I consider a situation in which a principal commits to a mechanism first and then agents choose unobservable actions before they draw their types. The agents’ actions affect not only their payoffs directly but also a distribution of private types as well. Thus, the distribution of types is determined endogenously rather than exogeneously unlike standard mechanism design literature. Then I exten...

Users share an increasing marginal cost technology. A method charges non negative cost shares covering costs. We look at the worst surplus (relative to the efficient surplus) in a Nash equilibrium of the demand game, where the minimum is taken over all convex preferences quasilinear in cost shares. We compare two budget-balanced methods, average cost pricing and serial cost sharing, and two met...

The paper incorporates liquid reserves, interest and dividends in the compound Poisson surplus model. When an insurer’s surplus is below a certain level, it is kept as liquid reserves. As the surplus attains the level, the excess of the surplus above the level will earn interest at a constant interest rate. If the surplus continues to surpass a higher level, the excess of the surplus above this...

A number of studies, most notably Crémer and McLean (1985, 1988), have shown that in generic type spaces that admit a common prior and are of a fixed finite size, an uninformed seller can design mechanisms that extract all the surplus from privatelyinformed bidders. We show that this result hinges on the non-convexity of such a family of priors. When the ambient family of priors is convex, gene...

Most competition authorities pursue a consumer standard – they seek to deliver an improvement in consumer surplus (i.e. the difference between what consumers are willing to pay and what they actually pay, aggregated across all consumers who purchase the good in question). Under this standard, if improving consumer surplus reduces profits, those lost profits are not taken into account. What do e...

-In this paper we provide an introduction to water quality benefit estimation for noneconomists. Net water quality benefits are typically measured using the concept of consumer surplus, which can be estimated using a number of economic valuation methodologies. These can be divided into direct and indirect methods. Direct methods involve questioning survey respondents to determine their consumer...

We compare behavior in modified dictator games with and without role uncertainty. Subjects choose between a selfish action, a costly surplus creating action (altruistic behavior) and a costly surplus destroying action (spiteful behavior). While costly surplus creating actions are most frequent under role uncertainty (64%), selfish actions become most frequent without role uncertainty (69%). Als...

An economic crisis in capitalism is a deep and prolonged interruption of the economy-wide circuit of capital. Crises emerge from within the logic of capitalism’s operation, and are manifestations of the inherently contradictory process of capital accumulation. The Marxist tradition conceptualizes two types of crisis tendencies in capitalism: a crisis of deficient surplus value and a crisis of e...

This paper determines the effect that offset payments under the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act (CDSOA also known as the “Byrd Amendment”) have on tariff levels that are lobbied for by U.S. producer groups. We derive the optimum antidumping tariff that would maximize the welfare of producers receiving CDSOA offset payments. We compare and contrast this newly derived “optimal antidumpin...

A cable operator chooses to bundle or provide programs à la carte by striking a balance between maximizing total surplus and minimizing transfer payments to program providers. We show, using general demand and cost functions, that a cable operator’s decision to bundle maximizes total producer surplus if the cable operator’s bargaining power is sufficiently high, and that a cable operator in a w...