The agricultural sector is one of the important sectors for the Indonesian economy. Coffee is one of the commodities produced from the plantation sub-sector included in the agricultural sector which also contributes greatly to the Indonesia economy, especially as a source of foreign exchange, employment and income sources as well as other economic actors. This study aims to determine whether the factors of land area production, number of productive trees, farming costs and labour used by coffee farmers are elastic or inelastic to coffee production. Samples were taken as many as 400 coffee farmers spread in four districts namely North Toraja Regency, Enrekang Regency, Sinjai Regency and Bantaeng Regency, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Data collected in the form of primary data and secondary data. The analysis used the Cobb-Douglass production function. The results show that the use of production factors; land area, number of productive trees, farming costs and labor are inelastic to coffee production, the scale of farming follows the rules of increasing return to scale. Therefore, it is expected that the support of local government (related institutions) to assist coffee farmers in providing superior seeds to increase coffee production, farmers incomes and reduce land conversion.
Ministerial cabinets hold a central place in the Belgian politico-administrative system, carrying out the bulk of policy formulation. However, they do not operate in isolation and rely on other actors of the policy advisory system for information supply and advice. They request, receive and use various advisory inputs. This article investigates how ministerial advisers utilize policy advice when they formulate policies. Based on a unique survey targeting ministerial cabinet members, it shows that policy advice utilization varies according to the source and its location in the policy advisory system. The sample consists of ministerial advisers from 11 ministerial cabinets in the two Belgian federated entities' governments of Wallonia and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. Ministerial advisers still predominantly use advice from the civil service, which points to the continued importance of advice provision from internal, in-house sources. However, advice from external actors – such as trade unions, civil society or consulting firms – have been observed to have rather high repercussions on policy formulation activities too. Advisory bodies appear to be very much active in supplying advice, but this same advice does not yield comparatively higher utilization scores. Points for practitioners This study focuses on policy advice utilization by members of ministerial cabinets in Belgium, especially when they formulate policies. It shows that internal, in-house sources remain important advice-providers and their advisory inputs still abundantly feed into the policy work carried out at the level of government. However, this article provides evidence that external sources might also supply advice that directly finds its way to decision-makers working in ministerial cabinets and that have considerable repercussions at that level too. This is the case for advice from trade unions, (organized) civil society or consulting firms, among others. Quite importantly for practitioners, our results suggest that ministerial advisers sometimes prefer controlling advisory exchanges and running separate consultations with one stakeholder at a time, instead of having to deal with collective, internal institutions that represent multiple interests, like advisory bodies. We did not observe striking differences in the degree of utilization between solicited and unsolicited advice, which means that for civil servants or stakeholders, sending policy advice previously unrequested by ministerial cabinets is not necessarily a fruitless strategy to follow.
This article examined the premises of interpersonal deception theory (IDT) within an advice-giving context. Advisors with quality and persuasion goals provided advice concerning stock rankings to decision makers either primed or not primed to be suspicious of advisors' motives. Two competing hypotheses were proposed. First, suspicious decision makers were predicted to accept less advice from all advisors and be no more likely to detect advisors' motives than nonsuspicious decision makers. Second, suspicious decision makers were predicted to be better able to detect the motives of advisors and accept less advice from the advisor with the persuasive motive than nonsuspicious decision makers. The first hypothesis was supported. The persuasive advisor had significantly higher confidence than the quality advisor on the rankings used to give advice, although not on private rankings. Advisors' confidence on these rankings fully mediated their influence on the decision maker.
AbstractThis article explores why the Swiss Federal Council and the Swiss Federal Parliament were reluctant to follow the majority views of the scientific epidemiological community at the beginning of the second wave of the Covid‐19 pandemic. We propose an institutionalist take on this question and argue that one major explanation could be the input overload that is characteristic of the Swiss federal political system. We define input overload as the simultaneous inputs of corporatist, pluralist, federalist and direct democratic subsystems. Adding another major input—this time from the scientific subsystem—may have threatened to further erode the government's and parliament's discretionary power to cope with the pandemic. We assume that the federal government reduced its input overload by fending off scientific advice.
AbstractAdvice taking and related research is dominated by deterministic weighting indices, specifically ratio‐of‐differences‐based formulas for investigating informational influence. Their arithmetic is intuitively simple, but they pose several measurement problems and restrict research to a particular paradigmatic approach. As a solution, we propose to specify how strongly peoples' judgments are influenced by externally provided evidence by fitting corresponding mixed‐effects regression models. Our approach explicitly distinguishes between endogenous components, such as updated beliefs, and exogenous components, such as independent initial judgments and advice. Crucially, mixed‐effects regression coefficients of various exogenous sources of information also reflect individual weighting but are based on a conceptually consistent representation of the endogenous judgment process. The formal derivation of the proposed weighting measures is accompanied by a detailed elaboration on their most important technical and statistical subtleties. We use this modeling approach to revisit empirical findings from several paradigms investigating algorithm aversion, sequential collaboration, and advice taking. In summary, we replicate and extend the original finding of algorithm appreciation and initially demonstrate a lack of evidence for both systematic order effects in sequential collaboration as well as differential weighting of multiple pieces of advice. In addition to opening new avenues for innovative research, appropriate modeling of information sampling and utilization has the potential to increase the reproducibility and replicability of behavioral science. Furthermore, the proposed method is relevant beyond advice taking, as mixed‐effects regression weights can also inform research on related cognitive phenomena such as multidimensional belief updating, anchoring effects, hindsight bias, or attitude change.
