We consider a seller who can sell her product over two periods, advance and spot. The seller has private information about the product quality, which is unknown to customers in advance and publicly revealed in spot. The question we consider is whether the seller has an incentive to signal quality in advance and, if so, how she can convey a credible signal of product quality. We characterize the...

W study the effect of strategic customer behavior on pricing and rationing decisions of a firm selling a single product over two periods. The seller may limit the availability of the product (that is, ration) in the second (clearance) period. Some customers are strategic and respond to the firm’s decisions by timing their purchases. When capacity is nonconstraining and the seller has pricing fl...

Programs intended to improve nutrition often fall short of expectations. One exception, however, occurred during the rationing years of World War II, when U.S. citizens were encouraged to incorporate protein-rich organ meats into their protein-deficient diets. Unfortunately, most of the insights resulting from these efforts remained unpublished or in limited distribution. For the first time, th...

BACKGROUND Evidence internationally suggests that staffing constraints and non-supportive work environments result in the rationing of nursing interventions (that is, limiting or omitting interventions for particular patients), which in turn may influence patient outcomes. In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), preliminary studies have found that discharge preparation and infant comfort ca...

The costs of shortages and rationing are not captured by standard consumer price indices. In this study, virtual prices for the rationed goods are used to calculate a new cost-of-living index (CLI). The results for Poland show that from 1987 to 1992 the CLI that ignores the rationing effects is biased upward from 3.6 to 6.99 percentage points per year. Compared to the welfare loss calculated by...

Society should not accept the inevitability of rationing medical resources, at least not in the short term. Because of the high degree of waste and duplication that characterize the Canadian and, even more, the American healthcare system, the invitation to focus on rationing procedures known to be useful is likely to divert attention from the need to eliminate waste. If and when extensive ratio...

This paper compares and contrasts three different substantive (as opposed to procedural) principles of justice for making health care priority-setting or "rationing" decisions: need principles, maximising principles and egalitarian principles. The principles are compared by tracing out their implications for a hypothetical rationing decision involving four identified patients. This decision has...

This paper measures excess labor supply in equilibrium. We induce hiring shocks—which employ 24 percent of the force external month-long jobs—in Indian local markets. In peak months, wages increase instantaneously and aggregate employment declines. lean consistent with severe rationing, are unchanged, positive spillovers on remaining workers, indicating that over a quarter is rationed. At least...

D pricing offers the potential to increase revenues. At the same time, it creates an incentive for customers to strategize over the timing of their purchases. A firm should ideally account for this behavior when making its pricing and stocking decisions. In particular, we investigate whether it is optimal for a firm to create rationing risk by deliberately understocking products. Then, the resu...

The equitable division of a joint cost (or a jointly produced output) among agents with different shares or types of output (or input) commodities, is a central theme of the theory of cooperative games with transferable utility. Ever since Shapley’s seminal contribution in 1953, this question has generated some of the deepest axiomatic results of modern microeconomic theory. More recently, the ...