Past research in marketing and psychology suggests that pricing structure may influence consumers’ perception of value. In the context of two commonly used pricing schemes, pay-peruse and two-part tariff, we evaluate the impact of pricing structure on consumer preferences for access services. To this end, we develop a utility-based model of consumer retention and usage of a new service. A notab...

tele.ring is a mobile phone organization selling contracts and cell phones in the Austrian market. The market situation in 2005 was highly competitive and dynamic resulting in relatively short tariff life cycles. Excessively long lead times made tele.ring’s management feel dissatisfied with their new tariff development process. Furthermore, a new competitor had entered the market posing a major...

In the negotiations on agriculture in the World Trade Organization, it was asserted that an importing state trading enterprise affects the domestic market but not the international market. This claim is investigated through specifying a model of intermediaries in international trade. There are two kinds of intermediaries: first, a state trading enterprise; and second, an n-firm Cournot oligopso...

The typical economic model implicitly assumes that the set of goods in an economy never changes. As a result, the predicted efficiency loss from a tariff is small, on the order of the square of the tariff rate. If we loosen this assumption and assume that international trade can bring new goods into an economy, the fraction of national income lost when a tariff is imposed can be much larger, as...

Recently, many algorithms have been developed for autonomous agents to manage home energy use on behalf of their human owners. By so doing, it is expected that agents will be more efficient at, for example, choosing the best energy tariff to switch to when dynamically priced tariffs come about. However, to date, there has been no validation of such technologies in any field trial. In particular...

The majority of African countries implemented import liberalisation in the 1990s. This paper explores factors that may explain the pattern of protection and of tariff reform. We consider political economy explanations, motivated specifically by the Grossman and Helpman (1994) model of protection in response to industry lobbies, and the possibility that reforms are technocratic. Using industry-l...

Distributed electricity producers, such as small wind farms and solar installations, pose several technical and economic challenges in Smart Grid design. One approach to addressing these challenges is through Broker Agentswho buy electricity from distributed producers, and also sell electricity to consumers, via a Tariff Market–a new market mechanism where Broker Agents publish concurrent bid a...

This paper explores the impact on the Southern Mediterranean Countries (SMC) of the current process of trade liberalisation with the European Union. The methodology is that of computable general equilibrium modelling under imperfect competition and the model includes 10 countries and 11 sectors. This allows for both a cross-country and cross-sectoral analysis of the results. The experiments con...

For the better part of the past century, residential customers in the United States and many other countries have paid for electricity through a twopart tariff that has collected most of the revenue through a flat volumetric charge—that is, flat electricity rates paid in cents per kilowatt hour (¢/ kWh). In contrast, a large share of the cost of producing and delivering electricity does not var...

Previous theoretical contributions on endogenous tariff formation have focused on trade models with homogeneous goods and constant returns to scale. This paper investigates the political equilibrium of trade policy when economic structure is instead characterized by differentiated products and increasing returns to scale and there exists intra-industry trade. The result shows that endogenous ta...