Abstract. The form and regulation of contracts is of increasing importance to agricultural economists as farmers and agribusinesses increasing rely on contracts rather than markets to acquire inputs and sell outputs. We focus on the differences between the joint and individual surplus achievable under complete versus incomplete or relational contracts, where the latter are contracts that are no...

Competitive information revealed in a marketplace will have significant impact on the learning ability of the participating sellers across market sessions and therefore, on performance of the marketplace. The marketplace that we study in this paper has the following characteristics: a) Products transacted are custom-built – created specifically for a consumer and cannot be resold to other consu...

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARX'S THEORY OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF SURPLUS-VALUE Marx's theory of the production and distribution of surplus-value is based on a fundamental methodological premise, which has not been sufficiently recognized: that the total amount of surplus-value is determined prior to and independent of the division of this total amount into individual parts. The individual parts of surpl...

I consider a situation in which a principal commits to a mechanism first and then agents choose unobservable actions before they draw their types. The agents’ actions affect not only their payoffs directly but also a distribution of private types as well. Thus, the distribution of types is determined endogenously rather than exogeneously unlike standard mechanism design literature. Then I exten...

Users share an increasing marginal cost technology. A method charges non negative cost shares covering costs. We look at the worst surplus (relative to the efficient surplus) in a Nash equilibrium of the demand game, where the minimum is taken over all convex preferences quasilinear in cost shares. We compare two budget-balanced methods, average cost pricing and serial cost sharing, and two met...

The paper incorporates liquid reserves, interest and dividends in the compound Poisson surplus model. When an insurer’s surplus is below a certain level, it is kept as liquid reserves. As the surplus attains the level, the excess of the surplus above the level will earn interest at a constant interest rate. If the surplus continues to surpass a higher level, the excess of the surplus above this...

A number of studies, most notably Crémer and McLean (1985, 1988), have shown that in generic type spaces that admit a common prior and are of a fixed finite size, an uninformed seller can design mechanisms that extract all the surplus from privatelyinformed bidders. We show that this result hinges on the non-convexity of such a family of priors. When the ambient family of priors is convex, gene...

Most competition authorities pursue a consumer standard – they seek to deliver an improvement in consumer surplus (i.e. the difference between what consumers are willing to pay and what they actually pay, aggregated across all consumers who purchase the good in question). Under this standard, if improving consumer surplus reduces profits, those lost profits are not taken into account. What do e...

-In this paper we provide an introduction to water quality benefit estimation for noneconomists. Net water quality benefits are typically measured using the concept of consumer surplus, which can be estimated using a number of economic valuation methodologies. These can be divided into direct and indirect methods. Direct methods involve questioning survey respondents to determine their consumer...

We compare behavior in modified dictator games with and without role uncertainty. Subjects choose between a selfish action, a costly surplus creating action (altruistic behavior) and a costly surplus destroying action (spiteful behavior). While costly surplus creating actions are most frequent under role uncertainty (64%), selfish actions become most frequent without role uncertainty (69%). Als...