This article examines the problem of regulatory opportunism or strategic behavior by the regulator that undermines the performance of price cap regulation (PCR) without technically breaching the price cap commitment. Drawing from the experience with PCR in the telecommunications industry, this article contends that the Hope standard, a litmus test for governing the bounds of regulatory discreti...

Consumer Price Index (CPI) of a particular region is primarily calculated through aggregation of individual household observations. This aggregation is done following two schemes, plutocratic and democratic. While both of them are useful for certain purposes, none of them actually give proper attention to poor households. In this study, we have shown that weighting scheme with certain mathemati...

Analyzing Cost Efficient Production Behavior Under Economies of Scope: A Nonparametric Methodology In designing a production model for firms that generate multiple outputs, we take as a starting point that such multi-output production refers to economies of scope, which in turn originate from joint input use and input externalities. We provide a nonparametric characterization of cost efficient ...

Rats and mice were studied for changes in meal-taking structure in a closed operant food economy, in which the consummatory or unit prices for food were increased. In experiment 1, as food price increased, male rats modestly decreased the number of meals per day and increased mean meal size. Female rats were similar to males but had smaller meal size and, at low costs, took more meals per day. ...

Evaluation of ecosystem services has become a hotspot in terms of research focus, but uncertainties over appropriate methods remain. Evaluation can be based on the unit price of services (services value method) or the unit price of the area (area value method). The former takes meteorological factors into account, while the latter does not. This study uses Kunyu Mountain Nature Reserve as a stu...

The old dictum says that if the Devil did not exist, the Church would have had to invent him. Similarly, if the regulator didn't exist, the airline industry would have had to invent him-and did in 1938. A current question is what would happen to the industry were it totally deregulated. One thesis is that there would be a rush by existing and new entrants to those routes thought to be profitabl...

The value of environmental assets such as biodiversity, unique locations and the atmosphere may be hard to quantify. The implications of the irreversibility of decisions to destroy these has been the subject of extensive discussion. We analyze the value of such assets under conditions of uncertainty about future preferences, and show that this uncertainty will imply a conservation motive if it ...

In recent years drug prices have increasingly become a topic of debate for patients, providers, payers and policy makers. To place the current drug price debate into historical context, we searched the New York Times and Wall Street Journal from 1985 - 2015 and found that concerns about drug prices have commonly featured in the press over the study period with recently stronger calls for change...

The directed search model (Peters, 1984) is static; its dynamic extensions typically restrict strategies, often assuming price or match commitments. We lift such restrictions to study equilibrium when search can be directed over time, without constraints and at no cost. In equilibrium trade frictions arise endogenously, and price commitments, if they do exist, are self-enforcing. In contrast to...