This article extends the analysis of the impact of a system of protein premiums and discounts to that on a farmer's planned production. Despite an unambiguously negative impact on expected pro¢ts of equally likely premiums and discounts, supply response to the introduction of such a system is shown to depend on the level of seasonal variability faced by the farmer. In particular, farmers in reg...

Preferred provider organizations (PPOs) represent a form of managed care in which providers agree to accept discounted fees in exchange for the expectation that their patient volume will increase or at least be maintained. Managed care plans that rely on discounted fee-for-service (FFS) payments have increased from about 10 plans in 1981 to over 700 plans in 1994. In this study, we document lev...

Demand-based pricing is underused in many service industries, because customers are believed to perceive such pricing as unfair. Fencing can be highly effective in improving the perceived fairness of demand-based pricing. In this study, five fences were explored in a restaurant context across three countries (Singapore, Sweden, and the United States). Demand-based pricing in the form of coupons...

This paper investigates the individual investor trading in both closed-end funds and individual stocks. By examining the short-horizon dynamic relation between net individual investor trading of closed-end funds and the fund discounts, we find evidence consistent with the notion that both the level and the changes in close-end fund discounts are good proxies for individual investor sentiment. U...

Zone of tolerance has emerged as a key concept for guiding pricing decisions. It directs that user resistance to prices for new services or price increases to existing services will be minimized if they are within this zone, and that if discounts are to be effective in inducing additional use they should be of sufficient magnitude to be outside this zone. External reference prices can be used t...

In this paper, we present a new model for using prices as a way to shift traffic from congested peak periods to non-peak periods in telecommunications networks, and hence balance the load and also ensure that almost no one is turned away (or “blocked”) from being provided service. We use the offer of congestion discounts to customers who have the choice of accepting these rebates and returning ...

Introduction There has been recent discussion about price information and how it affects the cotton market (Ethridge and Hudson), as well as related topics of how the official price information provided by the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) affects the Commodity Credit Corporation's (CCC) loan schedule. These discussions have centered around (1) how information about differentials in pric...

Sudden Oak Death” (Phytophthora ramorum) is a non-indigenous forest pathogen which causes substantial mortality of coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) and several other oak tree species on the Pacific Coast of the United States. We estimated the time path of residential property values subject to oak mortality using a dataset that spans more than two decades—including a decade of transactions be...

We examine the impact of the universal service policy that was applied to the Spanish airline market during the period 2001–2009. Our analysis shows that routes that benefit from price discounts that were granted by the government to island residents enjoy higher demand than the rest of the country’s domestic routes. However, the lower elasticity of demand of these routes allows airlines to set...

We investigate a variant of the so-called Internet Shopping problem introduced by Blazewicz et al. (2010), where a customer wants to buy a list of products at the lowest possible total cost from shops which offer discounts when purchases exceed a certain threshold. Although the problem is NP-hard, we provide exact algorithms for several cases, e.g. when each shop sells only two items, and an FP...