Assessing the welfare impact of consumer health advisories is a thorny task. Recently, Shimshack and Ward (2010) studied how U.S. households responded to FDA's 2001 mercury-in-fish advisory. They found that the average at-risk household reduced fish consumption by 21%, resulting in a 17%-reduction in mercury exposure at the cost of a 21%-reduction in cardioprotective omega-3 fatty acids. Based ...

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...

We specify the optimal level of copyright protection for an individual producer and the society as a whole. For an individual producer, the optimal level is (i) no protection, (ii) the level under which the producer’s overall profit net of the development cost is zero, or (iii) full protection. The optimal level for the society, on the other hand, critically depends on the distribution of firms...

Lameness of dairy cattle is an economic and welfare issue. It is the third most important health related economic loss facing the dairy industry, following fertility and mastitis. Most economic loss due to lameness results from costs of premature culling, veterinary treatment, increased labor, discarded milk, prolonged calving interval, and reduced milk production (Kossaibati and Esslemont, 199...

The state of Singapore operates a national public housing program, accounting for over 80% of its residential real estate. Singapore uses its housing allocation program to ensure ethnic diversity in its neighborhoods; it does so by imposing ethnic quotas: every ethnic group must not own more than a certain percentage in a housing project, thus ensuring that every neighborhood contains members f...

The focus of classic mechanism design has been on truthful direct-revelation mechanisms. In the context of combinatorial auctions the truthful direct-revelation mechanism that maximizes social welfare is the VCG mechanism. For many valuation spaces computing the allocation and payments of the VCG mechanism, however, is a computationally hard problem. We thus study the performance of the VCG mec...

abstract the objective of this study is evaluation of government’s optimum combination of policy instruments on per capita consumption of bread and the share of this product in food cost of families in different income classes. the minimization of changes in dead weight loss function is used in this study. by using boot strop method and on base of normal distribution for supply elasticity and d...

This study models net welfare impacts on producers who receive utility from on-farm wildlife populations that are not costlessly disposable. Wildlife damage levels where net benefits are zero indicate producers' maximum willingness to pay for on-farm wildlife. An empirical model is developed. Results for Ontario producers suggest the net welfare loss from damage is approximately half of the val...