Service industries are a rapidly growing sector in the US economy and account for over 60% of its total output. Wireless communications in particular have become ubiquitous and there are an estimated 160 million subscribers in the US alone. In this paper, we focus on the wireless communications industry and model the impact of the nonlinear pricing schemes employed by service providers on custo...

This paper evaluates the opportunity and efficiency to introduce a two-part tariff to coordinate the location of power plants with lumpy transmission investments. Nodal pricing sends the short run component of such a two-part tariff and we study the case where the average participation tariff sends the long run one. We argue that this solution is helpful because the average participation tariff...

OBJECTIVE The Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) is adding financial incentives to increase the volume of surgeries provided by hospitals using a marginal pricing approach. The objective of this study is to calculate marginal costs of surgeries based on assumptions regarding hospitals' availability of labor and equipment. DATA This study is based on observational clinical, administrat...

Distributed Generation (DG) can help in reducing the cost of electricity to the costumer, relieve network congestion and provide environmentally friendly energy close to load centers. Its capacity is also scalable and it provides voltage support at distribution level. Hence, DG placement and penetration level is an important problem for both the utility and DG owner. The cost of electricity as ...

It has long been agreed upon by the practitioners and researchers in the field of electric power market operations that both pricing and demand must play much more proactive roles in better balancing demands across the hours of the day. A balanced system will mitigate demand and price spikes and thereby reduce the need for expensive reserve generation capacity as well. Balanced demand will also...

Mouse embryos homozygous for a null mutation in nodal arrest development at early gastrulation and contain little or no embryonic mesoderm. Here, two Xenopus nodal-related genes (Xnr-1 and Xnr-2) are identified and shown to be expressed transiently during embryogenesis, first within the vegetal region of late blastulae and later in the marginal zone during gastrulation, with enrichment in the d...

Firms commonly offer three-part tariffs, or menus of three-part tariffs, in a variety of contexts. A three-part tariff consists of a fixed fee, an included allowance of units for which the marginal price is zero, and a positive marginal price for additional usage beyond the allowance. A prime example is the US cellular phone services market in which firms typically offer consumers plans consist...

Settings in which independent self-interested agents form connections with each other are extremely common, and are usually modeled using network formation games. We study a natural extension of network formation games in which the nodes cannot form connections themselves, but instead must do it through an intermediary, and must pay the intermediary to form these connections. The price charged ...

District heating pricing is a core element in reforming the heating market. Existing district heating pricing methods, such as the cost-plus pricing method and the conventional marginal-cost pricing method, cannot simultaneously provide both high efficiency and sufficient investment cost return. To solve this problem, the paper presents a new pricing model, namely Equivalent Marginal Cost Prici...