Given a batch of human computation tasks, a commonly ignored aspect is how the price (i.e., the reward paid to human workers) of these tasks must be set or varied in order to meet latency or cost constraints. Often, the price is set up-front and not modified, leading to either a much higher monetary cost than needed (if the price is set too high), or to a much larger latency than expected (if t...

Given the agreed urgency of decarbonizing electricity and the need to guide decentralized private decisions, an adequate and credible carbon price appears essential. The paper defines and quantifies the useful concept of the break-even carbon price for mature zero-carbon electricity investments. It appears an attractive alternative given the difficulty of measuring the social cost of carbon, bu...

This paper shows how standard arguments supporting the imposition of price caps break down in the presence of demand uncertainty. In particular, though in the deterministic case the introduction or lowering of a price cap (above marginal cost) results in increased production, increased total welfare, decreased prices, and increased consumer welfare, we show that all of the above comparative sta...

We study a single-product fluid-inventory model in which the procurement price of the product fluctuates according to a continuous time Markov chain. We assume that a fixed order price, in addition to state-dependent holding costs are incurred, and that the depletion rate of inventory is determined by the sell price of the product. Hence, at any time the controller has to simultaneously decide ...

BACKGROUND It is believed that laboratory tariffs in Iran don't reflect the real costs. This might expose private laboratories at financial hardship. Activity Based Costing is widely used as a cost measurement instrument to more closely approximate the true cost of operations. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to determine the real price of different clinical tests of a selected private clinical lab...

We study the effects of different pricing strategies available to a continuous review inventory system with capacitated supply, which operates in a fluctuating environment. The system has a single server with exponential processing time. The inventory holding cost is nondecreasing and convex in the inventory level, the production cost is linear with no set-up cost. The potential customer demand...

Air pollution from motor vehicles, electricity-generating plants, industry, and other sources can harm human health, injure crops and forests, damage building materials, and impair visibility. Economists sometimes analyze the social cost of these impacts, in order to illuminate tradeoffs, compare alternatives, and promote efficient use of scarce resource. In this paper, we compare estimates of ...

We analyze the incentives for cost-reducing R&D by downstream firms in a two-tier market structure. Downstream R&D increases the demand for an input, thereby allowing the upstream firm to raise the input price. While it lowers the benefit of R&D to a downstream firm, such a price adjustment by the input supplier leads to a higher production cost for all rival firms. Due to this “raising rivals’...

A basic tenet of microeconomics is that for a competitive industry in equilibrium the market price of a product will be equal to its marginal cost. This paper develops a model framework and a corresponding empirical inference procedure for estimating longrun marginal cost in industries where production costs decline over time. In the context of the solar photovoltaic (PV) module industry, we re...

Retail gasoline prices are known to respond fairly slowly to wholesale price changes. This does not appear to be true for markets with Edgeworth price cycles. Recently, many retail gasoline markets in the midwestern U.S. and other countries have been shown to exhibit price cycles, in which competition generates rapid cyclical retail price movements. We show that cost changes in cycling markets ...