Owners of stochastic assets can pool their endowments to smoothen and insure individual payoffs across outcomes and time. We explore, in such a setting, how contingent shadow prices on aggregate resources can be used for three purposes: First, to design mutual contracts for risk averse agents; second, to quantify the malfunctioning of such contracts when there are risk lovers (or scale economie...

Abstract Lagrangian models use calculus to solve multi-variable non-linear constrained optimization of problems and for identifying the marginal changes (‘shadow prices’) optimal solutions in constraint bounds. This is especially useful when constraints represent resource limitations.

The paper analyzes the economics of CO2 emissions in power systems by introducing concepts of marginal carbon intensity (MCI) of electricity demand and shadow carbon intensities (SCI) of binding transmission constraints. It demonstrates that values of MCIs are time and location dependent and exhibit properties similar to those of locational marginal prices of power. These concepts and their pro...

Rapidly declining gasoline prices from their record high during the summer of 2008, while ethanol prices remained relatively high, made it difficult for many bio-fuel policy modelers to fully explain the impacts of U.S. bio-fuel policies on fuel prices. Using profitmaximization models for blenders, refiners, and distillers, we conduct a comparative static analysis to measure the relative magnit...

Abstract: This paper proposes a centralized data envelopment analysis (DEA) model for industrial optimization based on several different production technologies among several regions. We developed this model based on improved Kuosmanen environmental DEA technology, which avoids positive shadow price on undesirable outputs. We also designed a dual model for our centralized DEA model, and used it...

BACKGROUND Policymakers and researchers frequently compare the prices of medicines between countries. Such comparisons often serve as barometers of how pricing and reimbursement policies are performing. The aim of this study was to examine methodological challenges to comparing generic drug prices. METHODS We calculated all commonly used price indices based on 2013 IMS Health data on sales of...

In his inaugural presidential address to the Population Association of America in 1978, Richard Easterlin challenged the orthodox neoclassical economic model of fertility originally suggested by Becker and subsequently elaborated by Becker and Lewis. While maintaining an economic approach to fertility, Easterlin's model was based upon the notion of material aspirations which changed systematic...

This working note provides a basic overview of discounting in the context of climate change policy. After defining the social discount factor and social discount rate in terms of shadow prices (section 2), and noting the limitations of cost-benefit analysis for climate change (section 3), the determination of efficient social discount rates is discussed given: the impact of uncertainty about fu...

This paper takes a critical look at the literature on green national accounts. The problem studied is to find a linear index of economic variables that responds to perturbations in the same direction as social well-being. The thesis of a large literature, that net national product (which is a flow) is that index in closed economies, is shown in some interpretations to be simply false and in oth...