Damages

About: Damages is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9365 publications have been published within this topic receiving 89750 citations. The topic is also known as: compensation award.

ResilSIM—A Decision Support Tool for Estimating Resilience of Urban Systems

Abstract: Damages to urban systems as a result of water-related natural disasters have escalated in recent years. The observed trend is expected to increase in the future as the impacts of population growth, rapid urbanization and climate change persist. To alleviate the damages associated with these impacts, it is recommended to integrate disaster management methods into planning, design and operational policies under all levels of government. This manuscript proposes the concept of ResilSIM: A decision support tool that rapidly estimates the resilience (a modern disaster management measure that is dynamic in time and space) of an urban system to the consequences of natural disasters. The web-based tool (with mobile access) operates in near real-time. It is designed to assist decision makers in selecting the best options for integrating adaptive capacity into their communities to protect against the negative impacts of a hazard. ResilSIM is developed for application in Toronto and London, Ontario, Canada; however, it is only demonstrated for use in the city of London, which is susceptible to riverine flooding. It is observed how the incorporation of different combinations of adaptation options maintain or strengthen London’s basic structures and functions in the event of a flood.

Copy Me Happy: The Metaphoric Expansion of Copyright in a Digital Society

Abstract: The article uses conceptual metaphor theory to analyse how the concept of “copy” in copyright law is expanding in a digital society to cover more phenomena than originally intended. For this purpose, the legally accepted model for valuing media files in the case against The Pirate Bay (TPB) is used in the analysis. When four men behind TPB were convicted in the District Court of Stockholm, Sweden, on 17 April 2009, to many, it marked a victory over online piracy for the American and Swedish media corporations. The convicted men were jointly liable for the damages of roughly EUR 3.5 million. But how do you calculate damages of file sharing? For example, what is the value of a copy? The article uses a model for valuating files in monetary numbers, suggested by the American plaintiffs and sanctioned by the District Court in the case against the BitTorrent site TPB, in order to calculate the total value of an entire, and in this anonymous other, BitTorrent site. These calculated hypothetical figures are huge—EUR 53 billion—and grow click by click which, on its face, questions some of the key assumptions in the copy-by-copy valuation that are sprung from analogue conceptions of reality, and transferred into a digital context. This signals a (legal) conceptual expansion of the meaning of “copy” in copyright that does not seem to fit with how the phenomenon is conceptualised by the younger generation of media consumers.

Contingent Valuation: The Wrong Tool to Measure Passive-Use Losses

Abstract: William Desvousges is senior director and Richard W. Dunford is assistant director of ResearchTriangle Institute's Natural Resource and Environmental Valuation Program. Sara P. Hudson works at RTf on damage assessment projects relating to oil spills and hazardous substance releases, and Alicia R. Gable is completing her undergraduate degree in economics and international studies at the University of North Carolina. The measurement of passive-use values, values that do not depend on human use of natural resources, is one of the most controversial topics facing environmental economists today. Most economists, including ourselves, feel that people mayvalue the existence of unique beaches, lakes, and other natural resources, even though they may not actually use them. However, while use values can be readily estimated by observing people's actual behavior, passive-use values have no associated behavior to use in estimation. The main empirical challenges are to determine which resources have passive-use values and whether these values can be reliably estimated. Recently, passive-use values have played a critical role in policy decisions concerning compensation for damages to natural resources. In 1986, the u.s. Department of the Interior promulgated natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) regulations, allowing trustees of natural resources (i.e., government agencies) to be compensated for damages resulting from a chemical or hazardous substance release. Under these regulations, trustees could recover foregone passive-use values only if no foregone use values could be estimated. In 1989, the U.S. Court of Appeals significantly expanded the potential role of passive-use values in natural resource damages by ordering potentially responsible parties to pay for foregone passive-use values, if those values are "reliably" measured. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 further increased the potential importance of passive-use damages in NRDAs, supporting the Court of Appeals' decision. As a result of these developments and an increasing number of state legislative actions, trustees have filed numerous suits against potentially responsible parties (PRPs) to recover foregone passive-use values. Since potentially large monetary settlements are at stake, determining whether passive-use values can be reliably measured is very important.

Indisputably Essential: The Economics of Dispute Settlement Institutions in Trade Agreements

Abstract: Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents opportunism. However, economic scholarship has been less coherent in explaining why countries choose to settle and enforce their trade disputes with the help of an impartial third party, a "trade court". Typically, economists focusing on the purpose of trade agreements have assumed away the very reasons why institutions are needed, since under standard assumptions, neither defection from the rules nor disputes are expected to occur. This paper is a step towards the formulation of a coherent economic theory of dispute settlement. It challenges traditional models of enforcement (primarily concerned with acts of punishment) for being insufficient in explaining the existence of dispute settlement institutions. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the economics of dispute settlement institutions and demonstrate to what extent the literatures of trade cooperation and dispute institutions are (and should be) interlinked. On the basis of these theories, we show that dispute settlement institutions in trade agreements may assume a variety of roles, including that of an information repository and disseminator, an honest broker, an arbitrator and calculator of damages, an active information gatherer or an adjudicator.