The Campus Parking Game: A Demonstration of Price Discrimination and Efficiency

This article presents a classroom game that allows students to directly experience the welfare improvements that can result from price discrimination. The demonstration uses a very familiar decision-making scenario, campus parking, to introduce the concept of price discrimination as well as reinforce the concepts of opportunity cost, consumer surplus, and search costs. This game can be used in a variety of classes, including principles, intermediate theory, industrial organization, or environmental economics, and can be conducted in a 50-minute class period with follow-up discussion in the next class.     

Upfront payments and exclusion in downstream markets

Although upfront payments are often observed in contracts between manufacturers and retailers, little is known about their competitive effects or the role retailers play in securing them. In this article, we consider a model in which two competing retailers make take‐it‐or‐leave‐it offers to a common manufacturer. We find that upfront payments are a feature of equilibrium contracts, and in all equilibria, only one retailer buys from the manufacturer. These findings support the claims of small manufacturers who argue that they are often unable to obtain widespread distribution for their products because of upfront payments.     

Valuing Pre-Commercial Genetic Resources: A Maximum Entropy Approach

Genetic improvement has been a major contributor to agricultural productivity in the United States, but many questions about the economics of crop breeding, such as the value of pre-commercial germplasm, remain unanswered. This study estimates the marginal value of poorly characterized materials contained in the U.S. national germplasm system. Within the search theoretic framework, we apply a maximum entropy method to estimate the probability and the expected level of improvement in pest susceptibility relative to its best previously observed level. The results indicate that the lower-bound estimate of benefit is significantly higher than the upper-bound cost of conserving an accession.     

Locating emergency medical services in small town and rural settings

Locating emergency medical services in small town and rural settings presents subtle, but significant differences to those in metropolitan areas. The lack of service mix and unit choice, the measurement of response time in minutes rather than seconds, and the limits of the planning environment are discussed. Using time-distance comparisons and location-allocation techniques within a microcomputing environment, some aspects of planning emergency medical services are illustrated within the context of the Kingston (Ontario) Regional Ambulance Service.     

ECONOMIC BURDENS OF MARITAL DISRUPTIONS: A COMPARISON OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

Longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to show that women and children are worse off following a marital split than are men in both the United States and Germany. The size of the difference is sensitive to the equivalence scale used, but despite its far more extensive tax and transfer system the disparate impact of divorce or separation on women and children persisted in Germany at a level at least as high as in the United States.     

Predicting the Failure of Developmental Gold Mining Projects

This paper investigates firm‐level financial and non‐financial information and their association with project failure for a sample of pre‐production gold development firms. Pre‐revenue generating ‘single project’ mining companies are chosen, since project failure is synonymous with company failure for these firms. The setting is interesting due to the high information asymmetry and limitations of the GAAP‐based Altman Z‐score in this context. A definition of project failure is applied and both financial and non‐financial predictors are compared. Failure is driven by whether the deposit is open pit or underground, and whether the cash cost of production is disclosed at feasibility completion.     

The impact of audit penalty distributions on the detection and frequency of fraudulent reporting

We investigate how the distribution of the penalties incurred by auditors for failing to detect fraud influences their effort to detect fraud and auditees’ commission of fraud. We compare a probabilistic, skewed audit penalty to a penalty that automatically imposes the expected penalty of the probabilistic distribution (hereafter, a deterministic penalty). Our experiments show that a deterministic penalty with the same expected value of a probabilistic, skewed penalty increases audit effort to detect fraud and decreases fraudulent reporting by auditees and that these benefits hold in a game involving both auditee and auditor players.     

The informativeness of on-line advertising

Sending general advertisements with inflationary claims may attract additional visitors with whom an advertiser is poorly matched. This is costly when ads are priced per-click because many visitors (clickers) will not purchase. This renders per-click advertising particularly conducive to the transmission of information via ads. The admissibility of information transmission depends not only on advertiser behaviour, but also upon consumers' interpretation of and trust in ads. In less conducive environments, consumers quickly learn to place little stock in the claims they see advertised. This mechanism undermines the ability of advertisers and consumers to communicate under per-impression or per-sale fee structures. Consumers benefit from increased informativeness, but distortions introduced by the market power given to advertisers imply that society may be better-off with no information transmission taking place.