Jan Whittington

When to Partner for Public Infrastructure? Transaction Cost Evaluation of Design-Build Delivery

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Public agencies traditionally request bids and award contracts to private firms after infrastructure designs are complete (bid-build). They also increasingly partner with private firms, often by folding capital improvements into a contract to design and build (design-build). The latter involves much more than the mere transfer of design work to the private sector, such as time to completion; the merits or problems of design-build strategies can, thus, be difficult to isolate. This article presents a method for doing so. Together with the development of a theory of contracting, the comparative analysis of two very similar highway overpass projects, one design-build and the other bid-build, demonstrates how so-called transaction cost economics can clarify the details of partnership cost-effectiveness. Takeaway for practice: Transaction cost analysis disaggregates and evaluates the costs of completed projects, accounting for factors typically external to economic analysis. My approach reveals tradeoffs between variables of interest to planners, such as the pace of delivery, public participation, environmental compliance, and the transfer of risk of cost overrun to the private sector. Research support: This research was made possible by a grant from the University of California Transportation Center, shared with Professor David Dowall.

Transaction Cost Analysis of In-Clinic Versus Telehealth Consultations for Chronic Pain: Preliminary Evidence for Rapid and Affordable Access to Interdisciplinary Collaborative Consultation

OBJECTIVES With ever increasing mandates to reduce costs and increase the quality of pain management, health care institutions are faced with the challenge of adopting innovative technologies and shifting workflows to provide value-based care. Transaction cost economic analysis can provide comparative evaluation of the consequences of these changes in the delivery of care. The aim of this study was to establish proof-of-concept using transaction cost analysis to examine chronic pain management in-clinic and through telehealth. METHODS Participating health care providers were asked to identify and describe two comparable completed transactions for patients with chronic pain: one consultation between patient and specialist in-clinic and the other a telehealth presentation of a patients case by the primary care provider to a team of pain medicine specialists. Each provider completed two on-site interviews. Focus was on the time, value of time, and labor costs per transaction. Number of steps, time, and costs for providers and patients were identified. RESULTS Forty-six discrete steps were taken for the in-clinic transaction, and 27 steps were taken for the telehealth transaction. Although similar in costs per patient (

Are we prepared for the economic risk resulting from telecom hotel disruptions

332.89 in-clinic vs.

Climate-informed decisions: the capital investment plan as a mechanism for lowering carbon emissions

376.48 telehealth), the costs accrued over 153 business days in-clinic and 4 business days for telehealth. Time elapsed between referral and completion of initial consultation was 72 days in-clinic, 4 days for telehealth. CONCLUSIONS U.S. health care is moving toward the use of more technologies and practices, and the information provided by transaction cost analyses of care delivery for pain management will be important to determine actual cost savings and benefits.

Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government

Abstract Large and small businesses in Seattle, Washington, as in most urban centers across the United States, increasingly rely on telecom hotels and related telecommunications centers to conduct business operations. What would be the economic impact to these businesses if a natural or man-made disaster were to make this infrastructure unavailable for a significant period of time? How long would it take for the owners of small businesses, which provide the foundation for economic recovery, to give up and move away? Are metropolitan regions prepared for this risk? This paper draws on publicly available reports of telecom hotel investments to examine the economic risks that such telecommunications hubs pose at the regional scale. New York City and Seattle are two urban areas that depend on key investments in telecom hotels. In the Pacific Northwest, these assets are located downtown, primarily in the center of the urban real estate market of Seattle. Although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were directed at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, collateral damage to a major telecommunications hub brought outages during and after the attacks that highlighted the serious risk posed to small- and mid-sized businesses from disruptions in telecommunications service. The Seattle case study illustrates the potential to learn from the experience in Lower Manhattan and apply this knowledge across the United States. Regional economic analysis of the benefits of and the means to protect small- and mid-sized businesses can provide the basis for strategic investments that minimize economic loss and reduce the recovery time.

Accuracy, Security, and Architecture Impacts and Challenges of Mobile and Web Technologies:Geolocation Field Data Collection in Washington State Water Resources

Global trajectories for reducing carbon emissions depend on the local adoption of alternatives to conventional energy sources, technologies, and urban development. Yet, decisions on which type of capital investments to make, made by local governments as part of the normal budget cycle, typically do not incorporate climate considerations. Furthermore, current academic and professional literature specific to climate change draws attention to decision-making tools that would require access to technical expertise, data, and financial support that may not be practical for cities in low- and middle-income countries. Arguably, the methodologies most able to effect this transformation will be those that are convenient and affordable to administer, and that offer straight-forward low carbon alternatives to traditional forms of infrastructure investment. Current methodologies for capital investment planning that do not take climate change into consideration can result in prioritization of investments that diverge from a low carbon path and a potential missed opportunity to reap financial benefits from efficiency gains. This paper concludes that relatively minor alterations to common procedures can reveal the trade-offs and local benefits of low carbon alternatives in the capital investment planning process. This paper was written as an input to the preparation of the Climate-Informed Capital Investment Planning Guidebook, a how-to guide for local government staff, which will be published in 2015.

Political and Economic Implications of Authoritarian Control of the Internet

Cities hold considerable information, including details about the daily lives of residents and employees, maps of critical infrastructure, and records of the officials’ internal deliberations. Cities are beginning to realize that this data has economic and other value: If done wisely, the responsible release of city information can also release greater efficiency and innovation in the public and private sector. New services are cropping up that leverage open city data to great effect. Meanwhile, activist groups and individual residents are placing increasing pressure on state and local government to be more transparent and accountable, even as others sound an alarm over the privacy issues that inevitably attend greater data promiscuity. This takes the form of political pressure to release more information, as well as increased requests for information under the many public records acts across the country. The result of these forces is that cities are beginning to open their data as never before. It turns out there is surprisingly little research to date into the important and growing area of municipal open data. This article is among the first sustained, cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system. We are a team of researchers in law, computer science, information science, and urban studies. We have worked hand-in-hand with the City of Seattle, Washington for the better part of a year to understand its current procedures from each disciplinary perspective. Based on this empirical work, we generate a set of recommendations to help the city manage risk latent in opening its data.

Free: Accounting for the Costs of the Internet’s Most Popular Price

The purpose of this paper is to examine accuracy, security, and architecture impacts and challenges of mobile and web technologies through the case study of collecting geolocation field data in Washington (WA) State water resources. Effective management of water as a public resource relies on the capture, storage, and retrieval of accurate geographic position data. This is also true of a broad range of business domains beyond water resources, such as earth sciences, city planning, and navigation to name a few. Application developers must choose how to capture this information (with enough accuracy to be useful for its intended application) and get that data to a place where it can be processed and used. A traditional monotonic application using a Global Positioning System (GPS) and a mobile app using a smartphone are available today. The advent of HTML 5 now allows the development of a mobile web app, which is not dependent on any particular smartphone platform. These multiple technical options lead to two research questions: How does an HTML5 mobile web app solution work in terms of accuracy, security, and architecture, compared with a GPS-based solution and a mobile native app solution for collecting geolocation field data? And second, as HTML5 mobile web apps are a relatively new technology, what best practices can we uncover to assist in the process of choosing between an HTML5 mobile web app and a mobile native app, and also what are the best practices for building a mobile web app that can operate offline? To answer these questions, we build an HTML5 mobile web app called „LocationSharpener‟ for collecting GPS locations leveraging three of the new HTML5 features: IndexedDB, AppCache, and GeoLocation. We use the mobile web app to collect locations of water resources facilities like wells and diversions and analyze how accurately the app collects the geolocation data. We apply threat risk modeling to the mobile web app to analyze its security and privacy compared to that of the native mobile app approach. In addition, by documenting the architecture of the mobile web app with multiple views, we analyze how HTML5 affects the architecture and present best practices for building a mobile web app that can operate online and offline. The analysis of location accuracy shows the HTML5 mobile web app approach provides acceptable location accuracy even when offline. Threat modeling demonstrates that, in contrast to native mobile apps, mobile web apps offer a clear advantage to users and developers: an isolated execution environment makes it more difficult for a malicious mobile web app to read private data; As an outcome of the architecture documentation we also propose new best practices of developing a mobile web app using HTML5: the developer must consider two subsystems for online and offline use cases and a sequence of connected, disconnected, and connected deployment modes. Also, standards-based web apps are portable across virtually any operating system. This also eases the burden on developers, since they can write mobile web app once and deploy anywhere.

MAKING ROOM FOR THE FUTURE: REBUILDING CALIFORNIA'S INFRASTRUCTURE

During the early days of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the Mubarak regime shut down all Egyptian Internet access with the exception of one service provider, Noor ADSL. Analysts have noted that President Mubarak, in attempting to restrict Internet access, suffered from the dictator’s digital dilemma, and have speculated that Noor’s exceptional treatment was due to its role as a telecommunications provider for the Egyptian Stock Exchange. This paper shows, through an analysis of events, that stock exchange connectivity could not have been the rationale for Noor’s continued services and that transaction cost economics, as described by North’s theory of the state, provides a more thorough explanation for Mubarak’s selective intervention with regard to Internet service. Decisions made during this series of events have implications beyond the Arab Spring. Insights are drawn from the particular case of Noor’s role in the Egyptian Revolution and, in the process, a model is developed for future examination of the general case of the potential for loss of critical Internet infrastructure service under authoritarian governments.