In this paper we estimate the welfare associated with the Medicare HMO program, now known as Medicare+Choice. We find that the Medicare HMO program contributed over $5.8 billion (1998 dollars) to consumer and producer surplus from 1993 to 1998. We estimate that the HMO program generates positive net societal welfare as long as the cost of treating HMO enrollees in the Medicare fee-for-service (...

Private companies (PCs) in restructured electricity industries determine facility investment timing and sizing. Such decisions maximize the PC’s expected profit (rather than social welfare) under uncertainty. By anticipating incentives, a welfare-maximizing transmission system operator (TSO) shapes network to align public private objectives. Via an option-based approach, we first quantify welfa...

In the theoretical literature, strong arguments have been provided in support of the efficiency defense in antitrust merger policy. One of the most often cited results is due to Williamson (1968) that shows how relatively small reduction in cost could offset the deadweight loss of a large price increase. Furthermore, Salant et al. (1983) demonstrate that (not for monopoly) mergers are unprofita...

Today we return to the idea of differential privacy as a tool to be wielded in mechanism design. We will prove a simple, but remarkable theorem that deviates from our normal intuition as mechanism designers. Typically, we think of social welfare as a special objective function – we can always use the VCG mechanism to optimize social welfare, but in general, there do not exist truthful mechanism...

I develop a general equilibrium multi-country model that allows for interaction between firm production and exporting decisions and individual migration decisions. Migrants lower trade costs and influence the number of firms that find it profitable to operate domestically or in foreign markets. The reduction in trade costs will impact consumer welfare by affecting the amount and range of differ...

When it is costly for agents to ̄nd a match, integrating small markets into a large one increases the matching di±culty. We examine such dependence of the number of matches on the market size by explicitly modelling ̄rms' attempt to attract workers by posting wages. It is shown that integration reduces the relative market power of agents on the much shorter side of the market. Thus, if there ar...

We compare individual survival curves constructed from objective (actual mortality) and elicited subjective information (probability of survival to a given target age). We develop a methodology to estimate jointly subjective and objective individual survival curves accounting for rounding on subjective reports of perceived survival. We make use of the long follow-up period in the Health and Ret...

In the last two decades, many firms in the U.S. forest products industry have either divested their timberlands to timber investment management organizations (TIMOs) and conservation organizations or converted their corporate structures from C corporations to real estate investment trusts (REITs). All landowners sold smaller timberland tracts for nonforestry uses. Reduced timber supplies from c...

The design and implementation of resource allocation and pricing for computing and network resources are crucial for system and user performance. Among various designing objectives, we target on maximizing the social welfare, i.e., the summation of all user utilities. The challenge comes from the fact that users are autonomous and their utilities are unknown to the system designer. Under the Ke...

Time Limits: The Effects on Welfare Use and Other Consumption-Smoothing Mechanisms We use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation covering the period 19892006 to investigate the impact that time limits on receipt of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families have on female-headed family outcomes, including welfare use, employment and living arrangements. The effects of time limits...