An attractive feature of competitive markets is that they maximize the sum of consumer and producer surplus. Producer and consumer surplus are shown in the market supply and market demand diagram in Figure 7-4. Recall that the producer surplus for all producers is the area above the supply curve and below the market price line, and that the consumer surplus for all consumers is the area below t...

The government organizations grant incentives to promote green product consumption, improve green product quality, boost remanufacturing activities, etc. through various policies. The objective of this study is to highlight pros and cons of two incentive policies, namely (1) incentive on manufacturer’s R&D investment and (2) direct incentive to consumer based on greening level of the product on...

We customize the aggregative game approach to oligopoly to study asymmetric media markets. Advertiser, platform, and consumer surplus are tied together by a simple summary statistic. When media are ad-financed and ads are a nuisance to consumers we establish see-saws between consumers and advertisers. Entry of a lower-quality platform increases consumer surplus, but decreases advertiser surplus...

What is consumer surplus, and how is it measured? ANSWER: Consumer surplus measures the benefit to buyers of participating in a market. It is measured as the amount a buyer is willing to pay for a good minus the amount a buyer actually pays for it. For an individual purchase, consumer surplus is the difference between the willingness to pay, as shown on the demand curve, and the market price. F...

We estimate the welfare associated with the Medicare HMO program, now known as Medicare+Choice (M+C). We find that the creation of the M+C program resulted in approximately $15.6 billion in consumer surplus and $52 billion in profits from 1993 to 2000 (in 2000 dollars). This program most likely generated significant net social welfare. However, we find that consumer surplus is geographically un...

We build a model of credit card pricing that explicitly takes into account credit functionality. We show that a monopoly card network always selects an interchange fee that exceeds the level that maximizes consumer surplus. If regulators only care about consumer surplus, a conservative regulatory approach is to cap interchange fees based on retailers’ net avoided costs from not having to provid...

We derive bounds on the ratios of deadweight loss and consumer surplus to producer surplus under Cournot competition. To do so, we introduce a parameterization of the degree of curvature of market demand using the parallel concepts of ρ-concavity and ρ-convexity. The ”more concave” is demand, the larger the share of producer surplus in overall surplus, the smaller is consumer surplus relative t...

Most competition authorities pursue a consumer standard – they seek to deliver an improvement in consumer surplus (i.e. the difference between what consumers are willing to pay and what they actually pay, aggregated across all consumers who purchase the good in question). Under this standard, if improving consumer surplus reduces profits, those lost profits are not taken into account. What do e...

-In this paper we provide an introduction to water quality benefit estimation for noneconomists. Net water quality benefits are typically measured using the concept of consumer surplus, which can be estimated using a number of economic valuation methodologies. These can be divided into direct and indirect methods. Direct methods involve questioning survey respondents to determine their consumer...