Digital identity: How users value the attributes of online identifiers

This paper examines online identifiers from an economic perspective. It uses conjoint analysis survey techniques to develop empirical data on how users value the attributes of online identifiers. It is concerned in particular with three issues: (1) the degree to which identified subjects value increasing the scope of an identifier, i.e., the ability to use a single identifier to access services offered by several organizations; (2) the degree to which users’ choice may be constrained by switching costs; and (3) the value individuals place on privacy and data security relative to other attributes such as cost or scope. The survey population was located in South Korea. The results indicate that e-mail addresses dominate the world of online identifiers for ordinary consumers; that consumers highly value increased scope (e.g., single sign-on capabilities) and the security of their private data; and that switching costs are high.     

The law of one price revisited: How do goods market frictions generate large and volatile price deviations?

This paper analyzes the role of goods market frictions in accounting for the large and volatile deviations from the Law of One Price (LOP) in a framework of flexible prices. We draw a distinction between the goods market frictions that are required to consume tradable goods (e.g., distribution costs) and those that are necessary for international transactions (e.g., trade costs). We find that trade costs generate LOP deviations by introducing a no-arbitrage band, while distribution costs cause the price to deviate from the LOP by affecting the probability that trade will occur, given the band. We then conduct a Monte Carlo simulation to show that real exchange rate volatility is positively associated with trade costs, but negatively related to distribution costs. This effect depends on the interplay of trade costs and distribution costs, as they work in opposite directions when creating arbitrage opportunities.     

Adjustment costs and time-to-build in factor demand in the U.S. manufacturing industry

In order to explain cyclical behavior of factor demand, the static neoclassical model of the firm has been extended to include either adjustment costs (e.g. Lucas (1967)) or time-to-build considerations as in Kydland and Prescott (1982). This paper presents an intertemporal factor demand model which accounts for adjustment costs and gestation lags. The closed form solution of the model is a highly restricted vector ARMA-process that is estimated using quarterly data for the manufacturing industry in the U.S., 1960–1988. The main conclusion is that both sources of dynamics of factor demand are identifiable and found to be empirically of importance.     

Optimal Time-of-use Access Charges

This paper examines the setting of optimal time-of-use access charges in a deregulated network industry environment. Firms, which may include the incumbent, compete in the final retail market. The regulator sets an access fee for use of the essential facility, allowing the incumbent to recover fixed costs. If the retail market is perfectly competitive the optimal access charge varies with time-of-use according to the Ramsey–Boiteux elasticity rule. However, with downstream market power the regulator needs to correct retail price distortion, as well as recover fixed costs efficiently. As a result, the regulators initial impulse to set higher access charges during peak periods may be reinforced, moderated or even reversed — and optimal access charges diverge from a Ramsey–Boiteux pattern.I would like to thank John Panzar and Julian Wright for helpful comments. The helpful and detailed remarks of an anonymous referee have greatly improved this paper and are gratefully acknowledged.     

Hand pollination,mass spraying,and hybrid seedlings: Do these technologies affect the welfare of smallholder cocoa farmers in Ghana?

Adoption of cocoa production technologies has the potential to improve productivity and welfare of smallholder producers in low-income countries. While studies investigating synergies in agricultural technologies are growing, empirical evidence on the determinants and impacts of adopting multiple cocoa production technologies on smallholder farmers' welfare is scarce. Therefore, this study contributes by analyzing the determinants and effects of adoption of multiple cocoa production technologies on the welfare of smallholder farmers in Ghana. To achieve this, we used the multinomial endogenous switching regression and multivalued inverse probability regression adjustment models to a random sample of 2233 cocoa farmers from Ghana. The results show that various socioeconomic characteristics (e.g., farmer's age and experience), resource constraints (e.g., land ownership and credit access), market-related factors (e.g., distance to the market), and production shocks (e.g., rainfall) influence the adoption of multiple cocoa production technologies. Furthermore, the results reveal that adopting multiple production technologies significantly improves cocoa yields, gross income, per capita consumption expenditure, and reduces household food insecurity. Therefore, policies, such as financial support, need to be aimed at improving and strengthening smallholder cocoa producers' capacity to adopt synergistic conventional and non-conventional cocoa production technologies to maximize smallholder farmers' welfare.     

Exploiting the Medium Term Biomass Energy Potentials in Austria: A Comparison of Costs and Macroeconomic Impact

The transition to an implicitly solar-basedenergy system can make use of various specificbiomass energy systems. This paper provideseconomic and environmental indicators forevaluating alternative options.The paper proceeds in three empirical steps.First, an expert survey supplies the primarybiomass potentials available for non-food usein Austria and their respective costs. Second,an inquiry into investment, operating andfinancing costs of 30 different biomass energyuse systems allows a standardized comparisonamong them and their relationship to fossilreference technologies. Third, a computablegeneral equilibrium model of the Austrianeconomy is employed to quantify the impacts offostering the use of distinct biomass energytechnologies.The results allow us to distinguish betweenthose technologies that tend to lead to anincrease in both GDP and employment (e.g.,combined heat and power production from sewagesludge biogas), to an increase only inemployment, while GDP tends to diminish (e.g.,district heating based on agricultural pellets)or to a decline in both (e.g., co-firing basedon wood-chips, bark or industrial pellets).Individual technologies could account for up toone third of Austrias Kyoto obligation, whilecombinations of technologies, triggered by acombined CO₂ tax and biomass energysubsidy for example, could almost fully lead toAustrian Kyoto-compliance.     

THE EFFECTS OF FIRM BOUNDARY AND FINANCING CONSTRAINTS ON UTILITY COSTS: THE CASE OF MUNICIPALLY OWNED ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION UTILITIES

ABSTRACT: A number of studies have examined costs and potential for scale and scope economies in electricity distribution; however, few if any, have examined this area in terms of the unique constraints associated with municipal ownership or historical and regulatory constraints associated with former municipal ownership. This paper focuses on 19 distribution‐only municipally owned utilities for a ten‐year period (1988–97). Distortions from variable outputs but largely fixed inputs are minimized. The data used were collected specifically to assess productivity, cost, and efficiency performance and include value‐based capital inputs and service prices. Outputs include energy conveyed and number of connections; inputs include capital, system losses, labour, and materials. We examine the effect of using third‐party financing (e.g., connection charges), with its inherent principal‐agent problems, on utility costs, as well as the effect of shared services and multi‐utility output (e.g., electricity and water). A translog total cost function is estimated. Our findings suggest significant returns to scope but also significant increases in costs associated with the use of third‐party financing. The results also suggest scale diseconomies. Shared outputs, which have been greatly restricted or eliminated under restructuring, may have provided larger, and now lost, economies than the scale returns blindly pursued by some through restructuring or incented/forced mergers or divestitures. Finally, it is clear that third‐party financing can raise costs; such financing is widely used among utilities providing electricity, gas, water, and telecommunications, and should be closely scrutinized.     

Transaction costs and informational cascades in financial markets

We study the effect of transaction costs (e.g., a trading fee or a transaction tax, like the Tobin tax) on the aggregation of private information in financial markets. We implement a financial market with sequential trading and transaction costs in the laboratory. According to theory, eventually all traders neglect their private information and abstain from trading (i.e., a no-trade informational cascade occurs). We find that, in the experiment, informational no-trade cascades occur when theory predicts they should (i.e., when the trade imbalance is sufficiently high). At the same time, the proportion of subjects irrationally trading against their private information is smaller than in a financial market without transaction costs. As a result, the overall efficiency of the market is not significantly affected by the presence of transaction costs.     

Contractual distortions in a market with frictions

This paper analyses contract design in a decentralized market environment with frictions. While principals (e.g., firms) have all contractual power, their market power is constrained as agents (e.g., workers) can choose to wait and search for better offers. We find that results depend crucially on how market frictions affect agents’ utilities. With type-independent costs of search and waiting, equilibrium contracts are always first-best. If agents are impatient and discount future payoffs, however, distortions vanish only gradually. In the latter case, we also characterize equilibrium offers and show that the market exhibits two types of externalities, both of which are absent in the case of type-independent costs of search.     

Level of access and infrastructure investment in network industries

In this paper, we study how the terms of access to an incumbent’s infrastructure (i.e., the level of access and price) affect an entrant’s incentives to build its own infrastructure. Setting a high level of access (e.g., a resale arrangement), which requires relatively small up-front investment for entry, accelerates market entry, but at the same time delays the deployment of the entrant’s infrastructure. This is also true for a lower access price. We show that the socially optimal access price can vary non-monotonically with the level of access. We also study the case where access is provided at two different levels, and show that access provision at multiple levels can delay infrastructure building. Finally, we modify our baseline model to allow for experience and/or market share acquisition via access-based entry, and show that high levels of access may accelerate facility-based entry.     

EXIT, CHOICE OR LOYALTY: PATIENT DRIVEN COMPETITION IN PRIMARY CARE

ABSTRACT ** :  This paper analyses the potential costs and benefits from patient driven competition between GPs and specialists by comparing gate-keeping with direct access to specialist care. The two access rules are compared under fee-for-service and capitation, on their performance at minimizing both total financial costs and patients' opportunity cost of time in care. To analyse the social cost of patients' potential access mistakes, two types of illnesses are considered, with two levels of severity and an equal probability for each of the four events. The results generated under information symmetry show that gate-keeping always dominates in terms of minimizing financial cost. Results are extended to show that under patients' heterogeneity with respect to time preferences, allocative efficiency can be enhanced in gate-keeping by giving the patient the option to seek a specialist directly, provided he bears the extra cost. When turning to information asymmetry, results are reversed, and direct access is shown to be more cost effective. This is due to patients' ability to constrain providers' opportunistic behaviour by 'voting with their feet'. Beyond increasing allocative efficiency, patient choice is therefore found, under certain conditions, to contribute towards enhancing productive efficiency. Finally, introducing co-payments to share the financial risk associated with direct access potentially weakens patients' ability to curb providers' strategic behaviour. Under information asymmetry, direct access to specialist care should therefore remain free if patient's disutility in time in care is linear. When it is instead increasing, we show that a co-payment becomes necessary to curb specialists' information rent. Finally, under information asymmetry, the mixed solution (gate-keeping with optional direct access) improves on pure gate-keeping but is still suboptimal.     

Addressing dependency in the sportfishing valuation literature: Implications for meta-regression analysis and benefit transfer

Meta-regression analysis is a statistical summary or synthesis of a body of evidence. However, when primary studies provide more than one estimate, the presence of dependence in the metadata has implications for the statistical efficiency of estimated moderator variables. Previous meta-analyses have adjusted for within study dependence through ad hoc procedures (e.g., selecting one estimate per study and study average) or regression-based methods (e.g., weighted and panel data models). This paper defines dependency based on the underlying primary data (i.e., from the same sample) and examines the effect of different models and treatments on meta-regression estimation and implications for benefit transfer performance. The models are applied to the sportfishing literature that contains 140 papers providing 833 estimates of access values for fishing in the United States and Canada. The different methods of adjusting for dependency within the sportfishing metadata result in differences in the estimated model coefficients; hence, different transferred values and transfer errors.     

Riding High: Success in Sports and the Rise of Doping Cultures

In this paper, I develop a socioeconomic model that can be used to investigate the decisions made by professional athletes concerning doping. In their evaluation of whether to use performance‐enhancing drugs, athletes consider not only costs and benefits (through rank improvement) but also the approval from fellow athletes toward pro‐doping decisions. Peer‐group approval is modeled as a lagged endogenous variable, depending on the share of doping athletes in the history of a sport. As such, the model can explain an equilibrium of high incidence of doping as a “doping culture”. In addition to presenting comparative statics of the equilibrium (i.e., in order to answer the question of how a doping culture can be eliminated), I also investigate how doping decisions are affected by the standards set by the leader in a sport (e.g., Olympic qualification marks), and by the disproportionate public veneration of winners.     

The commons,common property,and environmental policy

The conceptual confusion among property, common property, open access resources, and the tragedy of the commons is identified and rectified. Property rights are defined and clarified. From that it is possible to understand the traditional confusion between open access resources and common property resources. It is urged that common property regimes be used in place of common property resources. This will emphasize that institutional arrangements are human creations and that natural resources can be managed as private property, as common property, or as state property. It is the property regime — an authority system — that indicates the rules of use of a variety of natural resources.     

Development through synergistic reforms

For many less developed countries production of high quality output is a precondition for firms to become exporters. Institutional deficiencies that raise costs of high quality production therefore limit the positive impact that trade facilitation can have on income. Consequently, institutional reforms that reduce costs of high quality production and trade reform have synergistic effects. In contrast, institutional reforms that reduce costs of low quality production (e.g., reforms that disproportionately benefit small businesses) interfere with the impact of trade reform. We obtain these results in a heterogeneous firm model that displays standard “industry rationalization” responses to reduced trade costs.     

Consumption externalities, rental markets and purchase clubs

Summary. A premise of general equilibrium theory is that private goods are rival. Nevertheless, many private goods are shared, e.g., through borrowing, through co-ownership, or simply because one persons consumption affects another persons wellbeing. I analyze consumption externalities from the perspective of club theory, and argue that, provided consumption externalities are limited in scope, they can be internalized through membership fees to groups. Two important applications are to rental markets and purchase clubs, in which members share the goods that they have individually purchased.Received: 2 June 2003, Revised: 8 March 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D11, D62.This paper was supported by the U.C., Berkeley Committee on Research, and the Institute of Economics, University of Copenhagen. I am grateful to Birgit Grodal for her collaboration on the theory that underlies this paper, and for her helpful and motivating comments about these particular extensions. I also thank Hal Varian, Doug Lichtman, Steve Goldman, Karl Vind, anonymous referees, and members of the Berkeley Microeconomics Seminar for discussion.     

Sunk Costs, Market Access, Economic Integration, and Welfare

The nature of the equilibrium that arises after economic integration is shown to depend crucially on how initial entry costs are divided along two separate dimensions: market access versus technology costs, and fixed versus sunk costs. There are three post-integration equilibrium regimes: a traditional trade theory regime which arises when both market access costs and fixed costs are small, a new trade theory regime which arises when market access costs are small but fixed costs are high, and a market access regime which arises when market access costs are high. While the first two regimes have already appeared in the literature, the third is new. The sign, magnitude, and qualitative behavior of the welfare effects of integration across all three regimes depend on the configuration of these costs.     

Development through synergistic reforms

For many less developed countries production of high quality output is a precondition for firms to become exporters. Institutional deficiencies that raise costs of high quality production therefore limit the positive impact that trade facilitation can have on income. Consequently, institutional reforms that reduce costs of high quality production and trade reform have synergistic effects. In contrast, institutional reforms that reduce costs of low quality production (e.g., reforms that disproportionately benefit small businesses) interfere with the impact of trade reform. We obtain these results in a heterogeneous firm model that displays standard “industry rationalization” responses to reduced trade costs.     

The core in an oligopoly market with indivisibility

Summary. This paper studies the core in an oligopoly market with indivisibility. It provides necessary and sufficient conditions for core existence in a general m-buyer n-seller market with indivisibility. When costs are dominated by opportunity costs (i.e., a firm's variable costs are sufficiently small), the core condition can be characterized by the primitive market parameters. In a 3-2 market with opportunity cost, the core is non-empty if and only if the larger seller's opportunity cost is either sufficiently large or sufficiently small. Received: June 9, 1999; revised version: October 22, 1999     

Capacity Choice and Preemption of a Foreign Market

This paper studies the strategic role of foreign direct investments (FDIs) when specified as a device for a multinational enterprise (MNE) to precommit capacity. This captures the idea of an MNE preempting the host market or, at least, achieving more profitable outcomes by setting the initial conditions of the post-entry competition with local rivals. Here, the MNE chooses FDI even if "exporting costs" (e.g., tariffs) are not considered. Market preemption is an alternative justification for FDI, but not the only one; sometimes the tradeoff between advantages of strategic leadership and cost of establishing offshore facilities, alone, justifies FDI.