Counterfeiting causes hundreds of billions dollars of losses around the world every year. Due to the growing prominence of online commerce, the seriousness of the situation could soon become much worse. Hence, reaching a clear understanding of the fundamental economic incentives behind this practice is of vital importance. In this paper, we investigate a problem within which a firm selling a co...

T his article describes an important improvement in the calculation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The Bureau of Labor Statistics plans to use a new geometric mean formula for calculating most of the basic components of the Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U) and the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). This change will become effective ...

When a firm can recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their past purchases in order to price discriminate. We study a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers have the ability to maintain their anonymity and avoid being identified as past customers, possibly at a cost. When consumers can freely maintain their anonymity, they al...

Consumer Generated Media(CGM) is growing rapidly and the amount of content is increasing. However, it is often difficult for users to extract important contents and the existence of contents recording their experiences can easily be forgotten. As there are no methods or systems to indicate the subjective value of the contents or ways to reuse them, subjective annotation appending subjectivity, ...

Beneficiaries of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program received an 11.2-percent cost-of-living increase in benefits effective June 1981. This increase, the seventh automatic increase since 1975, was reflected in btiefit checks issued early in July. Automatic benefit increases are tied by statute to rises in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). They are initiated whenever t...

The consumer price index (CPI) is an important indicator of inflation in a market economy. It is necessary to regularly monitor and improve the quality of the CPI. Before one can develop a quality assurance system, one has to formulate a conceptual framework for evaluating the quality of consumer price statistics. In this paper various quality aspects of the CPI are presented. These aspects are...

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 532 I. OVERVIEW OF SMART GRID DEVELOPMENT ....................... 533 II. WHY NUSP-CONSUMER INTERACTIONS SHOULD BE REGULATED .............................................................................. 534 A. What are NUSPs and How Do They Interact with Consumers? ....................................

Socml security checks dellwred to benefiaanes m the first week of July 1977 reflected the thwd automatic cost-of-hvmg nxrease m cash benefits under legulatlon enacted m 1972 and 1973 The 5 Q-percent merease, which became effectwe m June, apphed to benefits for all persons on the social security benefit rolls at the end of May, except those recelvlng benefits under the “special mnunum” PIA provw...

This paper compares the Portuguese and Bulgarian consumer price indices (CPI) and attempts to identify some areas in which the CPI compilation methodology could be improved in the two countries. This work is organised into six sections. The first section briefly describes the organisational structure on which the production of the CPI is based in the two countries. The second section focuses on...

It is well known that switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. With heterogeneous consumers and incomplete information about individual consumers’ types, monopoly pricing entails second-degree price discrimination with inefficient contracts for low dema...