There is no single schedule of legal fees and the way they are calculated; a rational model of fee determination is acutely needed. This paper presents a decision support system called Rho that allows the user to enter the internal and external data into a set of decision models to determine the strategic pricing for law ®rms. The paper describes the main features of the system, the optimizatio...

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...

We consider a market where consumers mix goods offered by two firms differentiated a la Hotelling, and show how tariff structures affect consumers, profits, and location decisions. As compared to linear pricing, when firms charge two-part tariffs they make higher profits while consumers are worse off. The resulting allocation is not efficient since firms choose extreme locations and too little ...

We use data from eBay to identify hundreds of thousands of instances in which retailers posted otherwise identical product listings with targeted variation in pricing and auction design. We use these matched listings to measure the dispersion in auction prices for identical goods sold by the same seller, to estimate nonparametric auction demand curves, to analyze the effect of buy it now option...

We describe a possible design strategy for a market specialist in the TAC Market Design Competition. Specifically, we describe both a linear charging policy that steadily increases the fees charged to trading agents interacting with the market, and an adaptive pricing policy that alters the trading price of goods based on the relative numbers of buyers and sellers in the market and the previous...

The paper develops an integrated model of optimal nonlinear income taxation, public-goods provision and pricing in a large economy. With asymmetric information about labour productivities and publicgoods preferences, the multidimensional mechanism design problem becomes tractable by requiring renegotiation proofness of the final allocation of private goods and admission tickets for excludable p...

Are you sitting down? Of the four rate parts, the MBS price and delivery fees are the only constant between all lenders. All mortgage lenders get the same MBS pricing and all mortgage lenders are using the same delivery fee rules, so the only difference in rates should be based on the lender’s performance – right? It should be, but it doesn’t work that way in reality, which can lead to unhappy ...

The study assesses whether auditors factor into their pricing of an audit engagement the presence inventor CEO given potential conflict interest this may present. Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that CEOs have more appetite for risk be less business-minded, thus suggesting agency costs firm. We rely on a self-developed database archival data from other sources. Using multivariate regr...

Studies of cities that have successfully shifted demand from cars to more sustainable modes suggest coordinated packages mutually reinforcing policy instruments are needed. Congestion charges and parking fees can be important parts such packages. This paper examines the introduction welfare-optimal congestion in a model calibrated Uppsala, small city Sweden. These effects modeled with simple tr...