the proximity of nations to a socially sustainable steady state economy abstract there has been increasing interest in new economic models that aim to improve quality of life without increasing consumption this article provides the first empirical analysis of how close modern day economies are to the concept of a steady state economy and explores whether there is any relationship between a country s proximity to such an economy and its social performance the analysis is carried out using the degrowth accounts a set of 16 biophysical and social indicators that are derived from herman daly s definition of a steady state economy and the social goals of the degrowth movement these indicators are applied to 180 countries over a 10 year period the analysis reveals that the majority of countries in the world are biophysical growth economies there are only a small number of countries where resource use is relatively constant from year to year e g denmark france japan poland romania and the us and only four countries experiencing biophysical degrowth germany guyana moldova and zimbabwe there are no countries that achieve a true steady state economy defined as an economy with a stable level of resource use maintained within ecological limits however a few countries come relatively close including colombia cuba kyrgyzstan romania and south africa in general countries with stable resource use perform better on many social indicators than countries with either increasing or decreasing resource use this finding runs contrary to conventional economic thought however social performance is also higher in countries with greater per capita resource use overall these findings suggest that a steady state economy can be socially sustainable but countries need to become much more efficient at transforming natural resources into human well being if all seven billion people on earth are to lead a good life within ecological limits

contracting for software development software contracting is a multi faceted issue that involves legal economic managerial and technological considerations to better understand the economic aspect of software contracting this paper provides a summary review of software development contracts followed by a gametheoretic model developed to incorporate incentive and information issues associated with software contracting in the model an outside contractor is hired to develop a software system over multiple periods due to the uncertainties about costs or technology the developer faces the risk of having to abandon the project at an intermediate phase the user is better informed of the benefit of the system while the developer privately discovers the development costs as the project advances given the limited information the contracting parties make decisions in their own interest leaving each party vulnerable to the other s opportunistic behavior in this setting we construct a viable contract that aligns the incentives of the contracting parties and produces the same equilibrium outcome as in in house development we also relate the implications of the model to the actual contract cases

the design of the university system abstract this paper compares the organisation of the university sector under unregulated private provision with the structure which would be chosen by a welfare maximising government it studies a general equilibrium model where students attend university to earn higher incomes in the labour market and universities teach them and carry out research each university chooses its tuition fee to maximise the amount of resources it can devote to research research bestows an externality on society government intervention needs to balance labour market efficiency considerations which would tend to equalise the number of students attending each university with considerations of efficiency on the production side which suggest that the most productive universities should teach more students and carry out more research we find that government concentrates research more that the private market would but less than it would like to do if it had perfect information about the productivity of universities it also allows fewer universities than would operate in a private system

the analytics of the pricing of higher education and other services in which the customers are inputs many services provide outputs that depend partially on the customers as inputs the presence of other customers often contributes to the output experienced by each purchaser higher education is the premier example others are legion we provide a simple model that addresses the questions of competitive pricing and allocative efficiency for these types of services prices that charge customers for what they get on net output minus input from the firm both are competitive and support efficient allocations these prices internalize the apparent external effects of customers on each other few examples of such prices exist in the real world

do international students crowd out or cross subsidize americans in higher education abstract recent growth in international enrollment at u s universities has raised controversy while critics accuse international students of displacing american students university administrators have argued that they provide much needed tuition revenue this paper examines how international students impact domestic enrollment focusing on a unique boom and bust in international matriculation into u s graduate programs from 1995 to 2005 overall foreign students appear to increase domestic enrollment this positive effect is linked to cross subsidization whereby high net tuition payments from foreign students help subsidize the cost of enrolling additional domestic students

early decision and financial aid competition among need blind colleges and universities abstract this paper presents a stylized theoretical model of competition among need blind colleges and universities that implement early decision admissions under need blind admissions an applicant s financial aid status cannot affect their likelihood of admission in the model a need blind school can use early decision admissions as a screening mechanism to indirectly identify a student s ability to pay while superficially maintaining a need blind policy as a result in equilibrium non financial aid students are more likely to be admitted than financial aid students of comparable quality

compatibility and bundling of complementary goods in a duopoly this paper presents a simple model of compatibility and bundling in industries where consumers assemble several necessary components into a system that is close to their ideal the authors show that for a wide range of parameters firms will choose to produce compatible components but will offer discounts to consumers who purchase all components from the same firm however firms would be better off if they could commit not to provide such discounts furthermore the equilibrium tends to involve socially excessive bundling finally mixed bundling strategies tend to increase the range of parameters over which socially excessive standardization occurs copyright 1992 by blackwell publishing ltd

market provision of custom software learning effects and low balling due to reusability of program code and learning effects in software development development cost of custom software typically decreases in time and experience this creates a first mover advantage to software developers the paper studies whether the benefits of declining development costs are passed on to buyers in the form of lower prices when developers bid strategically by using a model of bidding auctions we characterize equilibrium bidding strategies of two software developers in order to become the first mover and attain future market dominance developers find it optimal to forgo profits from the first projects as a result bid prices development cost plus a profit margin to the developer to the buyers may not necessarily decrease over time and even if so not as fast as development cost drops we also show that bidders expect a higher profit margin from a high variance project thus if there exist high variance projects in the future developers are more likely to submit below cost bid prices or low ball

green goals and full employment are they compatible abstract two empirical correlations are studied one between economic growth and environmental impacts and the other between the lack of economic growth and unemployment it is demonstrated that at a global level economic growth is strongly correlated with environmental impacts and barriers to fast decoupling are large and numerous on the other hand low or negative growth is highly correlated with increasing unemployment in most market economies and strategies to change this lead to difficult questions and tradeoffs the coexistence of these two correlations which have rarely been studied together in the literature on green growth degrowth and a growth justifies ambivalence about growth to make key environmental goals compatible with full employment the decoupling of environmental impacts from economic output has to be accompanied by a reduction of dependence on growth in particular strategies to tackle unemployment without the need for growth several of which are studied in this article need much more attention in research and policy

contracting structures for custom software development the impacts of informational rents and uncertainty on internal development and outsourcing custom software development projects have special informational attributes that have challenged managers for many years they are associated with information asymmetries regarding user valuation and developer costs relationship specific investments and a resulting likelihood of positive externalities for the user or the developer from the other party s investment furthermore in a custom project market prices for software are not helpful in solving either the valuation or the cost problems in this paper we analyze the unique nature of the software development agreements that can be reached between the user and the developer in such a setting we compare the value of using internal and external developers with the goal of better understanding the factors relevant to the outsourcing decision for internal development we derive a new mechanism that achieves the first best system whenever the project has positive expected net value while achieving ex ante budget balance in contrast the optimal mechanism for an external developer will not in general yield the first best system this implies that when internal and external developers have identical cost functions internal development definitely yields the larger net value more generally this implies that an external developer must have considerable cost advantages over an internal developer in order to have the larger net value numerical results indicate that this difference in net values can be very large as much as a 100 increase for internal development over external development this is consistent with the strong bias in favor of internal custom development found in recent empirical studies we also explain why the efficient levels of investment can be achieved only when there are no externalities and we show that the presence of positive externalities results in underinvestment since using an external developer will typically yield a system that is not first best inefficient investments result with or without externalities we present examples showing that uncertainty about system value is not a significant factor in choosing between internal and external development however uncertainty about the development costs is highly significant with greater uncertainty making outsourcing less attractive

installed base and compatibility innovation product preannouncements and predation a good is often more valuable to any user the more others use compatible goods the authors show that this effect may inhibit innovation if an installed base exists and transition to a new standard must be gradual early adopters bear a disproportionate share of transient incompatibility costs this can produce excess inertia the installed base however is stranded if the new standard is adopted this may create excess momentum these dynamic effects have strategic implications temporary price cutting can permanently prevent entry and product preannouncements can be critical in innovation these strategic actions have ambiguous welfare effects

competition between private and public schools vouchers and peer group effects a theoretical and computational model with tax financed tuition free public schools and competitive tuition financed private schools is developed students differ by ability and income achievement depends on own ability and on peers abilities equilibrium has a strict hierarchy of school qualities and two dimensional student sorting with stratification by ability and income in private schools high ability low income students receive tuition discounts while low ability high income students pay tuition premia tuition vouchers increase the relative size of the private sector and the extent of student sorting and benefit high ability students relative to low ability students

desirability of compatibility in the absence of network externalities i compare the incentives firms have to produce individual components compatible with components of other manufacturers instead of systems composed of components that are incompatible with components of competing manufacturers i show that even in the absence of positive consumption externalities network externalities prices and profits will be higher in the regime of compatibility equilibrium total surplus could be higher in either regime both regimes overprovide variety compared to the surplus maximizing solution in today s environment many products are complex specified by a long array of characteristics part of the decision of the firm is to choose if it should break this long array of features into two or more smaller parts and produce the products corresponding to the smaller arrays instead of the product that embodies the full array we will call the products that correspond to these smaller arrays components and the product that corresponds to the full array a system note that components are by their definition complements components produced by different manufacturers are compatible if it is feasible for the consumers to combine them costlessly into a working system in this paper we will assume that there are two components which make up a system we will discuss competition under full compatibility when components produced by all firms are compatible with each other and under incompatibility when no components produced by different firms are compatible and no hybrid systems can exist 2 assuming availability of the same

product introduction with network externalities the authors study the introduction of a new product in a market with network externalities there is a common presumption that such markets exhibit excess inertia i e that they are biased toward existing products in contrast the authors provide conditions under which equilibrium involves insufficient friction i e a tendency to rush into new incompatible technologies they also analyze the firms incentives to make their products compatible and they show that the firm introducing the new technology is biased against compatibility copyright 1992 by blackwell publishing ltd

foreclosure of railroad markets a test of chicago leverage theory the possibility of vertical foreclosure arises when at least one firm in a market is vertically integrated and other firms are not for example in the well known alcoa case the production of aluminum ingot is monopolized by a single firm while the aluminum sheet industry is competitive the ingot producer is vertically integrated into sheet rolling nonintegrated sheet rollers are thus dependent for aluminum ingot on their vertically integrated competitor who has a monopoly in the aluminum ingot market 1 foreclosure implies that no transactions among integrated and nonintegrated firms will occur or at least that the quantities exchanged will be less than would occur in the absence of vertically related bargaining power as in the alcoa case the vertically integrated firm can also price squeeze its nonintegrated buyers by raising its price above competitive levels these potential inefficiencies have generated considerable concern in the industrial organization and antitrust literature the long standing legal view which first appeared in the 1911 american tobacco case was

network effects software provision and standardization in this paper we examine the software provision decision of software firms the provision decision by software firms determines the value and hence the market share of competing hardware technologies we show how the provision decision by software firms determines whether multiple hardware technologies are supported in equilibrium or whether there is de facto standardization with only one hardware technology supplied with software in equilibrium we show that when consumers place a high value on software variety there is a suboptimal amount of standardization by the market

making the hidden visible the importance of caring activities and their principles for any economy abstract in this paper we emphasize the interrelation of the monetary free enterprise sector of the economy and its maintaining basis the current discussion on sustainability has so far placed too little attention on this circumstance to us this interrelation is fundamental it is one important key to understanding present day economics and economies by concentrating on this interrelation we question the widely accepted dualism between the public and the private between the officially acknowledged economic and the invisible economic by this we create our own specific approach to the question of how to reform economic thought and action in order to achieve a naturally and socially sustainable living

should degrowth embrace the job guarantee degrowth should consider the right to work a job guarantee jg as a way of making a smaller economy more just and socially sustainable economic shrinkage in richer countries is accompanied by increased unemployment a bad enough problem in itself but also a barrier to voters acceptance of the degrowth path since being out of work is distinct from being poor anti poverty income policies should be approached separately the jg is one of several paths to full employment including reduced working time this essay only briefly mentions some real world jg programs and some technical objections the main suggestion is to move employment from being a matter of economics particularly economic growth to being a political right a right to work is necessarily effective and would avoid sacrificing the ecological and social goals of degrowth on the altar of full employment

competition between private and public schools testing stratification and pricing predictions abstract when there are peer effects in education private schools have an incentive to vary tuition to attract relatively able students epple and romano american economic review 88 1 1998 33 develop a general equilibrium model characterizing equilibrium pricing and student selection into schools when peer effects are present the model predicts that competition will lead private schools to give tuition discounts to more able students and that this will give rise to an equilibrium exhibiting stratification by income and ability between the public and private sectors and to a hierarchy of schools within the private sector the model also yields a variety of comparative static predictions the predictions of the model are tested in this paper using a unique data set assembled by figlio and stone research in labor economics 1999 115 tests of equilibrium predictions of the model reveal that the propensity to attend private school increases with both income and ability and among private schools the propensity to attend the highest tuition schools rises with both income and ability within private schools tuition declines with student ability with a substantial number of even high income households paying little or no tuition the correlation between income and ability is greater in public than private schools tests of comparative static predictions of the model reveal that both income and ability become stronger predictors of private school attendance as public school expenditure falls income becomes increasingly important in determining placement in the private school hierarchy as public school expenditure falls discounts to ability in the lowest quality private school decline as public school expenditure rises while discounts to ability in the highest quality private school are little affected by changes in public school expenditure expenditure in private schools rises as expenditure in public schools increases these empirical results are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model

a general equilibrium analysis of state and private colleges and access to higher education in the u s abstract we develop a general equilibrium model of the market for undergraduate higher education that captures the coexistence of public and private colleges the large degree of quality differentiation among them and the tuition and admission policies that emerge from their competition for students a quantitative version of the model matches well estimates of enrollment elasticities variation in need based and merit based institutional aid with respectively student income and ability and aggregate characteristics of u s higher education including college attendance in public and private schools tuition levels and the provision of federal aid predictions about the provision of federal aid and the distribution of students across colleges by ability and income match the empirical counterparts well we use the model to examine the consequences of federal and state aid policies a one third increase in the maximum federal aid increases college attendance by 6 of the initial college population most of the increase being in state colleges and mainly of poor students elite private colleges reduce institutional aid and use the net funding gain to spend more on educational inputs and to substitute some highly able poor students for less able rich students reductions in federal or state aid result in substantially reduced attendance mainly by poor students reductions of support to state colleges induce private colleges to increase enrollments modestly and improve in quality as demand shifts toward them

the price of education and inequality abstract constructing a simple model that includes the price of education this paper shows that the educational expenditure of rich households could prevent poor households from escaping poverty the paper offers an explanation for persistent inequality

policy watch antitrust goes to college it may have come as a shock to many economists especially those in academia to learn that the antitrust division of the u s department of justice doj has been investigating alleged price fixing and information exchange of financial aid among 23 prestigious east coast colleges and universities these schools include the ivy overlap group mit brown columbia cornell dartmouth harvard university of pennsylvania princeton and yale and the pentagonal sisters group amherst barnard bowdoin bryn mawr colby mount holyoke middlebury smith trinity tufts vassar wesleyan and williams we have no specific knowledge concerning the possible validity of these allegations or expertise about their legality rather in this article we wish to present the potential applicability of current antitrust doctrines to colleges and their conduct and the possible defenses that they might raise to justify their actions

competition and integration among complements and network market structure this article analyzes the competition and integration among complementary products that can be combined to create composite goods or systems the model generalizes the cournot duopoly complements model to the case in which there are multiple brands of compatible components it analyzes equilibrium prices for a variety of organizational and market structures that differ in their degree of competition and integration the model applies to a variety of product networks including automatic teller machines real estate multiple listing services and airlines crs as well as to nonnetwork markets of compatible components such as computer cpus and peripherals hardware and software and long distance and local telephone services copyright 1992 by blackwell publishing ltd

market structure in the production of economics ph d s a century ago economics began to develop as a separate and significant part of the curriculum in american colleges and universities along with increased popularity and enrollment came the need for faculty specifically trained in economics a number of american scholars turned to europe germany in particular for their training and brought the german ph d back as a model for graduate education the first economics ph d s earned in this country were awarded by harvard 1875 yale 1877 and johns hopkins 1878 1 these first ph d s were two year degrees by 1900 economists had generally upgraded the ph d to three years beyond the baccalaureate degree consisting of two years of course work and another year for the dissertation graduate classes were taught in seminar format with considerable interaction between professors and students as the production process matured dissertations became longer more sophisticated and more specialized i e they were no longer the mark of a cultured gentleman but the demonstration of a professional skill 15 11 the newly formed american economic association began to keep track of doctoral candidates in economics in 1904 6 in 1904 there were 8 institutions which reported having men working on ph d s and by 1928 that number had increased to 27 2 while the american economic association did not tabulate the output of completed ph d s the national research council has compiled a database containing the number of ph d s by institution by year since 1920 their survey of earned doctorates indicates that 22 ph d s were awarded in economics by 6 different universities in 1920 by 1992 that number had grown to 910 ph d s from 123 different institutions

the economics of degrowth economic degrowth is ecologically desirable and possibly inevitable but under what conditions can it become socially sustainable how can we have full employment and economic stability without growth what will happen to public spending and to public debt how would production be organised in a degrowing economy and under what plausible socio political conditions could such grand changes happen standard economic theories and models ignore these questions for them economic growth is an axiomatic necessity this article reviews recent contributions in the economics of degrowth and identifies research avenues for ecological economists

the division of markets is limited by the extent of liquidity spatial competition with externalities liquidity considerations will limit the number of markets in a competitive economy welfare implications are ambigious since liquidity is a positive externality there may be too little liquidity per market at a noncooperative equilibrium and too many markets compared to the surplus maximizing market structure but liquidity is also self reinforcing given an existing equilibrium new markets may not open because nobody wants to use a new market with low liquidity there may be too few markets to achieve efficiency a nondiscriminating monopolist will operate smaller and more numerous markets compared to optimality as well as to the equilibrium of independent auctioneers copyright 1988 by american economic association

optimal incentives for income generation in universities the rule of thumb for the compton tax abstract in this paper we propose a novel framework to model one of the key links between universities and industry the undertaking of applied research we postulate that a basic objective of universities is to undertake fundamental research and that they receive public funding to do so nevertheless faced with tight budget constraints universities may have incentives to allow their staff to devote some of their time to income generating activities such as applied research or consultancy this opens up two channels by which universities can ease their budget constraint i by allowing academics to supplement their income universities may be able to hold down academic salaries ii universities can effectively tax the income that academics raise through applied research or consultancy for example through the imposition of overhead charges by easing their budget constraint universities may be able to take on sufficient extra staff to more than offset the time that existing staff are spending on non fundamental research and thus increase the amount of fundamental research that they can achieve with a given public budget we develop a model of this link between universities and firms and use it to determine the optimal tax that universities should impose on applied research income the compton tax used at mit in the 1930s is an early example of the use of this instrument

impact caps why population affluence and technology strategies should be abandoned abstract this paper classifies strategies to reduce environmental impact according to the terms of the i pat formula policies limiting resource depletion and pollution impact by heavily taxing resources or rationing them on a country basis are thus called direct or left side strategies other policies to achieve the environmental goal of lowering impact strive to limit population and affluence or to use technology to lower the ratio of resource inputs to goods and services outputs next it is shown that lowering any of these right side factors causes or at least enables the other two to rise or rebound this has two consequences 1 since i pat does not express these interdependencies on the right side it is more accurately written i f p a t and 2 success in lowering any of the right side factors does not necessarily lower impact rationing or pigouvian taxation of resources or pollution on the other hand necessarily lower impact and are therefore preferable to population consumption and technological environmental strategies finally lifestyle and technology changes towards more sufficiency and efficiency would follow the caps as consumers and producers work to retain the greatest amount of welfare within the limits given

degrowth taking stock and reviewing an emerging academic paradigm degrowth has evolved within a decade from an activist movement into a multi disciplinary academic paradigm however an overview taking stock of the peer refereed degrowth literature is yet missing here we review 91 articles that were published between 2006 and 2015 we find that the academic degrowth discourse occupies a small but expanding niche at the intersection of social and applied environmental sciences the discourse is shaped by authors from high income mainly mediterranean countries until 2012 articles largely constitute conceptual essays endorsed by normative claims more recently degrowth has branched out into modelling empirical assessments and the study of concrete implementations authors tend to agree in that economic growth cannot be sustained ad infinitum on a resource constraint planet and that degrowth requires far reaching societal change whether degrowth should be considered as a collectively consented choice or an environmentally imposed inevitability constitutes a major debate among degrowth thinkers we argue that the academic discourse could benefit from rigid hypotheses testing through input output modelling material flow analysis life cycle assessments or social surveys by analyzing the potentials for non market value creation and identifying concrete well being benefits the degrowth discourse could receive wider public support and contribute to a paradigmatic change in the social sciences

reputation and school competition abstract stratification is a distinctive feature of competitive education markets that can be explained by a preference for good peers learning externalities can lead students to care about the ability of their peers resulting in across school sorting by ability this paper shows that a preference for good peers and therefore stratification can also emerge endogenously from reputational concerns that arise when graduates use their college of origin to signal their ability reputational concerns can also explain puzzling observed trends including the increase in student investment into admissions exam preparation and the decline in study time at college jel i21 i23 i26 j24

technology adoption in the presence of network externalities we analyze technology adoption in industries where network externalities are significant the pattern of adoption depends on whether technologies are sponsored a sponsor is an entity that has property rights to the technology and hence is willing to make investments to promote it key findings include the following 1 compatibility tends to be undersupplied by the market but excessive standardization can occur 2 in the absence of sponsors the technology superior today has a strategic advantage and is likely to dominate the market 3 when one of two rival technologies is sponsored that technology has a strategic advantage and may be adopted even if it is inferior 4 when two competing technologies both are sponsored the technology that will be superior tomorrow has a strategic advantage

what s happened to the price of college quality adjusted net price indexes for four year colleges in this paper we estimate hedonic models of the consumer price of college to construct quality adjusted net price indexes for u s four year colleges where the net price of college is defined as tuition and fees minus financial aid for academic years 1990 91 to 1994 95 we find adjusting for financial aid leads to a 22 percent decline in the estimated price index for all fouryear colleges while quality adjusting the results leads to a further albeit smaller decline nevertheless public comprehensive colleges perhaps an important gateway to college for students from low income backgrounds experienced the largest net price increases

subsidies hierarchy and peers the awkward economics of higher education higher education is a business it produces and sells educational services to customers for a price and it buys inputs with which to make that product production is subject to technological constraints costs and revenues discipline decisions and determine the long run viability of a college or university but higher education is not just a business while that statement is often meant to imply that higher education is nobler than business more decent and humane in the purposes it serves it can also mean that even in economic terms higher education is in important ways simply different from a business this paper asks how well our extensive experience with commercial businesses and the microeconomic theory of firms and markets that has evolved to describe them helps in understanding the economics of higher education that experience and those insights will be used by trustees politicians administrators lawyers reporters and the public as well as by economists to understand and evaluate the behavior of colleges and universities so it is useful to ask how safe it is to use the economic analogy in the context of higher education drawing parallels between universities and firms students and customers faculty and labor markets and so on the discussion here seeks to identify the key economic features of higher education that make it different from familiar for profit industries and to ask what difference those differences make this is a stick that can be picked up from either end one approach is to start with meticulous economic theory and see how far it can be made to encompass the economic realities of higher education an excellent recent paper by rothschild and white 1995 does that in their matching model students and colleges meet

are efficiency and equity in school finance substitutes or complements this paper analyzes cases made for local and centralized school finance and policies such as vouchers categorical aid and equalization aid an ideal system of school finance would achieve efficiency and equity by ensuring every person invests in the amount of schooling that is socially optimal for him the author evaluates the empirical evidence for and the merit and importance of arguments for each policy she concludes that the theoretical arguments for centralized finance not only exaggerate the efficiency equity tradeoff but actually make better arguments for a system combining local school finance with categorical aid and means tested vouchers

dynamic nonlinear pricing in networks with interdependent demand we consider the pricing decision for a new product whose consumption value increases as the network of adopters expands this demand interdependence is a characteristic feature of telecommunications networks the paper analyzes the case of a single supplier offering the product to a heterogeneous population consumers decide on network access and consumption quantity the pricing decision consists of choosing a pricing schedule over the dimensions of quantity and time that maximizes the present value of a weighted sum of total surplus and producer profits subject to the dynamics of market growth we find that the decision can be decoupled into two nested optimization problems a given some market size what should the optimal nonlinear price schedule be and b how should the price schedule be changed optimally over time this separation enables us to solve the pricing problem explicit consideration of the dynamics the discounting of future surpluses and the extent of market growth anticipation affect not only the price and network size trajectories but also their steady state equilibrium values

efficient tuition fees and examinations we assume that students observe only a private noisy signal of their ability and that universities can condition admission decisions on the results of noisy tests if the university observes a private signal of each student s ability which is soft information then asymmetries of information are two sided and the optimal admission policy involves a mix of pricing and pre entry selection based on the university s private information in contrast if all test results are public knowledge then there is no sorting on the basis of test scores tuition alone does the job of implementing an optimal degree of student self selection these results do not depend on the existence of peer effects the optimal tuition follows a classic marginal social cost pricing rule jel d82 h42 i22 j24

women nature and the social construction of economic man abstract this paper argues that the social construction economic man is the product of a hierarchical dualism in western society that has also created rational man and scientific man women and the natural world form the subordinated half of these dualisms central to this paper is the claim that this dualism is not only a cultural theoretical one but also a material one the social construction of economic man is the product of a bifurcated knowledge system and a materially divided society economic man reflects a society in which the embeddedness and embodiedness of humanity is hidden by the division of mind from body and science culture from the natural world for this reason it is not possible to incorporate women and nature into the economy through the commodity form by according them a value as price it is argued that the economic system can only exist if women and nature remain externalised as women form the bridge between an autonomous individualised man and the biological ecological underpinning of his existence central to this analysis is the distinction between social and natural biological time economic man lives in social time clock time while women are responsible for biological time this is not because women are closer to nature biology in an essential sense rather this relationship is imposed upon them by a male dominated society

terminal railroad revisited foreclosure of an essential facility or simple horizontal monopoly rollowing the supreme court s 1986 decision in aspen ski there has been a renewed interest in the essential facilities doctrine the doctrine as we understand it is inconsistent with economic theory broadly stated the doctrine says that if assets cannot be economically reproduced by another firm but are economically essential to all producers of some good then all producers of that good should have equal access to the assets the doctrine presumes that the firm controlling such assets will not provide access equally to all firms this problem is thought to be particularly acute in cases where the firm owning the asset is one among a group of competitors needing that asset to produce some other good the case that has been cited as establishing the doctrine and the classic essential facilities case 2 is united states v terminal railroad association of st louis 3 several recent articles4 on this case detail three important propositions

vertical mergers and market foreclosure ythe model in this paper illustrates three effects of vertical mergers when both stages are oligopolistic and vertically integrated and unintegrated producers coexist first the merging firm increases its final good output second the resulting backward shift in the residual demand curve facing unintegrated final good producers ylowers their demand for the intermediate good third the merged firm withdraws from the intermediate good market the increased concentration pushes the intermediate good price upward which effect dominates depends on market structure under some conditions a vertical merger causes the price of the final good to increase

market power and price discrimination in the u s market for higher education the main purpose of this paper is to estimate an equilibrium model of private and public school competition that can generate realistic pricing patterns for private universities in the u s we show that the parameters of the model are identified and can be estimated using a semi parametric estimator given data from the npsas we find substantial price discrimination within colleges we estimate that a 10 000 increase in family income increases tuition at private schools by on average 210 to 510 a one standard deviation increase in ability decreases tuition by approximately 920 to 1 960 depending on the selectivity of the college discounts for minority students range between 110 and 5 750

could do better the effectiveness of incentives and competition in schools this paper studies the eects of incentive mechanisms and of the competitive environment on the interaction between schools and stu dents in a set up where their eort aects the students educational attainment we show that increasing the power of the incentive scheme and the eectiveness of competition may have the counterintuitive ef fect of lowering the students attainment in a simple dynamic set up where the reputation of the schools aects recruitment we show that increased competition leads to segregation of pupils by ability

multi dimensional skills specialization and oligopolistic competition in higher education abstract this paper develops a differentiated products model of school competition that distinguishes among different dimensions that matter in the skill acquisition process the model predicts that when identical schools compete for students specialization may arise as a competition strategy this serves rich students education goals well poorer students however may attend schools with specializations that do not cater to their relative strengths by doing so these poorer students complement the weaknesses of the richer students through peer effects and receive financial aid in return the empirical analysis provides strong support for the model s predictions about within school implications of specialization

first degree price discrimination goes to school personalized pricing is widely discussed but seldom observed making studies of its efficacy rare yet first degree price discrimination is common in the pricing of higher education and i use data on prices and the characteristics of students admitted to a professional graduate program at a public university to estimate a matriculation demand function i then derive linear pricing functions that maximize revenue for a target number of students by allowing these functions to depend on progressively richer sets of observables i explore the effect of personalization of pricing on profit tailoring prices to a one dimensional measure of student quality would raise revenue by 2 2 per cent above the revenue with uniform pricing pricing based on both student quality and state residency raises revenue by 8 4 per cent and further tailoring based on available observables raises prices 9 0 per cent above the maximum revenue under uniform pricing pricing that obeys current statutory tuition limits raises revenue less but still by just over half as much i also infer the welfare weights that the pricing process implicitly attaches to student characteristics

the determinants of donative revenue flows from alumni of higher education an empirical inquiry institutions of higher education are increasingly relying upon alumni giving and endowment earnings as sources of funding this paper utilizes a new database on average alumni donations at the institutional level and institutional characteristics to explore the role that lagged institutional characteristics and policy have on subsequent donations to the institution our results confirm the noncontemporaneous effects of variations in the average scholastic achievement of matriculated students a proxy for both student quality and student socioeconomic status on subsequent donative revenue flows and indirectly address some of the open questions left by previous theoretical inquiries

networks and compatibility implications for antitrust in this paper we draw crucial parallels between the concepts of compatibility and networks and the more traditional concepts of complementarity and vertical relationships we also develop the important distinctions between two way networks and one way networks we then apply our framework to a number of current antitrust issues

assessing the degrowth discourse a review and analysis of academic degrowth policy proposals abstract debates on ecological and social limits to economic growth and new ways to deal with resource scarcity without compromising human well being have re emerged in the last few years central to many of these is a call for a degrowth approach in this paper a framework is developed to support a systematic analysis of degrowth in the academic literature this article attempts to present a clearer notion of what the academic degrowth literature explores by identifying organising and analysing a set of proposals for action retrieved from a selection of articles the framework is applied to classify proposals according to their alignment to ecological economics policy objectives sustainable scale fair distribution and efficient allocation type of approach top down versus bottom up and geographical focus local national or international a total of 128 peer reviewed articles focused on degrowth were reviewed and 54 that include proposals for action were analysed the proposals identified align with three broad goals 1 reduce the environmental impact of human activities 2 redistribute income and wealth both within and between countries and 3 promote the transition from a materialistic to a convivial and participatory society the findings indicate that the majority of degrowth proposals are national top down approaches focusing on government as a major driver of change rather than local bottom up approaches as advocated by many degrowth proponents the most emphasised aspects in the degrowth literature are related to social equity closely followed by environmental sustainability topics such as population growth and the implications of degrowth for developing nations are largely neglected and represent an important area for future research moreover there is a need for a deeper analysis of how degrowth proposals would act in combination

in state versus out of state students the divergence of interest between public universities and state governments abstract this paper examines the divergence of interest between universities and state governments concerning standards for admitting in state versus out of state students we find that public universities set lower minimum admission standards for in state than out of state applicants presumably in response to state pressure while private universities treat both groups equally however we also find that favoring in state applicants goes against states long term financial interest this is because marginal out of state students pay higher tuition than marginal in state students pay more in future state taxes and are equally influenced in whether they locate in the state after graduation by attending public university there

quality distortion by a discriminating monopolist the standard model of monopolistic imperfect quality discrimination involving consumer self selection has shown that no distortion occurs at the highest quality level while all lower quality levels are degraded in order to maintain profitable market segmentation this result flows from the assumption that consumers with a higher total utility of quality also have a higher marginal utility of quality the paper develops a reasonable model in which the standard assumption is not satisfied and this alternative model yields vastly different conclusions regarding the form of quality distortion in particular quality may be enhanced not degraded to maintain profitable market segmentation copyright 1989 by american economic association

why environmental sustainability can most probably not be attained with growing production the concepts of welfare economic growth production environmentally sustainable national income environmental sustainability environmental function and asymmetric entering are defined because the confusion about these concepts hampers sound information based on these concepts the arguments are enumerated why it is plausible that environmental sustainability most probably cannot be attained with a growing production level national income ni and why broad acceptance of a lower production level meaning de growth of production will make attaining this goal much easier or at least possible some consequences of unsustainable development are provided and the alleged conflict between employment and environment is refuted the conclusion is that our planet is threatened by a wrong belief in a wrongly formulated growth

the growth discourse growth policy and sustainable development two thought experiments abstract this paper addresses three aspects of growth the discourse the policy and the impacts the growth discourse claims that the central factor for social economic political and environmental progress is economic growth it is assumed to create wealth and provide the necessary means for social and environmental purposes on the basis of the growth discourse different growth policies can be derived based on different economic and political ideologies in order to reveal the implications of de facto degrowth two thought experiments are conducted for physical and economic end to growth strategies the latter is capable of meeting environmental objectives but implies significant social tensions and hardships and calls for transition strategies consisting of carefully designed steps

regulation in the market for education and optimal choice of curriculum we analyze educational institutions incentives to set up demanding or lax curricula in duopolistic markets for education with endogenous enrolment of students we assume that there is a positive externality of student achievement on the local economy comparing the case of regulated tuition fees with an unregulated market we identify the following ine ciencies under regulated tuition fees schools will set up ine ciently lax curricula in an attempt to please low quality students even if schools internalize some of the externality on the other hand unregulated schools set up excessively di erentiated curricula in order to relax competition in tuition fees deregulation gets more attractive if a larger fraction of the externality is internalized

the economics of private liberal arts colleges private not for profit liberal arts colleges operate in a knotty market where consumers are both inputs and outputs and the total product is not directly observed our model explains interactions among price quantity reputation and cost the evidence suggests that these institutions alter tuition and financial aid to set price below the market clearing value reputation is more a function of expenditure per student and student quality than tradition and endowment costs depend more on student inputs and the price of faculty than that of capital scale economies occur at less selective colleges with excess capacity and a hierarchy exists among purveyors

admission tuition and financial aid policies in the market for higher education we present an equilibrium model of the market for higher education our model simultaneously predicts student selection into institutions of higher education financial aid educational expenditures and educational outcomes we show that the model gives rise to a strict hierarchy of colleges that differ by the educational quality provided to the students we also develop a new estimation procedure that exploits the observed variation in prices within colleges identification is based on variation in endowments and technology it does not rely on observed variation in potentially endogenous characteristics of colleges such as peer quality measures and expenditures we estimate the structural parameters using data collected by the national center for education statistics and aggregate data from peterson s and the national science foundation