Utility Regulation and Risk Allocation: The Roles of Marginal Cost Pricing and Futures Markets

The effects on consumer welfare of requiring a utility facing cost or demand risk to use either a fixed retail price or marginal cost pricing are assessed. With marginal cost pricing and cost volatility an efficient futures market allows consumer welfare to be at least as high in every state as with the fixed price. With demand risk marginal cost pricing can benefit the consumer in every state without harming the firm if the profit difference is transferred to the consumer. A futures market can act as a partial replacement for the transfer.     

Social welfare loss due to second-best pricing: an application to the Portuguese telecommunications

The telecommunications industry is usually characterized by low marginal costs and significant fixed costs which are the conditions for the inefficiency of marginal cost pricing. In such cases theory postulates that optimal pricing is obtained by maximizing welfare subject to a restriction of viability of the firm: the second-best pricing scheme. The possible welfare losses due to second-best pricing varies according to the values of marginal costs, prices and demand elasticities. This paper analyses to what extent the second-best pricing has been achieved in the Portuguese telecommunications firm CTT, over the period 1950#150;1984 as well as the magnitude of the price-cost margins and welfare losses created. We obtained empirical evidence of the presence of economies of scale, a welfare loss estimate of 1% of the telecommunications receipts and a result that price was 40% greater than marginal cost. We concluded that price regulation and public ownership of the firm did not seriously affect social welfare over the sample period (it should be noted that it is the non-digital and fixedwire infrastructure period). Therefore, it is important to study the impact of new digital and non-wire technologies and new services provided in the old regulatory scenery.     

Factor supply interruption, welfare loss and shortage management

Factor supply shortage is a common problem faced by a firm. Solutions for allocating the limited supply include rationing, interruption and pricing. While previous research has examined the welfare losses generated by each solution, there is little evidence on their relative magnitudes within a common framework. The objective of this paper is to specify a model of firm behaviour under service interruption to estimate the welfare loss of service interruption. The same model is used to estimate the loss due to a price increase intended to resolve a supply shortage. Using water consumption data collected for Hong Kong, we find that relative to pricing, service interruption is inefficient for water shortage management.     

Regulating prices for shifting between service providers

The price that a regulated access provider charges for shifting customers between service providers has significant welfare implications. Typical regulatory approaches to pricing, such as pricing based on fully allocated cost or incremental cost, ignore the characteristics of consumer demand. A theoretical alternative, Ramsey pricing, considers only the elasticity of demand for given products. This paper directs attention to the competitive process. Using US long-distance telephone services as an example, this paper shows how empirical evidence concerning customer acquisition costs, customer switching costs, and churn among service providers can help to inform price regulation.     

Beyond implicit prices: recovering theoretically consistent and transferable values for noise avoidance from a hedonic property price model

Using a two-stage hedonic pricing methodology we estimate a system of structural demand equations for different sources of transport-related noise. In the first stage, we identify market segments using model-based clustering techniques and estimate separate hedonic price functions (HPFs) for each segment. In so doing, we show how a semiparametric spatial smoothing estimator outperforms other standard specifications of the HPF. In the second stage, we control for non-linearity of the budget constraint and identify demand relationships using techniques that account for problems of endogeneity and censoring of the dependent variable. Our estimated demand functions provide welfare estimates for peace and quiet that we believe to be the first derived from property market data in a theoretically consistent manner.      

Consumer welfare effects of increased food and energy prices

In this study, the authors evaluated how much price changes in food and energy – two basic living expenditures competing for consumers’ budgets – would affect consumer welfare. We first estimated a US complete demand system to quantify the interdependent demand relationships among 11 categories of consumption expenditures. Among the estimates, the own price elasticities of both food and energy are relatively inelastic, a finding that explains the dynamics of the recent soaring food and energy prices. The estimated demand elasticities were then incorporated into the measurement of Hicksian compensating variation to analyse the consumer welfare effects of price changes in food and energy. The results indicated that an increase in food and energy prices would increase compensated expenditures or incur a substantial consumer welfare loss, creating an especially heavy burden for low income households.     

Health insurance and the demand for medical care: evidence from a randomized experiment.

We estimate how cost sharing, the portion of the bill the patient pays, affects the demand for medical services. The data come from a randomized experiment. A catastrophic insurance plan reduces expenditures 31 percent relative to zero out-of-pocket price. The price elasticity is approximately -0.2. We reject the hypothesis that less favorable coverage of outpatient services increases total expenditure (for example, by deterring preventive care or inducing hospitalization).     

Parimutuel Lotteries: Gamblers' Behavior and the Demand for Tickets

In a parimutuel lottery, players face a strategic situation. We investigate how rational lottery players should choose combinations of numbers. Using data from the Austrian Lotto we compare this to actual behavior. We propose a relationship between the number of tickets and the expected loss of taking part, based on both theoretical and empirical findings about players' behavior. Rollovers introduce exogenous price variation allowing to estimate properties of a demand function sensitive to the expected loss. Contrary to previous work our model accounts for conscious selection.     

Reforming Food Subsidy Schemes: Estimating the Gains from Self-targeting in India

The paper uses the theoretical framework of the theory of tax reform to analyze whether a “small” change in an existing food subsidy program can be both welfare‐improving and revenue‐neutral. It shows how existing econometric methods can be adapted to estimate demand parameters even when household‐level data exhibit little price variation because the government controls food prices. The methodology is used to estimate welfare changes from shifting a rupee of subsidy on existing commodities to coarse cereals in the Indian public distribution system.     

The Welfare Impact of Self-supplied Water Pricing in Canada: A Computable General Equilibrium Assessment

This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to assess the welfare cost of changing the method of water allocation in Canada towards one that uses prices to ration demand. We model the introduction of a price on both water that is abstracted as well as water that is consumed (that is abstracted, and not returned to the source). We estimate that reducing water consumption by 25 % would require imposition of a price on water consumption of around $$\$0.21/\text{ m }^{3}$$ . Similarly, introduction of a water abstraction charge of about $$\$0.013/\text{ m }^{3}$$ would be sufficient to reduce water abstraction by 25 %. We find that if revenues from water pricing are returned in lump sum to households, the introduction of water pricing would result in a modest welfare loss. When revenues from water pricing are used to offset existing taxes, we find a gain in welfare corresponding to a ‘strong double dividend.’     

Pricing urban congestion: A structural random utility model with traffic anticipation

We design and estimate a game theoretic congestion pricing mechanism in which the regulator aims at reducing urban traffic congestion by price discriminating travelers according to their value of time (VOT). Travelers' preferences depend on their observable characteristics, on the endogenous amount of congestion anticipated, on their marginal utility (MU) of income and on some unobserved factors. Using a French household survey, we estimate the demand models to simulate different pricing mechanisms. We find that unobserved determinants of transportation demand are significant and are used to measure the anticipated time spent in traffic and the comfort of traveling: diverging from these expectations is felt as more discomfort than if no expectations were formed a priori. However, some of this discomfort is derived from travelers' marginal utility of income: the lost time in traffic is clearly “unpleasant” because of its opportunity cost. When the regulator and the transportation provider share common objectives, we show that a great welfare improvement can be achieved when implementing a homogenous pricing that accurately accounts for travelers VOT.     

Demand for Piped and Non-piped Water Supply Services: Evidence from Southwest Sri Lanka

In many countries water supply is a service that is seriously underpriced, especially for residential consumers. This has led to a call for setting cost recovery policies to ensure that the tariffs charged for water supply cover the full cost of service provision. Identification of factors driving piped and non-piped water demand is a necessary prerequisite for predicting how consumers will react to such price increases. Using cross-sectional data of 1,800 households from Southwest Sri Lanka, we estimate water demand functions for piped and non-piped households using appropriate econometric techniques. The (marginal) price elasticity is estimated at  − 0.15 for households exclusively relying on piped water, and at  − 0.37 for households using piped water but supplementing their supply with other water sources. The time cost elasticity for households relying on non-piped water only is estimated at  − 0.06 on average, but varying across sources. For both piped and non-piped households, we find evidence of substitutability between water from different sources. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of pricing policy.     

Modelling time of day substitution using the second moments of demand

Time of day (TOD) rates are a commonly used method for peak load pricing of many services. Such services as; electricity, communications, transportation, shared computer facilities, and computer networks (i.e. the Internet), either use, or will use, some form of TOD pricing. However, TOD rates do not ensure a movement towards economic efficiency unless the patterns of TOD substitution are known. The model presented here provedes a method for estimating TOD substitution without the need for rate experiments that have proven to be both costly and limited by sample selection bias problems. This model employs the estimated second moment of demand to estimate a matrix of relative own- and cross-price elasticities and it can estimate elasticities even when there is no apparent TOD price variation. The low level of computations required for the estimates allows the application of a bootstrap procedure to estimate the covariance matrix of the elasticities. Two applications of this model are presented: a case of aggregate demand for computer services and a case of an individual household's electricity demand.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF THE QUANTITY‐QUALITY BALANCE IN MONOPOLY*

This paper describes how a monopolist manipulates the balance of quantity and quality in order to increase revenue when its customers treat quantity and quality as substitutes. This ‘skewing’ of quality depends on the characteristics of customer's demand for quality. Customers differ in demand for quality, because they differ in either (i) their preferences and/or (ii) their time cost per unit. The monopolist is constrained to supply the same quality of good to all customers. The price and quality per unit are described under the assumption the monopolist (i) profit maximises; (ii) maximises social welfare subject to a profit constraint. The determinants of the skewing of quantity and quality are found under third‐degree price discrimination and uniform pricing.     

Modelling price competition across many markets (An application to the Spanish loans market)

The purpose of this work is the structural modelling of price competition in a product-differentiated industry in which many firms of varying size compete across many independent small markets, with the target of identifying price behaviour. We apply it to model competition among the more than 79 banks that were active in the Spanish loans market during the period 1983-1991, using micropanel data. A model in which national banks (as opposed to regional and local banks) fully internalize their cross-rate effects in pricing is selected as the model that best fits the data. Our framework allows us to estimate the dead-weight loss due to market power, and to decompose it assessing the part attributable to price coordination.     

Price-Cap Regulation and Inefficiency in Relative Pricing

The allocative efficiency properties of three price-cap schemes are compared. The scheme that uses lagged quantities in the price index and has a fixed cap works well when the firm is myopic but generates inefficient relative prices otherwise. With myopia prices are efficient and welfare is higher than with equal pricing, but the gain to the firm comes at the expense of lower consumer surplus. When the firm is not myopic pricing can be so inefficient that steady-state welfare is below the no-regulation level.     

Microeconometric Analysis of Residential Water Demand

This paper develops a structural model for obtaining price elasticities and evaluating consumer’s response to changes in nonlinear tariffs when only panel data on household consumption are available. The model and the empirical strategy address problems implied by nonlinear tariffs, existence of a fixed cost, and use of limited data, giving rise to a random effects model with a nonlinear individual effect. Results show that the estimated model does well at fitting data and demand is inelastic, although elasticity varies by initial consumption block. Then, I estimate welfare consequences of implementing several demand policies.     

PRICE AND SUBSTITUTION IN RESIDENTIAL SOLID WASTE

Many per-unit curbside recycling and garbage collection pricing systems were implemented in the 1990s. A detailed data set is used to estimate the effect of an increase in the per-unit price change for a long-running pricing system across time in one city. A fixed-effects regression controls for collection district and explanatory variables including weather, time, and employment changes. The elasticity estimate is within the range of previous work but with a higher cross-price elasticity to recycling. This shift to recycling results in significant financial benefits to the city and a small decrease in social welfare. ( JEL Q5, Q53)     

Choice, price competition and complexity in markets for health insurance

The United States and other nations rely on consumer choice and price competition between competing health plans to allocate resources in the health sector. While a great deal of research has examined the efficiency consequences of adverse selection in health insurance markets, less attention has been devoted to other aspects of consumer choice. The nation of Switzerland offers a unique opportunity to study price competition in health insurance markets. Switzerland regulates health insurance markets with the aim of minimizing adverse selection and encouraging strong price competition. We examine consumer responses to price differences in local markets and the degree of price variation in local markets. Using both survey data and observations on local markets we obtain evidence suggesting that as the number of choices offered to individuals grows, their willingness to switch plans given a set of price dispersion differences declines, which allows large price differences for relatively homogeneous products to persist. We consider explanations for this phenomenon from economics and psychology.