While adverse selection is often blamed for ineffi ciently high insurance premiums, imperfect competition is also a pervasive feature of many health insurance markets. In Medicare Supplement insurance (Medigap), two firms control nearly three-fourths of the market and premiums exceed claims by thirty percent. I find that while adverse selection can restrain markups, a low price elasticity and c...

Market volatility remains one of the most important research fields in agricultural economics.Interestingly, price transmission mechanism seems to be symmetric in sectors that are likely to be of high political power.This paper analyzes the price transmission effects from international markets to domestic markets for corn in Iran. For this purpose, we estimate the elasticity of substitution bet...

among the agricultural important factors, inputs are the most significant in agricultural production. this article aimed to examine the impact of government subsidy policies on production of one of the most strategic products, namely on production of one of the most strategic products, namely maize, in iran. to achieve this goal, panel data for the nine provinces of iran's major producers of ma...

We study the strategic impacts of behavioral price discrimination on manufacturers and retailers in a distribution channel when there are switching costs in consumer demand. Unlike previous empirical studies of behavioral price discrimination, which rely only on differences in price elasticity across customers, our pricing model allows the strategies of channel members to additionally account f...

We adopt the optimization framework for rate allocation problem proposed by Kelly and characterize the stability condition with an arbitrary communication delay in the case of single resource. We demonstrate the existence of a fundamental trade-off between users’ price elasticity of demand and the responsiveness of resource through a choice of price function as well as between system stability ...

U a consignment contract with revenue sharing, a supplier decides on the retail price and delivery quantity for his product, and retains ownership of the goods; for each item sold, the retailer deducts a percentage from the selling price and remits the balance to the supplier. In this paper we show that, under such a contract, both the overall channel performance and the performance of individu...

Since China accelerated its market oriented economic reforms at the end of 1992, its energy intensity has declined 3.6% annually over 1993–2005. However, its energy intensity declined 4.2% annually during its first reform period 1979–1992. Therefore, can we conclude that the accelerated marketization since the end of 1992 has made no contribution to its energy efficiency improvement? In order t...

We examine how gasoline price volatility impacts consumers’ price elasticity of demand for gasoline. Results show that volatility in prices decreases consumer demand for gasoline in the intermediate run. We also find that consumers appear to be less elastic in response to changes in gasoline price when gasoline price volatility is medium or high, compared to when it is low. Moreover, we find th...