – of CBA in public policy decision-making has been addressed from several perspectives, but its affective (embodied, emotional, non-cognitive) dimensions remain under-explored. This study addresses that gap through a qualitative documentary analysis employing the post-structural critical discourse-theoretic approach of Glynos and Howarth’s Logics of Critical Explanation (LCE) framework (Glynos, J., & Howarth, D. (2007). Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge). It offers the following contributions: (a) it provides knowledge of how CBA is presented, positioned, contested, and defended in the Herceptin debate; (b) it generates a genealogically-inflected understanding of how these have come about; (c) its offers an explanation for CBA’s ‘grip’ (continued authority despite its difficulties); and (d) it proposes some alternative presentations, positionings, contestations, and defences of CBA.</p>

No More Than Comfort? A logics approach to the 'grip' of cost-benefit analysis in a New Zealand public policy decision

<p>This study explores an apparent paradox: cost-benefit analysis (CBA) requires a series of highly subjective decisions to calculate, yet is employed for its perceived objectivity. The dominant view of CBA in the academic and policy literature is as a neutral technology, offering an objective resolution to difficult resource allocation problems. However, this view has been much challenged, with long-standing and still-unresolved debates on CBA’s technical calculation and methodological approaches, as well as critiques of its underpinning socio-political assumptions and its consequences. Drawing on the literature considering accounting as a form of discourse, this study investigates CBA and its discursive use in the debate between 2006 and 2008 around the public policy decisions regarding New Zealand’s public funding of Herceptin (trastuzumab) for early HER2-positive breast cancer (‘the debate’). The repeated use of cost and CBA in arguments by the participants in this debate was striking, with both those for and those against funding appearing to regard CBA as especially authoritative. This authority – even dominance – of CBA in public policy decision-making has been addressed from several perspectives, but its affective (embodied, emotional, non-cognitive) dimensions remain under-explored. This study addresses that gap through a qualitative documentary analysis employing the post-structural critical discourse-theoretic approach of Glynos and Howarth’s Logics of Critical Explanation (LCE) framework (Glynos, J., & Howarth, D. (2007). Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge). It offers the following contributions: (a) it provides knowledge of how CBA is presented, positioned, contested, and defended in the Herceptin debate; (b) it generates a genealogically-inflected understanding of how these have come about; (c) its offers an explanation for CBA’s ‘grip’ (continued authority despite its difficulties); and (d) it proposes some alternative presentations, positionings, contestations, and defences of CBA.</p>

Requiem for the American CBD: The Impact of COVID-19 and a Dispersed Workforce

Digital communication technologies have rendered the American Central Business District (CBD) obsolete, and one can expect the corporate headquarters function to be removed in varying degrees from the CBD as this decade further unfolds.&nbsp; The COVID-19 pandemic forced corporate America to widely embrace a dispersed workforce model. We argue that corporations will continue to embrace this model for profit driven reasons, while employees will also demand its continuance for another set of reasons: some monetarily based with others rooted in flexibility and the ability to reside anywhere.&nbsp; In the meantime, the public will perceive such moves as environmentally friendly and enhancing worker safety.&nbsp; The traditional CBDs and their adjoining sports/entertainment districts will likely face significant near-term fiscal challenges, which for some cities will be magnified by poor public policy decisions and increasing crime.&nbsp;

AI under great uncertainty: implications and decision strategies for public policy

Decisions where there is not enough information for a well-informed decision due to unidentified consequences, options, or undetermined demarcation of the decision problem are called decisions under great uncertainty. This paper argues that public policy decisions on how and if to implement decision-making processes based on machine learning and AI for public use are such decisions. Decisions on public policy on AI are uncertain due to three features specific to the current landscape of AI, namely (i) the vagueness of the definition of AI, (ii) uncertain outcomes of AI implementations and (iii) pacing problems. Given that many potential applications of AI in the public sector concern functions central to the public sphere, decisions on the implementation of such applications are particularly sensitive. Therefore, it is suggested that public policy-makers and decision-makers in the public sector can adopt strategies from the argumentative approach in decision theory to mitigate the established great uncertainty. In particular, the notions of framing and temporal strategies are considered.

Open Government

Since Irish independence in 1922, governance structures have been excessively secretive. Political and civil service elites operated on a presumption of secrecy and a principle that the public did not need to know about decisions being taken in their name. In the last two decades, a number of policy innovations have gone some way towards providing for a more open polity. These include Ombudsman, regulation of lobbying, and freedom of information legislation, enacted over concerns about payments to politicians and a series of catastrophic public policy decisions that led to the bailout of the Irish economy by the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank. This chapter assesses the importance of the principle of open government in modern Irish politics. It examines the nature of secrecy, assesses the tentative opening up of government since the 1980s, and analyses the open government proposals introduced since 2011.

K-12 School Teaching Posture Correlates with COVID-19 Disease Outcomes in Ohio

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, most US K-12 schools shutdown and millions of students began remote learning. By September 2020, little guidance had been provided to school districts to inform fall teaching. This indecision led to a variety of teaching postures within a given state. In this report we examine Ohio school districts in-depth, to address whether on-premises teaching impacted COVID-19 disease outcomes in that community. We observed that counties with on-premises teaching had more cumulative deaths at the end of fall semester than counties with predominantly online teaching. To provide a measure of disease progression, we developed an observational disease model and examined multiple possible confounders, such as population size, mobility, and demographics. Examination of micropolitan counties revealed that the progression of COVID-19 disease was faster during the fall semester in counties with predominantly on-premises teaching. The relationship between increased disease prevalence in counties with on-premises teaching was not related to deaths at the start of the fall semester, population size, or the mobility within that county. This research addresses the critical question whether on-premises schooling can impact the spread of epidemic and pandemic viruses and will help inform future public policy decisions on school openings.

The rhetoric of New Zealand's COVID-19 response

PurposeThe authors unpack the critical role of rhetoric in developing and justifying the New Zealand (NZ) government's coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown strategy.Design/methodology/approachUsing Green's (2004) theory of rhetorical diffusion, the authors analysed government documents and media releases before, during and after the lockdown to reconstruct the government's rationale.FindingsThe blending of kairos (sense of urgency and “right” time to act), ethos (emphasis on “saving lives”), pathos (fear of disruption and death) and selective use of health-based logos (shrinking infection rates), prompted fast initial adoption of the lockdown. However, support for the rhetoric wavered post-lockdown as absence of robust logos became apparent to the public.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors implicate the role of rhetoric in decision-makers’ ability to successfully elicit support for a new practice under urgency and the right moment to act using emotionalisation and moralisation. The assessment of the NZ government's response strategy provides insights decision-makers could glean in developing policies to tame the virus.Practical implicationsThis study’s analysis demonstrates the unsustainability of rhetoric in the absence of reliable information.Originality/valueThe authors demonstrate the consequences of limited (intermittent) evidence and disregard for accounting/accountability data in public policy decisions under a rhetorical strategy.

Transparency in public administration as a challenge for a good democratic governance

In democratic societies, the transparency of public institutions is essential. Increasingly, developed or developing countries recognize that free access to information is fundamental to democracy. Whether we are talking about the government or the private companies that manage public services, access to the data held by these organizations means increasing accountability and allows citizens to know what these organizations do and what they use public money for. Access to information develops citizens' trust in public institutions, enabling citizens to understand public policy decisions and monitor their implementation. The purpose of our research is to identify the degree of transparency of the ministries in the Romanian Government. The research was based on public data and information identified on the websites of 18 ministries in the current structure of the Romanian Government, but also on data collected using online questionnaires answered by 45 officials from the Information and Documentation Departments of the ministries. The data and information obtained were processed in excel and SPSS. The database was completed with the evaluation reports on the implementation of Law 52/2003 on decisional transparency in the Romanian public administration, from 2017-2020. The results of our research show that ministries have made progress in ensuring administrative transparency. However, administrative transparency remains a challenge for Romanian government ministries. The results obtained are useful and interesting for both the field of knowledge and for ministries to help them identify ways to increase transparency for better democratic governance.