Provision Of Public Information Research Articles

Pollution Policy: the Role for Publicly Provided Information

This paper identifies a market failure in the provision of information about polluting consumer products and argues that there is a role for public information provision if no other policy instruments are available. The market failure arises because the individual consumer does not take full account of the benefit she bestows on other consumers if acquired information leads her to reduce her consumption of the polluting product. If a corrective tax is available then the role for public information provision is reduced to one of ensuring that the corrective tax is informationally consistent with the equilibrium it induces.

The press, the market and democracy

Abstract The newspaper press in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe is currently being re‐organized on market lines. This will produce a much greater reliance upon advertising revenues. The evidence from developed market economies demonstrates that such a press is sharply stratified with regard to the provision of public information. The resulting imbalance produces severe problems for theories of democracy. In order to lessen the impact of these problems, some countries in Europe, for example Sweden, have managed to adopt a policy subsidy without endangering the freedom of the press.

Local Authority Videotex Association (LAVA): HUMAN INFORMATION NETWORKS II SEMINAR

LAVA and the Municipal Journal Jointly organised a seminar on public information provision in the 1990s at the Swallow Hotel in Solihull. The seminar was held to coincide with the Annual General Meeting of LAVA on 23 January 1992 and there follows a brief summary of the papers presented.

The Seveso Directive: An Italian Pilot Study in Enabling Communication

In 1982 the Council of the European Communities issued a Directive on the Major Accident Hazards of Certain Industrial Activities, commonly known as the Seveso Directive. Besides other requirements, the Directive specifies that members of the public liable to be affected by a major accident from certain industrial activities must be informed of safety measures and how they should behave in the event of an accident. The Directive was subsequently amended in an extensive way. Upon the transposition of the Seveso Directive and its amendments into national legislations, the 12 European Member States are faced with the task of "appropriately and effectively" informing the public about major accident hazards. Delays are observed throughout the community, both in transposing the Directives and implementing public information. A pilot study on "Risk Information Needs" was commissioned and carried out at two Seveso sites in Italy in order to begin to resolve some of the problems involved in the provision of public information and to suggest appropriate guidelines. One hundred subjects answered an experimental protocol designed to assess their "information needs." This article presents the theoretical background, the pragmatic aims, and the design of the study. It also summarizes its most relevant findings and suggests some recommendations for the provision of information to the public.

The Information Economics Approach to Financial Reporting

Abstract This paper provides a non-technical overview of the literature on the economics of information and its implications for financial reporting. This paper attempts to spell out the unity of approach which underlies all information economics models and focuses on the main implications of the literature for accounting policy makers. The central section of the paper identifies precise conditions under which the provision of public information can lead to an improvement in social welfare. An understanding of these conditions is essential for policy makers if they are to take into account the economic effects of their decisions. The final section highlights three important unresolved issues and identifies promising directions for further research.

The value of information in resource exploration: The interaction of strategic plays and institutional rules

Several characteristics of information used in resource exploration have led to conjectures that the private market will provide a suboptimal amount of such information. A public information provision has been proposed as a remedy, both for problems of underproduction and overproduction of private information. This paper demonstrates that, barring exceptional conditions, public provision of information cannot be guaranteed to be a generic solution to the private information overprovision problem. In fact, an example is developed to demonstrate the possibility that public information exacerbates the private overprovision problem.

Incomplete Information, High-Low Bidding and Public Information in First Price Auctions

High-low bidding refers to auctions of a series of objects where for a subset of the auctioned objects one of two buyers bids high on some objects and low on others while the other buyer does the reverse. This paper shows that high-low bidding does not imply collusive behavior among buyers. In particular, through a formal modeling of a noncooperative game of information acquisition and bidding decisions, it shows that high-low bidding can be obtained. The paper also demonstrates that if the cost of information to a seller is less than the equilibrium joint expected information cost of the buyers, then it pays the seller to provide public information. Finally, if the provision of public information is not feasible but a seller can know whether buyers have acquired information, then it pays the seller to make known to the buyers and to pursue a policy that just prior to the start of an auction the seller will announce which buyer has acquired information.