Many government contracts with or policies towards oligopolistic sectors essentially involve private firms selling a given proportion (O), or quantity, of output to the government at a fixed price (pR) with the remainder being sold on the open-market. Often this is combined with consumer rationing. Examples include cement and sugar in India, and health, housing and defence in many countries. Th...

This note describes probabilistic properties of optimal price sample paths in a dynamic pricing model with a finite horizon and limited stock. We assume that customer arrivals follow a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. We show that if customers’ willingness-to-pay increases rapidly over time, then the optimal price process follows a submartingale, which implies an upward price trend. Alternativel...

The aim of this note is to establish criterion of absence of arbitrage opportunities under small transaction costs for a family of multi-asset models of financial market.

On October 6, 1979, the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System embarked on an aggressive policy to lower the inflation rate, which then stood near 12 percent. That effort succeeded: By the mid-1980s, the rate of change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was reduced to less than 4 percent on a three-year moving-average basis, as shown in figure 1. The commonly reported measur...

For portfolio optimisation under proportional transaction costs, we provide a duality theory for general càdlàg price processes. In this setting, we prove the existence of a dual optimiser as well as a shadow price process in a generalised sense. This shadow price is defined via a “sandwiched” process consisting of a predictable and an optional strong supermartingale and pertains to all strateg...

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...