Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the most flexible form of cloud computing and provides great opportunities to acquire and release computing resources as necessary. However, consumers face an increasingly opaque market due to growing number of providers and tariff options. As an approach to aid consumers finding the right tariff matching their needs, we suggest a broker model as an intermediate b...

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby improving its bargaining position. On the other hand, a tariff can prompt inefficient organizational c...

This paper examines the effect of the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The results suggest that U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico have been responsive to tariff rate reductions applied to Mexican products. A one percentage point decrease in tariff rates is associated with an increase in U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico by 5.31% in the f...

A strategy to convert quotas to tariffs is to auction the quota rights and use the realized auction prices as guides to setting tariffs. In the 1980s, New Zealand employed auctions to allocate quota licenses. We analyze the relationship between tariff-equivalents and auction prices for auctions with resale. Using panel data from New Zealand’s quota license auctions, we estimate the expected val...

This paper follows up on its companion paper decomposing the effects of the transition from a fully average cost distribution tariff to a cost reflective distribution tariff, in terms of time and location, that uses nodal prices to recover losses and an “extent-of-use” method to recover network fixed costs based on use at coincident peak, but in the presence of distributed generation (DG). As w...