Commitment Costs Research Articles

Collateral damage: the emotional and material costs of political commitment for the followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi

ABSTRACT This article aims to cast light on the backstage of total militancy in the case of the followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi during the Risorgimento and post-Risorgimento. Political engagement is an existential commitment to a cause either in undercover conspiracy networks or in openly volunteering to fight all the way through to parliamentary activity that carries emotional and material costs. These costs can best be approached through the now rich scholarly literature on political emotions and exile, and the still under-investigated collateral effects of nineteenth-century patriotism that can be recovered from the study of the correspondence of families and friends and ego-documents. From Mazzini’s most intimate confessions to the choices made by Giovine Italia’s local leaders or by Garibaldi’s officers on the battlefield or even in the parliamentary arena, the impact of politics on the private horizon reveals the multiple layers of gain and loss, of expectation and disappointment, playing an unavoidable role in the lives of so many Italian men and women. The selected cases illustrate how disruptive political engagement proved to be when it entered the private sphere in the shape of risk, absence or punishment, and yet how fulfilling it was when it offered the ultimate reason for people leaving behind their loved ones and their professional status.

Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state acceptance of the UN human rights treaties’ individual complaint procedures

AbstractHow do states react to adverse decisions resulting from human rights treaties’ individual complaint procedures? While recent scholarship has shown particular interest in states’ reactions to international court judgments, research on state behavior vis-à-vis an increasing treaty body output remains scarce. I argue that states generally want to avoid the costs implied by adverse decisions, or ‘views’. Rising numbers of rebukes lead them to update their beliefs about the costliness of complaint procedure acceptance in a Bayesian manner. As a result, states become less inclined to accept further petition mechanisms under different human rights treaties. I test these assumptions on an original dataset containing information on individual complaint procedure acceptance and the distribution of 1320 views for a total number of 169 countries ranging from the year 1965 to 2018. Results from Cox proportional hazards regressions suggest that both the number of views against neighboring states and against the examined state itself decrease the likelihood of acceptance of most of the six individual complaint procedures under observation. I also find evidence that this effect is exacerbated if states are more likely to actually bear the costs of implementation. Findings indicate that the omission of further commitment can be a negative spillover of the treaty bodies’ quasi-judicial output.

The global cost of international commitments on land restoration

AbstractLand restoration and sustainable land management projects have now been proposed for up to a billion hectares globally, responding to continuous land degradation processes. But, a lack of reliable cost estimates hinders implementation, which results in a high perceived risk of restoration investments. This study addresses this gap, using cost data from 243 restoration projects from multiple sources to estimate the cost ranges for different types of restoration more precisely. The analysis shows median restoration costs vary from 185 $US/ha to 3012 $US/ha depending on the restoration measure, implying current global land restoration commitment cost 0.04%–0.27% of annual global GDP to implement. Since the majority of these commitments are made by developing countries, international cost‐sharing mechanisms, through climate or private finance, are required to move from goal setting to implementation.

A computational efficient approach for distributionally robust unit commitment with enhanced disjointed layered ambiguity set

AbstractTo achieve the sustainable development of the society, renewable energy dominated power systems are gradually formed. However, the uncertainty of renewable power poses challenges for power system operations, such as balancing the load and generation in day‐ahead unit commitment problems. To address this issue, an enhanced disjointed layered ambiguity set is proposed in this paper to effectively capture the uncertainty of renewable generation forecast errors. On this basis, a two‐stage distributionally robust unit commitment optimization problem is formulated, which is computational challenge. To this end, a novel reformation approach and a worst‐case support set identification method are proposed to derive the optimal solution in a computationally efficient way. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ambiguity set brings lower operation costs of unit commitment while maintaining similar reliability compared to existing methods. In detail, the proposed ambiguity set achieves a reduction in operating costs of approximately 10.01%. The proposed novel reformation approach and solution method are also shown to have higher computation efficiency than the existing Benders decomposition method, resulting in a reduction in computation time to less than 3.78% of the original duration.

A robust optimization approach for resiliency improvement in power distribution system

AbstractThe occurrence of natural disasters has led to an alarming increase in power interruptions, with severe impacts. Compounding this problem is the uncertain nature of data, which presents significant challenges in enhancing the resiliency of power distribution systems following such events. To tackle these issues, this paper introduces a robust optimization approach for improving the resiliency of power distribution systems. The approach encompasses crew teams for switching actions as part of the restoration process, along with demand response programs and mobile generators (MGs). By simultaneously leveraging these elements and considering the uncertainty associated with electrical load and electrical price, the resiliency of the system is enhanced. The objective function is tri‐level, comprising minimum, maximum, and minimum functions. At the first level, the approach minimizes the cost of commitment of combined heat and power plants (CHPs) by taking into account the location of MGs and the reconfiguration structure in power distribution systems. The second level aims to identify the worst‐case scenario for the uncertainty variables. Finally, the third level focuses on minimizing the total operation cost under the worst‐case scenario using demand response programs. The proposed algorithm is implemented on an IEEE 33‐bus test distribution system, with four different cases investigated.

Measurement of the environmental commitment costs at the Egyptian universities applied on universities hospitals

Measurement of the environmental commitment costs at the Egyptian universities applied on universities hospitals

The resiliency of photovoltaic applied fuelling station in Malaysia: A dynamic urban emission displacement assessment

The number of fuelling stations continue to increase with the growing population and demand. Low carbon building for the cities and communities concept has led to a reassessment of service provision and fuel station urbanisation using a safe and matured renewable system; solar photovoltaics. This study uses a dynamic urban emission displacement assessment considering spatial and temporal variables of a fuel retail building in Malaysia. The result shows that the carbon emission potency is not concentrated within the fuelling area; instead, it's redirected through vehicle emission, operation and maintenance. The annual emission displaced by the installed solar photovoltaic system is about 18,022 metric tonnes of CO 2 /year. The solar-integrated building has its monthly electricity cost reduced by 20% with only 70% of its roof space usage. The life cycle cost of a 50kW photovoltaic system refurbishment translates to around RM22,000 of savings per year. However, the return on investment may take about eight years. In reality, fossil fuel divestment is impossible due to its reliability, but renewable technology can improve the built environment and air quality management in the city. • Annual vehicle fuel emission is about 18 x 10 6 metric tonnes of CO 2 per station. • Vehicle displaced urban spatial-independent dynamic CO 2 emission potency. • The integrated solar photovoltaic system improves the fuelling station BEI by 90%. • A 20% reduction of commitment cost with only 70% available space occupation. • A 50kW system installation is equal to RM22,750 of savings per year.

Limited commitment, endogenous credibility and the challenges of price‐level targeting

AbstractThis paper studies the cost of limited commitment when a central bank commits to a price‐level target path but retains the discretion to re‐optimize it whenever the cost of honouring its commitment exceeds a tolerance threshold. Such discretion undermines the credibility of the price‐level target path and weakens its effectiveness to stabilize the economy. Endogenous target resets are more costly than exogenous target re‐optimizations and can give rise to multiple equilibria, including a low credibility equilibrium with frequent target resets and high volatility. Canadian data suggest that price‐level target resets could be quite frequent in practice.

Distributionally robust unit commitment with an adjustable uncertainty set and dynamic demand response

To address the uncertainty of renewable energy in unit commitment, an adjustable uncertainty set of renewable energy is introduced and unit commitment is scheduled to guarantee the safe operation of the power system in this set. However, the operational risk arises when renewable energy falls out of the adjustable uncertainty set and this risk should be evaluated to determine the adjustable uncertainty set. In this paper, a distributionally robust optimization approach is proposed to calculate the risks of load shedding and renewable energy curtailment at the lower and upper bounds of the adjustable uncertainty set. After the evaluation of the operational risk, the day-ahead unit commitment with the adjustable uncertainty set is determined together with the demand response reserve in the reduction of the operational risk. In real time, the dynamic demand response is proposed to further reduce the operational risk. The proposed distributionally robust method with the dynamic demand response for dealing with the uncertainty of renewable energy is verified on the IEEE 6-bus, 30-bus, and 118-bus systems. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the cost of the unit commitment and the operational risk.

Maintaining Trust When De-Escalating Commitment: Precommitment Alleviates Reputational Concerns

Escalation of commitment costs businesses and taxpayers billions of dollars. Management research has consistently found that even in cases where future prospects look dire, decision makers routinely escalate commitment to failing courses of action. We draw on psychological research on self-presentation to argue that reputational considerations are a key driver of such escalation: leaders who de-escalate may fear, and in fact be, distrusted. In four pre-registered experiments with managers (N= 2,661), we demonstrate an effective way to de-escalate while maintaining trust: pre-specifying conditions for de-escalation (i.e., precommitment). In the presence of precommitment, third-party observers perceive de-escalators as having more integrity and are more likely to trust them in a behavioral economic game, compared to the absence of precommitment (Studies 1 and 2). Decision-makers themselves recognize how precommitment changes their reputational incentives: in the presence of this precommitment, managers are not only more likely to de-escalate (Study 3), but also anticipate that they will be perceived as being more trustworthy (Studies 3 and 4). This work contributes evidence to the underexplored idea that self-presentation motives influence escalation of commitment, and also provides a practical and costless solution leaders can implement. By harnessing precommitment, leaders can maintain trust when deciding to de-escalate.

Do refugees cause crime?

• There is not any statistically significant impact of the Syrian refugees on crime rates in Turkey in the short-run (1-year after the treatment). • Staggered difference-in-differences analysis shows that the provinces where refugees make up over 1 percent of the total population do not demonstrate any statistically significant impact on their crime rates in the long run, either. • There is a negative impact of treatment intensity on crime rates per capita when the impact of refugee population share is analyzed using an instrumental variables strategy. The same analysis for the crime rates per native resident produces null effects. • Overall, the empirical analyses provide causal evidence for a rather lower propensity of crime commitment among the Syrian refugees in Turkey compared to the country’s native population. The null effects of refugees on crime rates per native resident, on the other hand, can be interpreted as a non-significant spillover effect of refugees on native criminality. • Higher expected costs of crime commitment for refugees such as deportation and negligible adverse impacts of them, on average, on the natives’ labor market outcomes, among other mechanisms, might have played an important role in these findings. The impact of immigration on crime continues to stir heated debates in public policy circles around the world. Surveys indicate that host societies favor controversial measures because they are concerned about what they perceive to be an impingement exacted on their security with each new wave of migration. Seeking whether there is any truth to such perceptions, this paper analyzes the refugees’ impact on crime rates, using the case of Turkey which has started to host the world’s largest refugee population within any national borders due to the Syrian civil war. In doing so, the paper employs instrumental variables, difference-in-differences (DiD), and staggered DiD methods to explain if the conflict-fleeing Syrians have pushed Turkey’s crime rates higher in the short and the long run. It also controls for a multitude of time-varying provincial characteristics and presents a battery of robustness checks against various identification threats. As a result, DiD estimates show that refugees do not have any causal effect on the crime rates in Turkey. More strikingly, its IV estimates provide evidence for a rather negative effect on the crime rates per capita whilst finding a null effect on the crime rates per native resident in particular.

No Check We Won't Write: A Report on the High Cost of Sex Offender Incarceration.

Child sexual abuse is a preventable public health problem that is addressed primarily via reactive criminal justice efforts. In this report, we focus on the cost of incarcerating adults convicted of sex crimes against children in the United States. Specifically, we summarize publicly available information on U.S. state and federal prison and sex offender civil commitment costs. Wherever possible, we used government data sources to inform cost estimates. Results indicate the annual cost to incarcerate adults convicted of sex crimes against children in the United States approaches $5.4 billion. This estimate does not include any costs incurred prior to incarceration (e.g., related to detection and prosecution) or post-release (e.g., related to supervision or registration). Nor does this estimate capture administrative and judicial costs associated with appeals, or administrative costs that cannot be extricated from other budgets, as is the case when costs per-prisoner are shared between prisons and civil commitment facilities. We believe information on the substantial funding dedicated to incarceration will be useful to U.S. federal, state, and local lawmakers and to international policymakers as they consider allocating resources to the development, evaluation and dissemination of effective prevention strategies aimed at keeping children safe from sexual abuse in the first place.

Optimal Unit Commitment with Renewable Energy in Regulated and Deregulated Systems

In this paper, the impact of the wind power generation system on the total cost and profit of the system is studied by using the proposed procedure of binary Sine Cosine (BSC) optimization algorithm with optimal priority list (OPL) algorithm. As well, investigate the advantages of system transformation from a regulated system to a deregulated system and the difference in the objective functions of the two systems. The suggested procedure is carried out in two parallel algorithms; The goal of the first algorithm is to reduce the space of searching by using OPL, while the second algorithm adjusts BSC to get the optimal economic dispatch with minimum operation cost of the unit commitment (UCP) problem in the regulated system. But, in the deregulated system, the second algorithm adopts the BSC technique to find the optimal solution to the profit-based unit commitment problem (PBUCP), through the fast of researching the BSC technique. The proposed procedure is applied to IEEE 10-unit test system integrated with the wind generator system. While the second is an actual system in the Egyptian site at Hurghada. The results of this algorithm are compared with previous literature to illustrate the efficiency and capability of this algorithm. Based on the results obtained in the regulated system, the suggested procedure gives better results than the algorithm in previous literature, saves computational efforts, and increases the efficiency of the output power of each unit in the system and lowers the price of kWh. Besides, in the deregulated system the profit is high and the system is more reliable.

How A Social Enterprise Wanes: The Transaction Costs of Credible Commitments at Etsy.com

This article fathoms how a social enterprise wanes by applying the construct of imperative credible commitments from transaction cost economics to the case of Etsy.com, an online marketplace created to connect artisans and craftwork enthusiasts. In the absence of imperative credible commitments, Etsy’s social mission was bound to change, leaving the company’s major stakeholders without safeguards to protect the perpetuation of the transactions that Etsy was created to serve. The construct of credible commitments has proved to be fertile in understanding issues of political and economic transition, yet its relevance to puzzle out the corporate world has been underestimated. To bridge this gap, we have recourse to the analogy between disabling the discretion of monarchs and executives to prevent them from reneging on commitments. Hence, by building on political economy academics’ attention is drawn to strategies that, despite existing in the corporate world, have rarely been perceived as important by management and economics scholars.

Determinan Intensi Whistleblowing Internal pada OPD Kabupaten Purbalingga

This research aims to examine the determinants of internal whistleblowing intention at OPD Purbalingga Regency. The determinants of internal whistleblowing intention need to be examined because Indonesia is one of the countries with a high level of fraud. This research used primary data in the form questionnaires with purposive sampling method. The sample used in this study were 27 Regional Apparatus Organizations (OPD) in Purbalingga Regency, Central Java Province. The variables examined in this study were professional commitment, ethical environment, moral intensity, and personal cost. This research used descriptive analysis and multiple linear regression analysis. The results of this study indicate that professional commitment, ethical environment, moral intensity, and personal cost have a positive and partial effect on the intention to conduct internal whistleblowing at the Regional Apparatus Organization (OPD) of Purbalingga Regency. A person with a high moral intensity tends to have a high intensity to whistleblowing. This means that morals are often an important limitation for a person to take action. A person with high moral boundaries will not like anything beyond the existing moral rules.

Distinctively Political Normativity in Political Realism: Unattractive or Redundant

Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists (mainstream liberals), has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high (first claim), and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it (second claim). Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory.

Enhancing the power grid flexibility with battery energy storage transportation and transmission switching

The penetration of large-scale renewable energy puts an urgent demand on increasing power grid flexibility. From the power grid perspective, transmission congestion has become one of the bottle-neck factors limiting renewable energy integration. In the tradition, transmission topology is regarded to be unadjustable, and energy storage only plays an important role in the local area where it locates. To enhance the transmission system flexibility and relieve transmission congestion, this paper proposes a network-constraint unit commitment (NCUC) model considering battery energy storage transportation (BEST) and transmission switching (TS). This model is integrated with a novel indicator based BEST model and a TS model to minimize the overall operating cost. The benefits of BEST mobility and TS flexibility are quantitatively evaluated through compared with the traditional NCUC model. Based on the difference between the overall operating cost of unit commitment (UC) and NCUC, we quantitatively evaluated the flexibility provided by BEST and TS by the overall operating cost reduction. A case study on a modified IEEE RTS-79 system is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the BEST and TS have a synergistic effect on enhancing power grid flexibility, which reflects in this study as the power grid operating economics improvement and renewable energy curtailment reduction. Besides, though the BEST and TS bring transmission system more losses, applying them into the system could relieve transmission congestion, which makes them valuable technologies to improve power system security.

Adjustable robust optimization approach for two-stage operation of energy hub-based microgrids

Growing demand for energy carriers has led to an increased interest in developing and managing multiple energy carrier microgrids. Furthermore, the volatile nature of renewable resources as well as the uncertain electrical and thermal demands imposes significant challenges for the operation of microgrids. Motivated by this, the paper leverages a min max min robust framework for short-term operation of microgrids with natural gas network to capture the uncertainty of wind generation and electrical/thermal loads. The proposed model is linearized and solved using the column-and-constraint generation (C&CG) procedure that decomposes the framework into a master problem and a sub-problem. The master problem minimizes the unit commitment cost, while the sub-problem determines the dispatch cost associated with the worst realization of uncertainties via a max min objective function. Also, polyhedral uncertainty sets are defined with budget of uncertainty parameter that adjusts the trade-off between the operation cost and the degree of robustness. The effectiveness of the framework is assessed and discussed via a 21-node energy hub-based microgrid. It can be seen that the solution immunizes against all realizations of uncertainties, whereby increasing the budget of uncertainty and the forecast error, the system robustness is improved. Moreover, the dual variables of the sub-problem are converted to the primary variables in order to evaluate the unit commitment and energy dispatch results.

Dispatching fuel-cell hybrid electric vehicles toward transportation and energy systems integration

With an increasing integration of traditional electric vehicles (EVs), the ensuing congestion and overloading issues have threatened the reliability of power grid operation. Hydrogen has been advocated as a promising energy carrier to achieve a low-carbon transportation and energy (trans-energy) systems, which can support the popularization of fuel cell hybrid EVs (FCHEVs) while enhancing the flexibility of power grids. In this paper, we propose an optimal scheduling framework for trans-energy systems that evaluates the merits of hydrogen supply chain from water electrolysis, compressed storage and transportation to FCHEV utilization. A detailed FCHEV model is established, and mileage is modeled as a function of the stored electricity and hydrogen mass. A stochastic programming-based scheduling model is formulated, which minimizes the total cost of unit commitment and hydrogen supply chain. Dijkstra algorithm is adopted to search the shortest path for hydrogen transportation. Case studies demonstrate that FCHEVs can reduce the operation costs of the trans-energy systems and facilitate the accommodation of renewable energy compared to traditional EVs.

Vaccine Procurement Contracts for Developing Countries

In recent years, several Global Health Organizations (GHOs) have experimented with market‐based procurement contracts to encourage pharmaceutical companies to bring late‐stage vaccines to developing‐country markets. Pharmaceutical companies often find such markets financially unattractive because the opportunity cost of capacity commitment is high, developing countries have limited ability to pay, and demand is uncertain. A contract design recently implemented by one GHO offers the manufacturer a per‐dose sales subsidy, which is paid by the GHO, on top of the base price paid by developing countries. The subsidy is required because the base price is not enough, by itself, to induce the manufacturer to commit capacity for developing‐country markets. A natural question that arises in this context is whether, within a fixed budget, alternate contract designs lead to higher capacity commitment. This study proposes and analyzes three contract designs that include the current practice and two alternatives inspired by contracts studied in the operations management literature. It also considers two types of budget constraints that may arise in practice and quantifies the impact of each type of budget constraint on the manufacturer’s capacity commitment. We show that the best contract design depends on the size of the budget, and that GHOs can increase capacity commitment (over the contract design used in practice) by choosing the budget‐appropriate contract design and optimal parameters for the chosen design.