We survey recent work on competition in markets in which consumers have costs of switching between competing firms' products. In a market with switching costs (or "brand loyalty"), a firm's current market share is an important determinant of its future profitability. We examine how the firm's choice between setting a low price to capture market share, and setting a high price to harvest profits...

High drug prices are a major barrier to patients' access to drugs and compliance with treatment. Yet low drug prices are often argued to provide inadequate incentives for innovation. We propose a drug-licensing model for health care, which has the promise of increasing drug use without altering patients' out-of-pocket spending, health plans' costs, or drug companies' profits. In such a model, p...

introduction: increasing costs of health and treatment services has led health economics specialists and even physicians in all countries to seek new methods for controlling and reducing costs in medical and health services. the present study was aimed to estimate the costs of a cardiac care unit (ccu) in a governmental hospital in iran. methods: in order to determine the end cost, a stepwise p...

The personnel cost savings we observed were achieved primarily by using fewer people and downgrading positions. Contrary to expectations, substituting capital for labor or lower wage and benefit costs did not appear to be important sources of personnel cost savings in the competitions we examined. To accomplish work with fewer people, both contractors and government managers employed a wide var...

this research aims to study the relationship between the components of quality costs and quality in company. the relationship between the components of quality costs and quality in company has been studied separately for materials, manpower, machinery, and whole of company. in this study, traditional method was used to collect quality costs and paf model was used to determine the components of ...

We develop a spatial model of oligopolistic competition in which firms simultaneously choose franchise locations and prices, and consumers receive uncorrelated firmspecific location shocks. Remarkably, when firms only differ along the endogenous contestable spatial dimension, they earn zero profits: while ex-post consumer heterogeneity ensures positive gross profits, competition for market shar...

Economic units can benefit from the cleaner production strategy, which aims to reduce environmental impact of economic activities while improving efficiency and profitability. Accordingly, aim research was clarify knowledge foundations costs indicate their role in reducing poor quality (the failure). A set conclusions has been reached, most important is that achieved a reduction external failur...