Pricing schemes that vary prices in response to demand shocks may antagonize consumers and reduce demand. At the same time, consumers may take advantage of the opportunities offered by price changes. Overall, the net impact of varying price on demand is ambiguous. We investigate the issue empirically, exploiting a unique dataset from a firm that has experimented with different pricing schemes. ...

The EU advocates a household waste recycling rate of more than 70%. Although the Netherlands already years ago invested in recycling policies heavily, this is still a large challenge as nowadays on average this rate is approximately 50% and nearly no municipalities have a rate above 70%. Given the experience, it is possible to learn from the Dutch experience which policies are effective in incr...

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) fundamentally altered the U.S. Postal Service by introducing enhanced pricing flexibility, profit incentives, and potential antitrust liability. PAEA also mandated a change from breakeven, cost-of-service regulation where revenues must equal costs over time to price cap regulation. The Postal Service can now introduce new or modify ex...

During the years of sharp tuition increases in the 1980s, the role of student financial aid provided by institutions shifted from the need-based formulas that had prevailed into a new pattern, subsequently called “tuition discounting.” As a president of a private college during that time, one of the authors (Breneman) lived through the discomfort and analytical confusion that occurred during th...

The main elements of electricity price can be divided into three components. These are, wholesale price of energy, price of network services and taxes, each composing approximately third of the final price. It seems that wholesale price is determined quite efficiently, while the price of network services have not been under much interest. However, total welfare can be disturbed significantly, i...

In this paper we evaluate and compare long-run economic effects of six road-pricing schemes aimed at internalizing social costs of transportation. In order to conduct this analysis, we employ a spatially disaggregated general equilibrium model of a regional economy that incorporates decisions of residents, firms, and developers, integrated with a spatially-disaggregated strategic transportation...

The article conceptualizes the pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement policies related to financial coverage in the context of health systems. It introduces the pharmaceutical market as an imperfect one, in which appropriate regulation is required. Moreover, the basis that guide the pricing and reimbursement processes are defined and described in order to generate a categorization based on wh...

The global effort toward sustainable development has initiated a transition in water management. Water utility companies use water-pricing policies as an instrument for controlling residential water demand. To support policy makers in their decisions, the authors have developed DAWN, a hybrid model for evaluating water-pricing policies. DAWN integrates an agent-based social model for the consum...

Admission to communication services for multimedia applications does not imply purely technical control, it has to integrate economic admission policies as well. This is mainly due to the fact that multimedia communication services within the Internet cannot be assigned in a cooperative fashion as they represent bandwidth-hungry applications. Internet economics make various assumptions on prici...