Cost cap tariffs are pay-per-use tariffs for which costs cannot exceed a predefined cost limit. They were recently introduced to telecommunications markets, but were previously also applied in the insurance industry as deductibles or in the rental industry as day rates. This paper develops and empirically validates a consumer surplus model that explains the optimal consumption pattern under cos...

BACKGROUND Products under the purview of the Consumer Product Safety Commission are involved in a large share of injuries and injury costs in the USA. METHODS This study analyses incidence data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) and cost data based on the Injury Cost Model, integrated with the NEISS. We examined the magnitude of non-fatal consumer product related ...

Despite growing documentation that the conditions needed to support competition in health care do not exist, consumer-directed health care has been offered as the new market-based solution to cost inflation. Yet typical consumer-based insurance products undermine the very logic of expecting consumers to make good health care decisions by making preventive services--the category of services abou...

The valuation of changes in consumption of addictive goods resulting from policy interventions presents a challenge for cost-benefit analysts. Consumer surplus losses from reduced consumption of addictive goods that are measured relative to market demand schedules overestimate the social cost of cessation interventions. This article seeks to show that consumer surplus losses measured using a no...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of monopoly differential pricing in the important but largely neglected case where costs of service differ across consumer groups. Cost-based differential pricing is shown to increase total welfare and consumer welfare relative to uniform pricing for broad classes of demand functions, even though total output can still fall or the output allocation betwee...

Although consumer profiling advocates tout benefits from personalization, consumer advocacy groups oppose profiling in online markets because of concerns about privacy and price discrimination. Policies such as opt-out or opt-in that provide consumers the option to voluntarily participate in profiling are the favored compromise. We compare voluntary profiling to no profiling and show that volun...

To meet consumer needs for assistance with treatment and provider choices, as well as cost and budget management, consumer decision-support tools have evolved and proliferated in recent years. Interest in these decision aids has accelerated with the expectation that consumer participation in health care decision-making will promote self-care and information transparency. Consumer participation ...

in this article, demand equations for import of consumer, intermediate and capital goods for the period 1971(2) to 1999(1), is estimated and analyzed, using the ardl pesaran & shin method. the results show that the behavior of the different categories of imported goods in iran is best explained by the parallel market exchange rate, implying this rate is a closer approximation fir the opportunit...

The cost of healthcare in the US is rising at an unsustainable rate and this cost is being transferred directly to the consumer. However, up to 30 per cent of all healthcare expense pays for administration of billing, collection and payments processing. Consumer-driven healthcare is one key way of countering excessive administration costs and a highdeductible health plan is central to this appr...