Bergstrom showed that a necessary condition for a Pareto optimum with non-paternalistic altruism is classification as a selfish Pareto optimum. This paper shows that Bergstrom’s result does not generalize to the benefit-cost analysis of generic changes in public goods. There may exist good projects that will be rejected by a selfish-benefit cost test, a selfish test error. Selfish test error is...

When individuals with the same preferences but different gross wages and non-labor incomes allocate time to leisure and labor and contribute to a pure public good, the order of contributors' utilities is a perfect inversion of the order of their gross wages. The same applies to contributors' net and gross wages when contributions are financed by income from labor. There are consequences regardi...

Mark Jamison is Director of the Public Utility Research Center (PURC), Warrington College of Business, University of Florida. Before joining PURC in 1996, he was Manager of Regulatory Policy at Sprint. Prior to joining Sprint, he worked nine years for state regulatory commission staffs at the Iowa Utilities Board and the Kansas Corporation Commission. He earned his PhD at the University of Flor...

This article reviews a set of studies depicting how public officials (agents )in French public utilities have reacted, in practical terms, to customer-focused reforms. These reactions are differentiated in terms of the agent’s position in the production cycle: maintenance of infrastructures; commercial positions; and service providing functions. These examples from the French experience are use...

We extend the equivalence between Bayesian and dominant strategy implementation established by Gershkov et al. (Econometrica, 2013) to environments with non-linear utilities satisfying the property of increasing differences over distributions and the convex-valued assumption. The new equivalence result produces novel implications to the literature on the principal-agent problem with allocative ...

Alexander Galetovic is Professor of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes, Santiago, Chile, and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University. He is co-editor of Breves de Energı́a, the leading energy blog in Chile. He has also advised several energy companies on pricing, regulation and antitrust. His current research focuses on industry structure and the regulation of public utilities.

Agriculture $ 1,181,718,000 1% $ 10,477 Construction $ 7,654,730,000 7% $ 35,515 Finance, Insurance and Real estate $ 7,461,815,000 6% $ 31,671 Government $ 15,530,196,000 13% $ 35,965 Manufacturing $ 33,177,923,000 29% $ 47,559 Mining $ 438,960,000 0.38% $ 50,729 Retail Trade $ 10,624,138,000 9% $ 10,640 Services $ 26,351,884,000 23% $ 40,126 Wholesale Trade $ 6,680,163,000 6% $ 42,376 Transpo...

Relatively little is known about the practice of settlement rather than litigation in US utility regulation, or about the activities of consumer advocates. This paper presents evidence from Florida. During 1976-2002, over 30 per cent of earnings reviews were settled by stipulations involving the Office of Public Counsel but only 5 per cent of other cases. Over three quarters of the rate reducti...