transfer fee regulations in european football abstract we analyze the impact of three different transfer fee systems on payoffs contract lengths training and effort incentives in european football the different regimes being used until 1995 pre bosman currently in use bosman and recently approved monti differ with respect to the transfer fee an initial club is entitled to depending on whether a player has a valid contract or not we show that the different systems differ only with respect to the contract length if the contract which maximizes the expected joint surplus of the initial club and the player is feasible under each system otherwise regime p is strictly dominated by regime b in terms of expected social welfare regime m leads to higher effort but lower incentives to invest in training compared to system b

exclusive contracts and protection of investments we consider the effect of a renegotiable exclusive contract restricting a buyer to purchase from only one seller on the levels of noncontractible investments undertaken in their relationship contrary to some informal claims in the literature we find that exclusivity has no effect when all investments are fully specific to the relationship i e are purely internal exclusivity does matter when investments affect the value of the buyer s trade with other sellers i e have external effects we examine the effects of exclusivity on investments and aggregate welfare and the private incentives of the buyer seller coalition to use it

the more stringent the better rationing car use in bogota with moderate and drastic restrictions rationing car use based on license plate number has become a popular policy in several cities around the world to address traffic congestion and air pollution this paper studies the effects of the moderate and drastic driving restrictions imposed as part of the pico y placa program on car use and air pollution in bogota using data on ambient carbon monoxide gasoline consumption and vehicle sales and registrations no evidence of an improvement in air quality or a reduction in car use is found in either phase of the program on the contrary there is some indication that relative to the moderate phase gasoline consumption vehicle ownership and carbon monoxide in the morning peak tended to increase slightly when drastic restrictions were implemented

material interests moral reputation and crowding out species protection on private land we consider how the reputation of being socially responsible works as an effective source of motivation in protecting a public good such as endangered species this paper investigates the mechanism design for endangered species protection on private land under asymmetric information about reputation and land quality we examine optimal monetary transfer by designing an efficient mechanism which takes into account the crowding out effect of monetary rewards on socially responsible behavior we find landowners who have good reputation contribute more than the optimum level landowners with poor reputation sacrifices information rent rather they buy reputation

the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

on the bad reputation of reputational concerns can reputational concerns do any good economists have shown how they lead agents to ignore valuable information to herd and to become overly risk averse we explore how they may be a social blessing an agent may exert effort to become informed about the uncertain benefits of a project a smart agent s efforts make him better informed a dumb agent s efforts are to no avail if an agent does not know his type reputational concerns are socially beneficial if an agent knows his type reputational concerns may be socially beneficial a dumb agent takes inefficient unconventional decisions to mimic a smart agent the latter exerts more effort in order not to be mistaken for a dumb this holds whether or not project rejection is a safe haven for the dumb

pricing and congestion economic principles relevant to pricing roads u k expenditures on roads or road costs average l4 34 billion per year from the 24 6 million vehicles registered road taxes of l12 7 billion were collected 2 9 times road costs from 1978 88 the average daily traffic on each km of road rose by 34 percent with a consequent serious increase in congestion road space is a valuable and scarce resource and road users should logically pay the marginal social cost if they are to make efficient transport and location decisions the paper estimates these costs and the appropriate charges for britain and identifies the major policy issues total road charges ignoring hard to quantify accident costs should yield l13 8 billion of which congestion charges would be l12 8 billion though close to road taxes in total amount replacing current taxes by road pricing would reduce congestion improve public transport and avoid perverse consequences from road expansion copyright 1990 by oxford university press

the impact of transfer fees on professional sports an analysis of the new transfer system for european football we evaluate the effect of the recently approved transfer system for european professional football which will replace the current system implemented by the bosman judgment in 1995 the focus is on the comparison of wages profits the length of contracts and investment incentives our main findings are that i the new regime reduces a player s overall payoff because it increases the new club s renegotiation payoff and ii since training generates a general skill the new regime will also diminish incentives to invest in the education of young talents because a new club benefits more from the initial club s investment

regulation moral hazard and insurance of environmental risks abstract a large class of major environmental risks are subject to severe moral hazard problems the purpose of this paper is to study the potential conflicts between cost minimization and safety care the intuition is that regulatory efforts or sheer competition inducing a greater focus on cost minimization may tilt the agents trade off towards taking too much risk here we study the problem in the context o regulation of a natural monopoly and see how high powered incentives may conflict with safety care we address the issue of moral hazard in environmental risk with adverse selection limited liability risk aversion and multiprincipals

multidimensional incentive compatibility and mechanism design abstract incentive compatibility conditions are characterized in general for problems in which several goods are to be allocated and agents types are multidimensional two questions of monopoly pricing under multidimensional uncertainty are then analyzed first we find the optimal nonlinear pricing scheme when the monopolist knows only the distribution of an arbitrarily parameterized family of demand curves and second we solve for the optimal bundling policy for a multiproduct monopolist

golden cages for showy birds optimal switching costs in labor contracts under what circumstances do workers sign contracts with high quitting penalties our answer points to market transparency when the worker s performance is privately observed by the incumbent 4rm alternative employers face an adverse selection problem as a result e7cient separations can only take place through involuntary layo8s and there is no role for quitting fees in contrast when performance is public quitting fees are useful devices to appropriate the surplus from workers reallocation separations are amicable and take the form of quitting after downwardly renegotiating the fees qualitative features of contracts are independent of the distribution of ex post bargaining power the impact of switching costs on total welfare and its distribution depends on the degree of market transparency and the ex ante distribution of market power c

free agency long term contracts and compensation in major league baseball estimates using longitudinal data for major league baseball players this paper estimates the effects of eligibility for free agency or arbitration on compensation and contract duration becaus e eligibility is based on experience and better players are kept longe r a fixed effects approach is used arbitration and free agency eligibility both raised annual compensation however only free agen cy raised contract duration the free agency findings are consistent wi th nash bargaining however additionally considering the arbitration results suggests the winner s curse duration rises only when a team might lose a player the auction market is thus avoided copyright 1993 by mit press

priced and unpriced online markets some online resources are free and others are not but it can be hard to predict which resources are in which category do users pay for web based e mail sometimes they do as in the case of lifetime e mail service from pobox but often they do not as in the case of hotmail from microsoft or gmail from google do users pay for wireless internet access at hotspots historically such access carries a fee as it does at the t mobile hotspots at many airports and hotels but now a number of retail outlets are providing such access without a fee such as panera bread whole foods and recently starbucks do users pay for software many users do pay for a wide variety of commercial software yet other software like the linux operating system and the firefox web browser can be downloaded without charge zero prices offer important benefits even relative to small positive prices for one fee free access reduces transaction costs eliminating the need for billing systems as well as in many cases account setup user names and the like furthermore zero prices seem to create an environment of experimentation and progress for products and consumers lessig 2002 von hippel 2001 finally consumers overwhelmingly favor zero price products even beyond what might be predicted by their ordinary efforts to maximize consumer surplus shampanier mazar and ariely 2007 yet experience in other contexts offers cause for concern although marginal costs may be near zero for many levels of use of online resources costs generally eventually increase as usage nears a capacity constraint given by technological capability or system design more generally experience in other contexts repeatedly reveals overconsumption scarcity and even hoarding when resources are

adam smith and the prisoners dilemma in ordinary life we engage in many transactions with other people in which there is potential profit for both parties from some kind of cheating normally we do not see much of this cheating i have no doubt that the merchant will put in the package the merchandise which i buy or which i ordered even though if he put in something else cheaper it is quite dubious that i would be able to win a lawsuit on my part if i decide i did not like the product and returned it with the remark that it was defective having first damaged it so that it is indeed defective i could get a gain neither i nor the merchant worries particularly about this kind of behavior although the merchant worries more than i do for reasons that will become plain below if we worried about it we would both take precautions with the result that socially we would be worse off by the cost of these precautions we have here what appears to be a prisoners dilemma matrix but the two parties are behaving cooperatively what adam smith called the discipline of continuous dealings takes care of the matter the point of this article is to work out adam smith s insight in the terminology of a modern game theory we shall see that smith was right and there are some cases indeed practically very important cases where what appears to be a prisoners dilemma in fact leads to cooperative behavior consider the prisoners dilemma game shown in figure i it is orthodox that if a and b are playing a single turn of this particular game they will end up in the lower right hand corner with a net loss of one dollar each if we go from a single game to a long series of games played by the same players however there is no agreed upon solution experimental evidence seems to indicate that the players play a mixed strategy with some cooperative plays and some noncooperative plays and the mixture can be modified by changing the payoffs 2 all of these situations are simplifications of the real world and it is a point of this article to suggest that if we make the game more like many real world

on revenue recycling and the welfare effects of second best congestion pricing in a monocentric city abstract this paper examines congestion taxes in a monocentric city with pre existing labor taxation when road toll revenue is used to finance labor tax cuts 35 of the optimal road tax in our numerical model does not reflect marginal external congestion costs but rather functions as a ramsey mirrlees tax i e an efficiency enhancing mechanism allowing for an indirect spatial differentiation of the labor tax this adds a quite different motivation to road pricing since welfare gains can be produced even in absence of congestion we find that the optimal road tax is non monotonic across space reflecting the different impacts of labor supply elasticity and marginal utility of income which both vary over space the relative efficiencies of some archetype second best pricing schemes cordon toll flat kilometer tax are high 84 and 70 respectively when road toll revenue is recycled lump sum the optimal toll lies below its pigouvian level extensions in a bimodal framework show that the optimality of using road toll revenue to subsidize public transport depends on the initial inefficiency in public transport pricing

second best road taxes in polycentric networks with distorted labor markets this paper examines the interaction of road taxes with spatially invariant labor taxation in a polycentric network it derives analytical expressions for the network counterparts of the traditional double dividend effects i e pigouvian tax interaction and revenue recycling effects and computes them under different policy regimes the analysis reveals a series of conditions under which a system of cordons around the major nodes of a network might be more efficient than marginal external cost pricing with a high elasticity of labor supply and limited public transport coverage it is shown that the pigouvian tax rule might reduce welfare even when the generated revenue is used to finance labor tax cuts

does britain or the united states have the right gasoline tax this paper develops an analytical framework to assess the second best optimal level of gasoline taxation taking into account unpriced pollution congestion and accident externalities as well as interactions with the broader fiscal system we provide calculations of the optimal taxes for the us and the uk under a variety of parameter scenarios under our central parameter values the second best optimal gasoline tax is 1 01 gal for the us and 1 34 gal for the uk current tax rates are much lower than this in the us and higher in the uk the calculations are moderately sensitive to alternative parameter assumptions the congestion externality is the largest component in both nations revenue raising needs also play a significant role as do accident externalities and local air pollution potential welfare gains from reducing the current uk tax rate are estimated at nearly one fourth the production cost of all gasoline used in the uk even larger gains could be achieved by switching to a tax on vehicle miles with equal revenue yield for the us the welfare gains from optimizing the gasoline tax are smaller but those from switching to an optimal tax on vehicle miles are very large

comparing the efficiency of alternative policies for reducing traffic congestion abstract this paper compares the efficiency of a single lane toll a uniform congestion tax across freeway lanes a gasoline tax and a transit fare subsidy at reducing congestion there are three conditions for an efficient outcome relating to travel across modes across peak and off peak periods and sorting out drivers with high and low time costs across faster and slower freeway lanes each policy involves some inefficiency indeed the single lane toll gasoline tax and transit subsidy forego at least two thirds of the efficiency gains under an ideal congestion tax that varies across lanes however the uniform congestion tax achieves over 90 of these gains

conditional cooperation and voluntary contributions to public goods we compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays a repeated publi c good game to a strangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations subjects in the partners conditi on contribute from t he first period on significantly more to the publi c good than subjects in the strangers conditi on in the strangers conditi on contributions show a continual decay whil e in the partners conditi on contributions fluctuate on a high level until t hey decrease in the final periods we interpret subjects behavior in terms of conditional cooperation which is characterized by both future oriented and reactive behavior

ethnicity productivity and salary player compensation and discrimination in the national hockey league the paper considers the impact of potential minority francophone american european ethnic language culture discrimination on salary determination in the national hockey league using player salary data for the 1989 90 season a regression model of salary determination is constructed which includes variables measuring productivity skills market structure and allows for several ethnic influences including minority discrimination ethnically shaped consumer preferences and reservation wages the basic conclusion is that wages are principally determined by productivity and market structure and the only evidence of discrimination is found in the ethnically influenced consumer preference of american as opposed to canadian teams

estimating the welfare effect of congestion taxes the critical importance of other distortions within the transport system abstract this paper extends the first best analysis of peak period congestion pricing to account for interactions with other distortions within the transport system including congestion on unpriced routes accident and pollution externalities suboptimal transit pricing and gasoline taxes we illustrate how the presence of each of these distortions changes the welfare effect of a congestion tax over a wide range of parameter scenarios in all cases the welfare changes are potentially significant implying that these distortions are important to consider in an economic evaluation of congestion taxes

winning or losing from dynamic bottleneck congestion pricing the distributional effects of road pricing with heterogeneity in values of time and schedule delay abstract this paper analyses the efficiency and distributional impacts of congestion pricing in vickrey s 1969 dynamic bottleneck model of congestion allowing for continuous distributions of values of time and schedule delay we find that congestion pricing can leave a majority of travellers better off even without returning the toll revenues to them we also find that the consumer surplus losses or gains from tolling are not strictly monotonic in the value of time because they also depend on the value of schedule delays the greatest losses are not incurred by drivers with the lowest value of time but by users with an intermediate value of schedule delays and the lowest value of time for that value of schedule delays for second best pricing with an untolled alternative the pattern of distributional effects is quite similar to that for first best pricing in contrast with results from prior static models users who are indifferent between the two alternative routes are not the ones who gain least from this type of second best pricing our results suggest that in assessing the distributional impacts of road congestion pricing it is important to take into account both the distribution of the value of time and of the value of schedule delays as well as the dynamics of departure time choice

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

efficient congestion tolls in the presence of unpriced congestion a peak and off peak simulation model abstract this paper develops a congestion pricing model to examine efficient congestion tolls for an urban highway facility that resembles california state route 91 the highway that has been subject to congestion tolls since december 27 1995 two lanes out of six each way are subject to congestion tolls and the other four lanes are not the simulation model combines the economic theories of second best pricing of transportation facilities and peak load pricing and considers both welfare maximizing and profit maximizing cases the simulation results show that the second best peak period toll is quite low and that the welfare gains from the toll are modest compared to a regime in which all lanes are subject to tolls

peak load pricing of a transportation route with an unpriced substitute abstract this paper considers two routes to work which could be two bridges a freeway and a tollroad or roadway travel and subway travel both routes are subject to pure bottleneck and queue congestion if peak load pricing can be imposed on both routes the first best solution is attained however if one route is unpriced then the other route should have a second best time varying toll that is negative at the tails of the rush hour positive near the peak of the rush hour and zero on average if the two routes have the same capacities and if the parameter g is 1 then two thirds of the total traffic should use the priced route and the efficiency gain of second best pricing is two thirds of the efficiency gain of first best pricing

arbitrator compromise in final offer arbitration evidence from major league baseball i introduction the purpose of interest arbitration is to encourage two bargainers to reach a mutually agreeable settlement in the event of impasse an independent arbitrator determines the settlement in conventional arbitration ca each of the bargainers submits an offer the arbitrator may select one of the two offers or one of his or her own choosing as the settlement critics have argued that arbitrators split the difference between the offers to enhance their chances of being rehired in future cases this gives each bargainer an incentive to submit an extreme offer to increase its expected gains from arbitration as a result ca chills rather than encourages productive negotiation final offer arbitration foa was created by stevens 1966 to remedy the chilling effect he proposed that arbitrators select one of the two submitted offers as the award unable to compromise between the offers the arbitrator will presumably choose the most reasonable offer as the award ironically arbitrator compromise may exist even in foa according to theory foa arbitrators maximize their chances of being rehired by formulating a notion of the ideal settlement the preferred award and selecting the nearest offer importantly bazerman and farber 1985 farber and bazerman 1986 and gibbons 1988 noted that the preferred award is not exogenous but reflects the perspectives of the bargainers consequently although foa arbitrators may not compromise by splitting the difference between the offers they may formulate preferred awards that compromise between the bargainers perspectives because farber 1980 and gibbons 1988 showed that submitted offers should be strategically aligned around the arbitrator s preferred award an empirical analysis of final offers should reveal any compromises implicit in the preferred award to test the compromised preferred award hypothesis this study examines foa offers in major league baseball unique characteristics in baseball foa allow for a test of the compromised preferred award baseball players become eligible for foa after completing roughly three years of major league service during these first three years the players bargain in a purely monopsonistic environment the players may not freely negotiate with other clubs until they have completed six years of service the coexisting monopsonistic and oligopsonistic free agency markets have led to extraordinary differentials in player salaries that have been well documented in economic literature as in kahn 1993 although players with three to six years of experience continue to be bound to one club they may unilaterally opt for foa consequently the arbitrator must determine the appropriate payscale for an eligible player because the clubs prefer to extend monopsony salaries into the arbitration eligibility years they are likely to stress the importance of the player s prior salary i e the size of the raise a player is entitled to receive whereas the players would rather have the arbitrators rely on free agent salaries to determine the proper wage although the arbitrators could side with one of the positions theory predicts the preferred award will reflect a compromise between the two perspectives the results strongly support the existence of compromised preferred award the submitted final offers are a weighted average between the mean free agent salary and the player s salary in the previous season the notion that the preferred award represents a compromise between the two perspectives is strengthened when one examines the weights of losing offers specifically for both hitters and pitchers the losing player offer does not differ significantly from the mean free agent salary for a comparable player winning player offers on the other hand are less than the comparable free agent salary perhaps the most intriguing finding is that by compromising between the perspectives of players and clubs baseball foa has generated its own unique labor market through which player salaries lie between the monopsony and free agent levels

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

pareto optima welfare weights and smooth equilibrium analysis abstract the first part of this paper deals with the parameterization of the set of pareto optima by utility levels and by the welfare weights in the second part the parameterization by the welfare weights is used to establish properties of the negishi equation system associated with the finite general equilibrium model this approach yields proofs of the regularity of the no trade equilibria and of the existence of equilibria by a degree argument that are new the formulation and the proof of these properties within the setup of the negishi equation system plays a crucial role in extending these properties to the infinite horizon model with discounted utility functions

amenity benefits and the optimal allocation of land agricultural land often yields sig nificant amenity benefits that may not be re flected in the prevailing allocation of land be tween agricultural and nonagricultural uses this paper introduces a simple supply demand model that incorporates these benefits in the de termination of optimal land allocation three stage least squares and county level data are used to estimate the supply and demand param eters these estimates confirm the plausibility of the conceptual model results from the con tingent valuation literature illustrate the extent of underallocation of land to agriculture due to existing institutional conditions some correc tive measures and their distributional effects are discussed and quantified jel q24

the marginal cost of species preservation the northern spotted owl abstract because species survival is not certain the decision to save a species is not an all or nothing choice but rather a marginal one the appropriate unit for both benefit and cost functions is the likelihood of survival and the appropriate question is how certain we want to be of species survival the intensity of the species preservation debate is also fired by strong equity concerns we illustrate these points for the case of the northern spotted owl by constructing a marginal cost curve for its survival and by disaggregating welfare loss by region and by market level

revenue recycling and the welfare effects of road pricing the authors explore the interaction between taxes on work related traffic congestion and preexisting distortionary taxes in the labor market a congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin when revenues are returned in lump sum transfers the resulting efficiency loss in the labor market can be larger that the pigouvian efficiency gains from internalizing the congestion externality by contrast if congestion tax revenues are used to reduce labor taxes the net impact on the labor supply is positive and the efficiency gain in the labor market can raise the overall welfare gains of the congestion tax by as much as 100 percent recycling congestion tax revenues in public transit subsidies produces a positive but smaller impact on the labor supply in short the authors results indicate that the presence of preexisting tax distortions and the form of revenue recycling can crucially affect the size and possibly even the sign of the welfare effect of road pricing schemes the efficiency gains from recycling congestion tax revenues in other tax reductions can amount to several times the pigouvian welfare gains from congestion reduction

the existence and persistence of a winner s curse new evidence from the baseball field this study takes advantage of recent developments in the measurement and valuation of individual output in the baseball labor market to i reassess prior evidence that this market is afflicted by the winner s curse phenomenon and ii test whether bidders learn to avoid this curse over time though we find no evidence of negative average returns on player contracts for the earliest cohort of baseball free agents we conclude that teams in that era failed to efficiently discount their bids in accord with available information especially about risk what is more evidence from a larger sample of players signed in the late 1990s shows that teams have continued to overvalue inconsistent free agents and failed to limit their bids to conform to players lower values in small markets this is consistent with experimental evidence that finds bounded rational behavior when bidders are faced with complex valuation problems involving multiple elements

relying on the information of interested parties we investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information we find that if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result if the decisionmaker is unsophisticated or not well informed competition is not generally sufficient if the interested parties interests are sufficiently opposed however or if the decisionmaker is seeking to advance the parties welfare then competition can reduce or even eliminate the decisionmaker s need for prior knowledge about the relevant variables and for strategic sophistication in other settings only the combination of competition among information providers and a sophisticated skepticism is sufficient to allow effective decisionmaking

hedonics and demand analysis the implicit demand for player attributes i introduction hedonic analysis is the standard technique of applied econometrics for modeling differentiated products a hedonic price function relates the observed price of a differentiated good to the bundle of characteristics of which the good is composed the derivatives of the function with respect to the characteristics are the implied hedonic prices which empirical work typically seeks to estimate as has been recognized since at least the work of rosen 1974 underlying the hedonic price function is an implicit market for these characteristics a number of studies have attempted to estimate the associated supply demand system in particular applied contexts based on data on the quantities of the characteristics used in the estimation of the hedonic price function and the resulting estimated hedonic prices examples include nelson 1978 witte sumka and erekson 1979 and thomas 1993 rather than a complete supply demand system other authors focus only on the implicit demand for characteristics for example polinsky and rubinfeld 1977 harrison and rubinfeld 1978 agarwal and ratchford 1980 bender gronberg and hwang 1980 blomquist and worley 1981 quigley 1982 mendelsohn 1984 and palmquist 1984 a curious aspect of these studies which appears to have gone unrecognized is the failure to draw on modern econometric demand analysis in the estimation of the implied demand system for the characteristics instead the analysis of the implicit market proceeds on the basis of ad hoc typically linear or loglinear functional forms which involve no explicit derivation from consumer theory and which impose arbitrary and non testable restrictions on preferences as a consequence there is little means beyond descriptive econometric measures goodness of fit examination of signs and t ratios and so on for judging the adequacy or legitimacy of the results no use is made of contemporary flexible functional form methodology which provides a second order approximation to arbitrary preferences and which permits in addition to the calculation of elasticities the testing of fundamental hypotheses of consumer theory such as demand homogeneity and symmetry of the slutsky matrix and numerical checks on the concavity of the associated implied expenditure function the present work attempts to fill this gap however instead of a differentiated good in a product market to which consumer demand theory would apply we choose to study a good in a factor market so that the relevant demand equations are a system of factor demands for the underlying characteristics the good in question is the service of baseball players to major league baseball teams which is a differentiated good in that different players represent different bundles of alternative attributes such as pitching or hitting skills our focus is solely on the implicit demand system for these attributes no attempt is made to estimate the associated supply system reflecting player behavior there are several reasons for this seemingly peculiar choice of commodity first the factor market for baseball players is of some intrinsic interest as evidenced by the extent to which it has been studied by economists for a taste of this see the entry by quirk 1987 in the new palgrave and the recent survey by fort and quirk 1995 in particular the market has been the focus of work by labor economists examples are blass 1992 khan 1993a 1993b and sommers 1992 much of this literature derives from the seminal work of scully 1974 who estimated equations for baseball player salaries as functions of player skills although not previously recognized in these terms underlying scully s salary equations are implicit markets for player skills the previous work involving baseball salary equations by scully 1974 1989 and others for example blass 1992 hill and spellman 1984 fort 1992 pascal and rapping 1972 raimondo 1983 and sommers 1990 is useful because it provides guidance as to the appropriate specification of the hedonic price equation

the incidence of congestion tolls on urban highways abstract the incidence of an optimal short run congestion toll is investigated using an equilibrium model of modal choice and congestion on a highway corridor served by express bus transit it is argued that for an externality tax the usual equi revenue analysis of burdens is inappropriate instead welfare effects are computed under three alternative assumptions about redistribution of toll revenues in almost all cases the net result is benefits for all income groups it is concluded that congestion tolls should not be rejected on grounds of income distribution but that an explicit package of tolls and revenue uses is probably a political prerequisite for adoption