Forecasting the Success of Governmental "Incentivized" Initiatives: Case Study of a New Policy Promoting the Replacement of Old Household; Air-conditioners

Governments often use budget so as to provide incentives for citizens to adopt new policies, especially when these are promoting eco-friendly technologies e.g. to subsidise the price of a hybrid-car. The public money spent on each policy, is considered to be value-for–money only if many citizens do...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of knowledge management, economics and information technology Vol. 2; no. 1
Main Authors PETROPOULOS, Fotios, NIKOLOPOULOS, Konstantinos, Akrivi, LITSA
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published ScientificPapers.org 2012
SeriesJournal of Knowledge Management, Economics and Information Technology
Subjects
Government
Group forecasting
Incentives
Policy Implementation
Structured Analogies
Subsidies
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Summary:Governments often use budget so as to provide incentives for citizens to adopt new policies, especially when these are promoting eco-friendly technologies e.g. to subsidise the price of a hybrid-car. The public money spent on each policy, is considered to be value-for–money only if many citizens do adopt the proposed policy. This is also known as the ‘cost-effectiveness’ or the ‘economic success’ of a new policy. The latter should not be confused with the ‘economic impact’ of the new policy, as this is usually referred to the respective macro/micro socio-economic impact. This study reports on a experiment with semi-experts using Structured Analogies (SA) forecasting the success of a new policy promoting replacing old household air conditioners with energy saving units under a new environment and technology initiative implemented by a European government. The findings shows evidence that Structured Analogies (SA) is a useful forecasting tool for policy making, however all methods predicted results that were considerably off the mark, indicating the difficulty of the forecasting task under examination.
ISSN:2069-5934
2069-5934