Search results for "Economic surplus"
showing 10 items of 12 documents
Operational and financial performance of Italian airport companies: A dynamic graphical model
2016
Abstract This paper provides evidence on the relationship within a set of financial and operational indicators for Italian airports over 2008–2014. The limited sample size of national and regional airports suggests to apply the penalised RCON ( V , E ) model, which falls within the class of Gaussian graphical models. It provides both estimate and easy way to visualise conditional independence structures of the variables. Moreover, it is particularly suitable for handling longitudinal data where small number of units and huge number of variables have been collected. Findings highlight that a qualified concept of size matters in determining good financial performance. Specifically, increasing…
Rail access charges and internal competition in high speed trains
2016
Abstract This paper develops an ex ante analysis of the introduction of on-track competition in High Speed Rail (HSR) lines. The distinctive elements of our analysis are the consideration of: (i) the vertical structure of the rail sector, (ii) operators that compete in prices and number of services, and (iii) access charges for the use of the rail infrastructure that are endogenous. We provide simulation results for three Spanish HSR routes. The socio-economic viability of entry is found to depend on whether infrastructure and rail operations are integrated or separated, and also on the policy rule to set rail access charges. Firstly, separation without entry is not an appropriate good poli…
Alternative pricing regimes in interurban passenger transport with externalities and modal competition
2009
Abstract We develop an interurban passenger transport model with modal competition, where modes are perceived as differentiated products, and capture all major externalities. Our objective is to establish whether alternative regulatory regimes, which may involve road tolls, may lead to a traffic allocation, user welfare, and total welfare that may be closer to the social optimum. An empirical application to interurban Spanish travel is undertaken. We find that the private regime yields the lowest total welfare level: 12.6% below the social optimum level. Optimum pricing requires a toll on car transport of 5.1 cents of per passenger-km, and a price decrease of all other modes, relative to th…
Competing R&D Joint Ventures in Cournot oligopoly with spillovers
2014
This paper considers competition between R&D cartels, whereby prospective Cournot competitors coordinate their R&D decisions in order to maximize joint profit. It studies how R&D activity, aggregate profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare vary as the number of competing cartels varies. It also compares equilibrium with second best R&D, and discusses the policy implications of the results. The results show that the effects of R&D cartel competition depend on the welfare criterion adopted and on whether there are cooperative synergies or not.
Environmental taxation, information precision, and information sharing
2022
We analyze how environmental taxes should be optimally levied when the regulators and firms face costs uncertainties in a Stackelberg-Cournot game. We allow linear-quadratic payoffs functions coupled with an affine information structure encompassing common and private information with noisy signals. In the first period, the regulator chooses the intensity of emissions taxes in order to reduce externalities. In the second period, facing industry-related and firm-specific shocks, firms compete in the marketplace as Cournot rivals and choose outputs. We show that, given costs uncertainties with non-uniform quality of signals across firms, the regulator sets differentiated tax policy. We also e…
Demand for and Pricing of Mobile Internet: Evidence from a Real-World Pricing Experiment
2006
Commercialization of innovations frequently stumbles. A prominent recent example are the early (i.e. pre3G)mobile phone-enabled Internet services, whose European takeup was slower than expected. To determine why, we build a structural model of demand for such services and estimate it using consumerlevel panel data from a real world pricing experiment. The experiment allows for a decomposition of the number of wireless connections into the number of needs instances where a consumer would establish a connection if the price were zero and the conditional probability of establishing a connection. We find that needs were plenty and potential consumer surplus several magnitudes higher than that a…
Wage gaps between the public and private sectors in Spain
1998
Based on data from the last household survey conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Estatistica in 1990-91, we estimate separate earnings equations by sector of employment and gender, treating the choice of employment sector as endogenous. From these results we compare the wage-generating process for each subgroup and identify the returns to human capital of males and females working in the public and private sectors. We then decompose overall wage gaps by sector for each gender in order to measure the contribution of education and other personal characteristics to public-private wage differentials and to evaluate the economic surplus that public sector workers receive compared to their pri…
Joint Audit, Audit Market Structure, and Consumer Surplus
2017
We use a structural application of the discrete choice model to investigate how the introduction of a joint audit policy would affect audit market structure and consumer surplus. We perform this policy evaluation by identifying demand fundamentals in a joint audit regime and applying them to a single audit regime. We find that a joint audit requirement has the potential to change the audit market structure substantially but that the effects are sensitive to the specific policy design. For example, small audit firms gain market share in a joint audit regime but only if an equal sharing of the workload between the two joint auditors is not required. Our counterfactual analysis reveals that th…
A Model of Multiproduct Price Competition
1997
Abstract We provide a simple model of price competition in a multiproduct oligopoly market. The products are of general nature. We find that a pure strategy equilibrium exists and every equilibrium consumption maximizes the total social surplus. Consumers are characterized by a set function which determines their willingness to pay for every subset of products. If this function is convex, the set of equilibrium prices coincides with the core of a cooperative game generated by this set function and the firms extract total industry surplus. If it is concave, the only equilibrium price of a product is its marginal contribution to the consumer's total willingness to pay. Journal of Economic Lit…
More firms, more competition? The case of the fourth operator in France's mobile phone market
2010
Accepted, Forthcoming; International audience; To foster competition the French government authorized a fourth operator, ‘Free', to enter the country's mobile phone market at the end of 2009 alongside Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom (BT), who held respectively one-half, one-third and one-sixth of the market. By using a stylized model of France's phone market, we have examined what we call the regulator's nightmares and dreams. If Cournot competition is in place before Free's entry, minimizing the total profit fails to maximize the consumer surplus and the total surplus; the maximum most realistic price fall is 6.7% compared to three-way competition and could be 1.7% only; if Orange, SFR an…