Diagrammatic Approach to Capacity-Constrained Price Discrimination

This paper presents a diagrammatic solution to the firm's profit-maximizing price discrimination problem in the face of capacity constraints. Airlines, hotels, and other firms practice yield management, allocating fixed capacity to customer groups paying different prices. In these cases, the firm's short-run problem is not a decision about production levels, but it is one of allocating a fixed number of output units among customers. Our diagram shows that the conditions for profit-maximizing price discrimination are very different under these circumstances than in the standard model in which the firm is not constrained by capacity.     

THE INCOME AND CONSUMPTION EXPERIENCES OF A SAMPLE OF FARM FAMILIES*

The way in which the consumption of farm families is adjusted to fluctuations in income has important implications at the national, regional and farm levels. In this paper, hypotheses about the consumption of farm families are examined using data from 16 families in a wheat-sheep region of New South Wales for the eight-year period 1968/69 to 1975/76. The results of the study indicate that lagged effects are important in explaining consumption by farm households. It was not possible to partition these lag effects between partial adjustment and normal income influences. Estimates of the short-run (one-year) marginal propensity to consume (mpc) were quite low, ranging from 0.13 to 0.16. The best estimates of the long-run mpc ranged from 0.19 to 0.25.     

Deregulation of the Australian Wheat Export Market: What Happened to Wheat Prices?

ABSTRACT

This report investigates whether deregulation of the Australian wheat export market induced a structural change in the price data generation process. We analyze the unit root properties of Western Australian wheat price series by testing for the possibility of single and double structural breaks. Daily spot prices for the period of May 20, 2003, to September 14, 2010 are used. We find the wheat price series has a unit root with two structural breaks but neither breaks coincides with the time when the Wheat Export Marketing Act 2008 came into effect on July 1, 2008. The implication of our results is that deregulation was not the main cause of structural breaks in the price series in the sample period.     

Competition in Book Publishing

Mergersm the publishing industry have been criticised as concentrating power in the hands of a few largefirms Peter Curwen, of Sheffield Polytechnic, finds recent take-overs to be a response to increased competition as the publishing industry wakes up to economic reality Mark Rogers condemns the Net Book Agreement of major UK publishers as a cartelistic device which restricts competition and choice     

British Telecom – Has Privatisation Delivered Competition?

What are the lessons for the privatisation of British Gas from previous flotations? Peter Curwen, Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Sheffield Polytechnic, charts the regulatory tangle in the telecommunications market and argues that privatisation on its own may not be enough to reduce the extent of regulation.     

Third generation new entrants in the European mobile telecommunications industry

This paper focuses on new entrants within the European mobile telecommunications industry. More particularly, the paper identifies those new entrants that emerged from the third-generation (3G) licensing process across Europe before examining how they have fared. Four operators seeking to become new entrants across a range of countries are identified, although only one of them—Hutchison Whampoa trading as ‘3’—is considered to be fully active as a 3G new entrant. It is argued that the success of Hutchison Whampoa to date has been patchy, and that a supportive parent company has significantly contributed to its ability to remain active.     

Learning to organise risk management in organisations: what future for enterprise risk management?

This paper identifies recurring issues in the regulation of new technologies through an historical review of the risk management of automobiles in the 1800s. Parallels are drawn between the regulation of early automobiles and that of the regulation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) today. It is found that many of the regulatory challenges facing UASs are analogous to those which faced the automobile industry more than a century and half ago and that the need for informed and objective decision making in policy development is reinforced. A systems engineering approach, based on general systems theory and decision‐based design principles, is then proposed as a means for improving the objectivity, transparency and rationality in the risk management decision making process. An example risk management decision making scenario is given within the context of a small UAS operating over a populated area. The results obtained from this case study illustrate how even simple analysis can support the decision making process and highlights some of the potential challenges in the regulatory approach currently applied to UASs.     

Incumbency and market share within European mobile telecommunication networks

The structure of mobile telecommunication markets varies considerably across Europe, ranging from monopolies with a handful of subscribers to markets with five operators and many millions of subscribers. Where competitive markets occur, there is also an incumbent operator possessing substantial first mover advantages. This paper explores these advantages, asking whether the incumbent has remained the largest operator as the market has developed. This question is investigated using data from 49 European countries. The analysis finds that in most countries the incumbent continues to be the largest operator measured by market share. In some countries, later entrants into the market have struggled to gain market share, contributing to the highly concentrated nature of many mobile markets. The extent to which the geographical footprint of an operator influences its market share is also examined.