Price planning for time-definite less-than-truckload freight services

Price planning simultaneous determines the service demand (with associated prices) and an operational plan to maximize a carrier’s profit. We modeled this integral-constrained concave program in the link formulation and proposed an implicit enumeration embedded with Lagrangian Relaxation upper bounds to determine the optimal prices. Computations on Taiwan’s time-definite less-than-truckload freight market showed that the carrier needs to simultaneously re-evaluate its network capacity while determining prices. The common practice of distance-based pricing that sets price by a base rate over direct shipment distance underestimates operating cost, specifically operating losses for short distance shipments.     

重庆印象

<正>今年7月1日,我与其他89名美中友谊和平志愿者一起来到中国,虽然有点疲劳,但还是对即将开始的培训非常期待。我们花了很多时间学习中文,学习中国文化和如何在中国教学。我们一直都在焦急地期待着自己会被安排到哪,终于在8月份确定下来。也正是这一天,我知道了在未来两年我将在重庆工作和生活。老实说,最初我还是不太确定。对于生活在这样一个大城市有点紧张。但是不管怎样,来到重庆的第一天感觉非常舒服,就像在自己家一样,这是一个美好的开始。     

The impact of taxation and signposting on diet: an online field study with breakfast cereals and soft drinks

Experimental Economics - We present a large scale study where a nationally representative sample of 1000 participants were asked to make real purchases within an online supermarket platform. The...     

A Shared‐Cost‐Profit Model of Teaching Materials for Higher Education

In this article, I assess the cost‐value crisis facing institutions of higher education; as the cost of higher education grows, students grow increasingly skeptical of the value of their degrees. The COVID‐19 pandemic has accelerated this crisis as institutions across the country have been forced to move to a fully or partially online model of instruction. In an effort to reduce costs, institutions have increased the number of low‐paid, part‐time adjunct faculty teaching introductory courses and have promoted the use of free and open online educational resources (OER). Both solutions lack sustainability and do little to solve the “value” question of higher education. I demonstrate how a shared‐cost‐profit model could address both issues of sustainability and value.     

Reference Income Effects in the Determination of Equivalence Scales Using Income Satisfaction Data

We estimate household equivalence scales, i.e. the needs of additional adults and children relative to a single adult, using income satisfaction data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel. We extend previous studies applying this approach by taking reference income into account. This allows separating needs‐based from reference effects in the determination of income satisfaction. We show that this adjustment helps to overcome a bias causing an overestimation of adults’ and an underestimation of children’s needs‐based equivalence weights. Our results indicate that controlling for income comparisons substantially increases children’s equivalence weight relative to that of adults.     

Market power and price discrimination in the US market for higher education

We estimate an equilibrium model of private and state college competition that generates realistic pricing patterns for private colleges using a large national data set from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS). Our analysis distinguishes between tuition variation that reflects efficient pricing to students who generate beneficial peer externalities and variation that reflects arguably inefficient exercise of market power. Our findings indicate substantial exercise of market power and, importantly, sizable variation in this power along the college quality hierarchy and among students with different characteristics. Finally, we conduct policy analysis to examine the consequences of increased availability of quality public colleges in a state.     

Behavioral Effects of Withholding Taxes on Labor Supply*

In most advanced economies, income tax collection uses third‐party withholding for wage income. Because withholding taxes do not necessarily reflect true effective taxes, these may give false signals of net‐of‐tax pay. We test labor supply responses to such misconceptions using laboratory experiments. Withholding taxes (and the resulting tax refunds) should be behaviorally neutral, but our results show that tax adjustments lead to effort adjustments, which suggests that withholding blurs tax incentives. While there is no statistically significant response in the overall sample, the participants in the subgroup who self‐assess to be motivated by monetary incentives (about half of the total sample) reduce their effort in response to withholding taxes and increase their effort after receiving tax refunds.     

TUC Organizing Academy 10 years on: what has been the impact on British unions?

The year 2008 saw the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) Organizing Academy which was designed to train a new cadre of union officials. The aim was to develop a culture of organizing that could help to transform the decline in trade union membership by bringing in new members who had been trained to be active within their unions. Through in-depth interviews and a survey of graduates of the Academy we look at the impact this project has had on individuals, their unions, and the wider union movement. We are particularly keen to give voice to the graduates as they have been charged with the difficult task of transforming the British trade union movement. We find evidence that trained organizers continue to be influential within their unions, but that many (although by no means all) get stuck in relatively junior positions because of the lack of a specialist career structure. This inevitably constrains their influence. The division between ‘servicing’ and ‘organizing’ functions is an almost inevitable consequence of the establishment of a separate, specialist organizing role and can also cause tensions and constrain the spread of organizing practices within unions. Despite this, there is evidence of widespread adoption of basic organizing practices, although more strategic organizing is still far less common. More widely, there is strong evidence of organizers developing new and influential networks between unions, and of individual unions implementing specialist organizing training. Despite this mixed evaluation, we argue that the creation of the Academy has had a considerable impact on British unions and has fostered important and innovative organizing approaches that would probably not have emerged otherwise.