Points mechanisms and rewards programs

I study points programs, such as frequent flyer and other rewards programs, as a revenue management tool. I develop a two‐period contracting model where a capacity‐constrained firm faces consumers who privately learn their valuations over time. The firm cannot commit to long‐term contracts, but it can commit to allocate any unsold capacity through a points program. This points scheme creates an endogenous and type‐dependent outside option for consumers, which generates novel incentives in the firm's pricing problem. It induces the firm to screen less ex interim, and to offer lower equilibrium prices, reversing the intuition of demand cannibalization.     

The Home Improvement,Maintenance, and Repair Industry

Spending on existing housing is important not only for the building materials, building products, and construction markets but also for the macroeconomy. It accounts for about half of total spending on housing capital. The new construction, home improvement, maintenance, and repair markets use overlapping distribution channels, labor, and capital inputs. The various segments of the housing industry touch many other industries and exhibit different patterns over the course of the business cycle. Understanding the unique characteristics of these segments helps business economists and macroeconomists in planning and interpreting changes in the economy as well as estimating better forecasting models.     

The cost of diabetes and obesity in Australia

Aims: To assess and compare the direct healthcare and non-healthcare costs and government subsidies by body weight and diabetes status.

Methods: The Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle study collected health service utilization and health-related expenditure data at the 2011–2012 follow-up surveys. Costing data were available for 4,409 participants. Unit costs for 2016–2017 were used where available or were otherwise inflated to 2016–2017 dollars. Age- and sex-adjusted costs per person were estimated using generalized linear models.

Results: The annual total direct cost ranged from $1,998 per person with normal weight to $2,501 per person with obesity in participants without diabetes. For those with diabetes, total direct costs were $2,353 per person with normal weight, $3,263 per person with overweight, and $3,131 per person with obesity. Additional expenditure as government subsidies ranged from $5,649 per person with normal weight and no diabetes to $8,085 per person with overweight and diabetes. In general, direct costs and government subsidies were higher for overweight and obesity compared to normal weight, regardless of diabetes status, but were more noticeable in the diabetes sub-group. The annual total excess cost compared with normal weight people without diabetes was 26% for obesity alone and 46% for those with obesity and diabetes.

Limitations: Participants included in this study represented a healthier cohort than the Australian population. The relatively small sample of people with both obesity and diabetes prevented a more detailed analysis by obesity class.

Conclusion: Overweight and obesity are associated with increased costs, which are further increased in individuals who also have diabetes. Interventions to prevent overweight and obesity or reduce weight in people who are overweight or obese, and prevent diabetes, should reduce the financial burden.     

Location of Decision Rights in Catholic Religious Orders

Organizational incentives are an important part of applied economics. Do even organizations like religious orders make the same trade‐offs and substitutions as predicted by economics for firms? It is argued here that religious orders face the problem of controlling the actions of their branch offices to assure the continued value and uniqueness of their trademark. We use the distinction between specific and general knowledge to analyze the optimal colocation of decision rights within the specific knowledge framework of a religious order. Assuming that knowledge is valuable in decision making, then the colocation of the decision authority with the particular knowledge that is beneficial to those decisions is preferable. With a sample of 114 local communities of 20 religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church, we empirically test whether the ratio of search/experience goods, of credence goods and the monitoring costs of the headquarter can explain the colocation of decision rights and authority within an order. Our findings give support for the hypothesis that religious orders at present make the same trade‐offs and substitutions as predicted by economics. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Planning or free market economy in LDCs?

On the face of it it looks as if there should be no great difference between less developed countries (LDCs) and the advanced national economies as far as planning is concerned. And yet in reality such differences do exist, even if they do not necessarily stem from the inequalities in the standard of living.     

Economic stagnation and development aid

The main objectors to a link being established between special drawing rights (SDRs) and the financing of development have in the past been the industrial countries. They have been pointing out that SDRs were created for other purposes — more effective control over international liquidity — and that a link with development finance would have an inflationary effect. If however the present unemployment situation in the industrial countries should become at least partly a permanent feature the idea of such a link would become more attractive than hitherto — to the industrial countries.     

Problems now and in the past

In some places, voices are raised today which assert that development aid is not worth the noise that is being made about it, because the industrialised countries went through exactly the same phase of development by their own, unaided efforts and still had arrived where they are now. Any development aid, so it is said, will only paralyse the determination of LDCs to aid themselves. The author discusses this assertion in the following article.