User fees for municipal services may generate revenue for municipalities and their utility commissions, but they are equally important as prices for those services. Pricing services at marginal cost can lead to efficient production and consumption of the service, and efficient allocation of the service when capacity limits are reached; and it can help to guide investment on an efficient basis. ...

Background In early 1990s, Tanzania like other African countries, adopted health sector reform (HSR). The most strongly held centralisation system that informed the nature of services provision including health was, thus, disintegrated giving rise to decentralisation system. It was within the realm of HSR process, user fees were introduced in the health sector. Along with user fees, various typ...

This paper presents a model of competing payment schemes. Unlike previous work on generic twosided markets, the model allows for the fact that in a payment system one type of user (merchants) competes to attract users on the other side of the market (consumers who may use cards for purchases). It analyzes how competition between card associations affects the choice of interchange fees, and thus...

Health policy will be a major issue in Britain’s next general election. The Labour government is committed to a substantial increase in funds for the National Health Service (NHS) and has eliminated tax relief for private health insurance. The Conservative Opposition party favors subsidizing private health insurance, though it has pledged to match the government’s funding increases for the NHS....

Blockchain technology has emerged as a disruptive innovation, opening the way for creation of decentralized apps (dApps). However, current implementation blockchain requires gas fees, which are transaction fees paid to miners validation. Gas restrict adoption applications because users must pay these interact with network. The method reduce consumer burden by utilizing transactions without is u...

Constrained efficient provision of an excludable public good is studied in a model where preferences are private information. The provision level is asymptotically deterministic, making it possible to approximate the optimal mechanism with a mechanism that provides a fixed quantity of the good and charges fixed user fees for access. In general, the fixed fees involve third degree price discrimi...