UNLABELLED Generic medicines can generate larger savings to health care budgets when their use is supported by incentives on both the supply-side and the demand-side. Pharmacists''remuneration is one factor influencing the dispensing of generic medicines. OBJECTIVE The aim of this article is to provide an overview of different pharmacist remuneration systems for generic medicines in Europe, w...

In a Dutch auction, the price of an item decreases incrementally from the starting price at regular intervals. A bidder may buy the item at any time and stop the auction at the current price. This paper presents an optimal price decrement strategy in a Dutch auction, such that the expected revenue of the auction host is maximized. Properties of the optimal solution and a simple iterative soluti...

A most favored nations (MFN) clause is a contractual agreement between a buyer and a seller stating that the price paid by the buyer will be at least as low as the price paid by other buyers who purchase the same commodities from the seller. During the past decade the anticompetitive impact of MFN clauses in the health care industry has been challenged under federal antitrust laws. The cases ha...

This paper extends the literature on consumer reactions to future price changes to a new context – markets with substantial repeat purchase behavior – where the efficacy of common dynamic pricing strategies turns on the strength of these reactions. Utilizing the unique discount structure in automobile insurance, I am able to measure the extent to which consumers react to changes in the future p...

Excise taxes on sugary beverages have been proposed as a method to replicate the public health success of tobacco control and to generate revenue. As policymakers increase efforts to pass sugary beverage taxes, they can anticipate that manufacturers will emulate the strategies employed by tobacco companies in their attempts to counteract the impact of such taxes. Policymakers should therefore c...

We consider a broad class of intertemporal economic problems and characterize the short-run long-run responses demand for good to permanent increase in its market price. Depending on interplay between self-productivity time discounting, we show that dynamic substitution effects can generate price elasticities opposite signs short run long run. (JEL D11, D15, H20, J22, J24)

This paper addresses the question of whether the findings of behavioral economics imply that techniques used in cost-benefit analysis should be modified. The findings of behavioral economics considered include the status-quo effect, loss-aversion, overconfidence and hyperbolic discounting. These behavioral phenomena do indeed imply that concepts from cost-benefit analysis such as consumer surpl...

Experimental results in research on time preference are often controversial. We propose a systematic investigation of choice task in multiple price list format (MPL) that is frequently implemented in experiments on time preference, through a computer simulation analysis. We conduct experiments with artificial subjects to demonstrate that elicited discount rates are highly dependent on the struc...

We introduce a new discounting semantics for priced timed automata. Discounting provides a way to model optimal-cost problems for infinite traces and has applications in optimal scheduling and other areas. In the discounting semantics, prices decrease exponentially, so that the contribution of a certain part of the behaviour to the overall cost depends on how far into the future this part takes...

Environmentalists are often upset at the effect of discounting costs of future environmental damage, e.g., due to climate change. An often-overlooked message is that we should discount costs but also take into account the increase in the relative price of the ecosystem service endangered. The effect of discounting would thus be counteracted, and if the rate of price rise of the item was fast en...