Two experiments investigating the constancy of egocentric visual direction were conducted. In Experiment 1, subjects indicated when a briefly exposed light was subjectively straight ahead during various degrees of asymmetric convergence. The results indicated that the perception of direction exhibited systematic underconstancy. The departures from constancy were dependent upon the degree of asymmetric convergence, increasing as asymmetric convergence increased. Experiment 2 investigated the source of underconstancy found in Experiment 1. The results showed that the underconstancy was due to a combination of the misregistration of eye position and misregistration of the retinal location stimulated. The errors due to misregistration of retinal area were constant regardless of location of the test target, while the errors due to misregistration of eye position were dependent upon the degree of asymmetric convergence. The results were interpreted as supporting a "taking-into-account" model of visual direction.

Strong local opposition to the construction of solid waste landfills has become commonplace and the siting of landfills in the United States is time consuming and expensive. To ease the siting process, host compensation in exchange for permission to construct a landfill has become popular. The value and nature of host compensation varies dramatically across communities, but the reasons for this variation are relatively unexplored. We construct a national data set consisting of host fees paid by the 104 largest privately owned solid waste landfills in 1996, along with the characteristics of the landfills and the host communities. Our findings suggest that he direct participation of citizens in host fee negotiations, the community knowledge stemming from having hosted a prior landfill, and the presence of state mandates for minimum host compensation all lead to much greater amounts of host compensation. We find that the bargaining position of the landfill developer is less important, in terms of the magnitude of the effect. However we do find evidence that firms with deeper pockets are more likely to pay higher host fees. We find limited evidence that a community's race and income level matter after accounting for factors that directly reflect citizen involvement. The analysis also indicates that landfills that accept risky wastes, such as contaminated soil or sludge, and problematic wastes, such as tires pay higher host fees.

Abstract:EPA has conducted several ex post assessments of regulatory compliance costs, with the ultimate goal of identifying ways to improve ex ante cost estimation. The work to date has culminated in four case studies that examine five regulations using a common conceptual framework. The standardized framework provides a systematic way to investigate key drivers of compliance costs to see if judgments can be made about why and how ex ante and ex post estimates of costs differ. In addition to describing this conceptual framework, we describe the criteria used to select the rules to be analyzed, summarize the main hypotheses for why ex ante and ex post cost estimates may differ and discuss some of the challenges encountered in conducting these ex post analyses.

This paper provides a systematic overview of water quality trading programs and one-time offset agreements in the USA. The primary source of information for this overview is a detailed database, collected and compiled by a team of researchers at Dartmouth College. Details discussed include: sources of the pollutant, lypes of pollutants traded, legal liability, main regulatory drivers, market structure, trading ratios, transaction and administrative costs and difficulties encountered in trading. We find that trading has often been explored as a way to meet more suingent discharge limits or walcrshed-wide caps. The most common type of trading program in the United States is between point sources and non-point sources. Point sources are usually held liable for non-point source reductions. The pollutants most commonly traded in the USA are nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen and almost all offset and trading programs focus on one pollutant only. However, market structures, trading ratios and other details of the trading framework vary widely among programs. No single characteristic appears to be a good predictor of a successful trading program.