This paper explores the impact of university finance reforms on teaching quality. It is shown that the graduate tax can achieve efficiency with tuition fees administered by the government, while student grants, pure and income contingent loans can not. However, all options are inefficient when universities have the autonomy to set tuition fees. Then, pure loans dominate the graduate tax and are...

The extensive promotion and proliferation of articles and learned essays on Total Quality Management (TQM) have filled the pages of magazines, conference proceedings and academic journals such as this over the past few years. A limited number of commentators have stuck their necks out to question some of the supposed gains that such a managerial revolution can have in terms of the intended bene...

We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers are heterogeneous in knowledge: some consumers know both the prices and quality of the products offered, some know only the prices and some know neither. We show that two types of signalling equilibria are possible. Both are characterised by dispersion and Pareto-inefficiency of the price/quality of...

Background to series CHE Discussion Papers (DPs) began publication in 1983 as a means of making current research material more widely available to health economists and other potential users. So as to speed up the dissemination process, papers were originally published by CHE and distributed by post to a worldwide readership. The CHE Research Paper series takes over that function and provides a...

*Correspondence: John A. Jones, Biology Department, Appalachian State University, 572 Rivers Street, Boone, NC 28608-2027, USA e-mail: [email protected] Determining how to best measure habitat quality is essential for many conservation plans and basic ecological questions. Territory quality is thought to be a product of physical habitat characteristics (i.e., habitat quality) and the densit...

We investigate how price ceilings and floors affect outcomes in continuous time, double auction markets with discrete goods and multiple qualities. When price controls exist, the existence of competitive equilibria (the solution concept of classical market theory) is no longer guaranteed; hence, we investigate the nature of non-price competition and how markets might evolve in its presence. We ...

We study a model of charity competition in which informed giving alone can explain quality heterogeneity across similar charities. It is this heterogeneity that also creates the demand for information. In equilibrium, too few donors pay to be informed; but interestingly, informed giving may increase with the cost of information. This is true if the charitable market is highly competitive or if ...

We examine a theory of competitive innovation in which new ideas are introduced only when diminishing returns to the use of existing ideas sets in. After an idea is introduced, the knowledge capital associated with that idea expands, and its value falls. Once the value falls far enough, it becomes profitable to introduce a new idea. The resulting theory is consistent with fixed costs of innovat...

Professor Jacobi's essay analyzes the various regulatory responses that are available to the government when crises in quality of care occur. These responses range from complete government involvement, i.e. "command and control" regulation, to a limited caretaker role in maximizing market forces. In responding to the recent IOM Report on human error in medical care, Professor Jacobi looks back ...