The extensive adoption of uniform pricing for branded variants is a puzzling phenomenon considering that firms may improve profitability through price discrimination. In the paper, we incorporate consumers' concerns of price fairness into a model of price competition and show that uniform price for branded variants may emerge in equilibrium. Interestingly, we find that uniform pricing induced b...

Constant shadow prices indicate that gains in expected votes with respect to marginal shifts in transfers should be equal across jurisdictions. The ratio of the scalars (λ/μ) holds constant, while exhausting the budget, only if each party promises the same amount to any given jurisdiction (taj = tbj = Yj ∀ j). Voter consumption is thus identical under either party and implies tj = 0. By the tra...

543 Introduction During the last years, due to world-wide economic recession and a large inventory of stock, copper reached a historical value of 0.59 US$/pound in 2001. This fact meant closing down many important mining companies in the world, mainly in USA. On the other hand, strong environmental restrictions have been imposed on the mining activity, and it is expected they will become more r...

The energy transition requires substantial amounts of metals such as copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium. Are these a key bottleneck? We identify metal-specific demand shocks, estimate supply elasticities pin down the price impact in structural scenario analysis. Metal prices would reach historical peaks for an unprecedented, sustained period net-zero emissions scenario. total value production r...

Empirical studies on pharmaceutical pricing across countries have found evidence that prices vary according to per capita income. These studies are typically based on survey data from a subset of countries and cover only one year. In this paper, we study the international trade and price of insulin by using detailed trade data for 186 importing countries from 1995 to 2013. With almost 12,000 ob...

In this paper, we study the problem of online pricing for multi-type items. Given a seller with k types of items where the amount of each type is m, a sequence of users {u1, u2, ...} arrive one by one. Each user is single-minded, i.e., each user is only interested in a particular bundle of items. The seller must set the unit price and assign some amount of bundles to each user upon his/her arri...

We analyse the bidding for unit-price contracts, a very common procurement auction. With a unit price contract, not the provision of the good but the employment of several kinds of inputs is priced. The seller charges a unit price for the employed quantity of each input. To select one seller, a linear selection rule is used to rank submitted lists of unit prices. In this paper, we model heterog...

BACKGROUND Fourteen African countries are scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention. Several devices that might offer alternatives to the three WHO-approved surgical VMMC procedures have been evaluated for use in adults. One such device is PrePex, which was prequalified by the WHO in May 2013. We utilized data from one of the PrePex field studies undertaken in Zim...

The world spends more than $500m on long-lasting Insecticidal nets (LLINs) every year; it is the largest single item in the global malaria control budget. A number of agencies have recently expressed interest in exploring how value-for-money in this market could be improved. The WHO Global Malaria Programme has therefore developed a system for reducing the cost-per-year of LLIN coverage. The pr...

Deterministic mine planning models along a time horizon have proved to be very effective in supporting decisions on sequencing the extraction of material in copper mines. Some of these models have been developed for, and used successfully by CODELCO, the Chilean state copper company. In this paper, we wish to consider the uncertainty in a very volatile parameter of the problem, namely, the copp...