This paper presents an approach to the allocation of surplus and profit loads to different product lines or policies within a single insurance company. The method presented calculates the allocation for each line based on the expected value conditional on the full surplus being exhausted. The use of conditional expectations produces a familiar variance-based allocation for a number of specific ...

We consider three new axioms for surplus sharing problems. The rst is strong monotonicity which says that workers should be rewarded for increases in productivity and the second says that productive workers should receive some compensation. The third requires that the surplus sharing rule should be well de ned (and continuous on) the set of threshold functions. We show that none of the standard...

We estimate the welfare associated with the Medicare HMO program, now known as Medicare+Choice (M+C). We find that the creation of the M+C program resulted in approximately $15.6 billion in consumer surplus and $52 billion in profits from 1993 to 2000 (in 2000 dollars). This program most likely generated significant net social welfare. However, we find that consumer surplus is geographically un...

We build a model of credit card pricing that explicitly takes into account credit functionality. We show that a monopoly card network always selects an interchange fee that exceeds the level that maximizes consumer surplus. If regulators only care about consumer surplus, a conservative regulatory approach is to cap interchange fees based on retailers’ net avoided costs from not having to provid...

The World Wide Web makes it easy for users to access various services online, such as online shopping in e-commerce, online financing in P2P lending networks, and even working online on freelancing platforms. A fundamentally important function of web applications is Online Service Allocation (OSA), which means matching service consumers with ‘appropriate’ goods (i.e., products/loans/jobs) from ...

The equitable division of a joint cost (or a jointly produced output) among agents with different shares or types of output (or input) commodities, is a central theme of the theory of cooperative games with transferable utility. Ever since Shapley’s seminal contribution in 1953, this question has generated some of the deepest axiomatic results of modern microeconomic theory. More recently, the ...

A model of surplus values within information ecosystems is presented. The model is based on the classical definition of surplus value. However, as this definition was developed within a manufacturing industry context, some modifications are necessary to adopt it to the context of information ecosystems, e.g., by taking into account that products are “virtual” rather than physical. Just as in ag...

Despite the growing research interest in Internet auctions, particularly those on eBay, little is known about the quantifiable consumer welfare accrued from such mechanisms. Using an ongoing novel field experiment, we collect and examine a unique dataset to empirically quantify and understand determinants of consumer surplus in eBay auctions. Our analysis, based on a sample of 5157 eBay auction...

This paper provides alternative measures of federal budget surpluses over 10-year and long-term horizons. Official baseline budget forecasts are based on a series of statutory requirements that may be at variance with reasonable expectation. More plausible notions of current policy toward discretionary spending, taxes and retirement trust funds imply that surpluses over the next 10 years will b...