the pricing of durable exhaustible resources partial or total durability characterizes a large class of exhaustible resources hotelling s r percent rule will apply to a durable resource produced in a competitive market but will not apply if the resource is produced in a monopolistic market however the r percent rule does not mean that price is steadily rising it is shown that in general the competitive market price will fall initially as the stock in circulation increases and later will rise as the stock decreases and eventually depreciates toward zero after production ceases accounting for durability may thus help explain the u shaped long term price profiles observed for many resources 11 references 3 figures

pricing of electricity tariffs in competitive markets in many countries electricity supply business has been opened for competition in this paper we analyze the problem of pricing of electricity tariffs in these open markets when both the customers electricity consumption and the market price are stochastic processes specifically we focus on regular tariff contracts which do not have explicit amounts of consumption units defined in the contracts therefore the valuation process of these contracts differs from the valuation of electricity futures and options the results show that the more there is uncertainty about the customer s consumption the higher the fixed charge of the tariff contract should be finally we analyze the indication of our results to the different methods for estimating the customer s consumption in the competitive markets since the consumption uncertainties enter into the tariff prices the analysis indicates that the deterministic standard load curves do not provide efficient methods for evaluating the customers consumption in competitive markets

durable goods monopolists durable goods monopolists face special problems because the sale of their products creates a secondhand market not controlled by the monopolist to the extent the monopolist is able to rent his product rather than sell it or to make binding promises about his future production such problems are ameliorated given the inability to do the above the monopolist is led to producing goods less durable than those produced by either competitive firms or monopolist returns a reverse averch johnson result that monopolist sellers may invest less in fixed costs including plant modernization and research and development than would the renters is shown it is also shown that even though sellers have less monopoly power than renters and nondurable goods monopolists it is possible that the seller will cause a greater deadweight loss than the other types of monopolies

sustainability impacts of car road pricing a computable general equilibrium analysis for austria abstract nationwide car road pricing schemes are discussed across europe we analyse the impacts of such schemes with respect to environmental economic and social indicators of sustainability also quantifying the trade offs among these three dimensions under different charging principles and revenue recycling options in our analysis we employ a computable general equilibrium cge approach develop a modelling structure for private transport and provide detailed empirical analysis for the case of austria regarding the social dimension it has often been argued that poorer households and commuters would have to bear a disproportionate share of the road pricing burden we find the contrary i e a stronger negative policy impact on richer households and on a small group of intensive car users the choice of revenue recycling is able to ameliorate the negative social and economic effects of road pricing without reversing the desired positive environmental effects for political feasibility questions of distributional impacts are most urgent and therefore we address them systematically within a quantitative framework

durable goods monopoly learning by doing and the coase conjecture abstract the coase conjecture states that if a durable goods monopolist can make offers to sell arbitrarily frequently then in equilibrium she will charge the competitive price and the market will be saturated quickly this conjecture is shown to be refuted when production of the durable good is subject to learning by doing for the linear case it is shown that there exist a stationary strategy perfect equilibrium in which the monopolist charges competitive prices but the market is saturated slowly an interesting analogy between bargaining and durable goods monopoly with learning by doing is also pointed out

road transport externalities during the last decade much progress has been made in defining measuring the external costs of transport as the cost of tolling equipment falls the set of realistic policy options to internalise these externalities will continue to grow this will determine the research and policy agenda we make three points firstly empirical work is still necessary to better identify marginal external costs including congestion accident and environmental costs secondly any assessment of policy options should treat externalities simultaneously the use of pricing instruments and emissions standards are discussed within this framework thirdly we emphasise the role of government designing the optimal road pricing institutions requires consideration of horizontal and vertical tax competition while double dividend arguments are central to the question of securing public support

marginal tax reform externalities and income distribution the paper examines welfare improving and revenue neutral directions marginal policy reforms for an economy with nonidentical individuals and an externality that has a feedback effect on the consumption of taxed goods it considers three types of policy instruments the indirect taxes the uniform poll transfer and public abatement this extends the framework set up by ahmad and stern 1984 bovenberg and de mooij 1994 and schob 1996 the theoretical model is illustrated for a specific externality namely congestion caused by peak car transport

foundations of dynamic monopoly and the coase conjecture subgame perfect equilibria are characterized for a market in which the seller quotes a price each period assume zero costs positive interest rate continuum of buyers and some technical conditions if buyers valuations are positive then equilibrium is unique buyers strategies are stationary and the price sequence is determinant along the equilibrium path but possibly randomized elsewhere otherwise a continuum of stationary equilibria can exist but at most one with analytic strategies coase s conjecture is verified for stationary strategies reducing the period length drives all prices to zero or the least valuation connections to bargaining models are described journal qf economic literature classification

the pricing of durable exhaustible resources comment in its simplest form hotelling s 1931 r percent rule states that in a competitive market with no extraction costs the price of an exhaustible resource will grow at the rate of interest for instance if price grows at a rate slower than the rate of interest it is in the interest of each firm to sell its entire stock immediately the hypothesized price path is obviously not an equilibrium even if there are extraction costs and firms are not identical it remains true that price net of marginal cost rises at the rate of interest the proposition generalizes to monopolized resources along the equilibrium path of extraction net marginal revenue grows at the rate of interest in a recent article in this journal levhari and pindyck 1981 henceforth l p show the r percent rule extends to durable exhaustible resources in a competitive market but they conclude that it does not hold in a monopoly market this is a surprising result following the hotelling logic should it not be possible for the monopolist to rearrange production from low net marginal revenue dates to high net marginal revenue dates and raise its present value the primary purpose of this comment is to show that hotelling s rule does in fact hold this is shown in section ii our result is compared with that of l p in section iii the conflict is shown to arise from a disagreement over the relevant marginal revenue in continuous time increasing the flow of production of a durable good at a particular point in time has no effect on the sales price at that or any other point in time hence the rate of change in the flow of revenue at that particular point in time is the sales price this is the definition of marginal revenue l p use however durables are different from nondurables in that a perturbation in the production trajectory over some length of time will affect the entire sales price trajectory in choosing its

monopoly production of durable exhaustible resources we examine monopoly production of a durable exhaustible resource previous authors have implicitly assumed that the monopolist is able to make binding commitments about future decisions we consider the more plausible case in which the monopolist lacks this ability and must choose from dynamically consistent plans two models are considered a discrete time model in which there is a strictly finite initial stock of the resource and a continuous time model in which costs are an increasing function of cumulative production we find that as a general result monopoly leads to overconservation the monopolist who cannot precommit produces the efficient quantity ultimately but does so too slowly by contrast the monopolist who can precommit produces less than the efficient stock even in the limit we also find that increased importance of exhaustibility hastens the extraction of the resource copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

the foreign trade and sectoral impact of truck road pricing for cross border trade truck road pricing is on the brink of beingintroduced in a number of european countries the experience gained from switzerland thefirst country worldwide to implement such adistant dependent pricing scheme has provedinvaluable nevertheless significant questionsstill remain the present paper attempts toprovide some clarity by analysing the welfareand sectoral impact resulting from theintroduction of truck road pricing with respectto foreign trade it is shown that this impactcan be separated into four effects the pureterms of trade effect the tax revenue effect the transit tax revenue effect and the resourcegain effect resources set free by a reductionin transport activity a cge simulation ofeach of these effects identifies theirquantitative implications out of the foureffects the pure terms of trade effect turnsout to dominate at both the sectoral andaggregate level it triggers a trade inducedwelfare loss the tax revenue effect and lessso the transit revenue effect mitigate thisloss for a full road transport costinternalization a trade induced welfare loss isquantified for austria at 1 3 sensitivity ofthis and other aggregate variables is high withrespect to household reaction to transport taxrevenue refunding the trade induced welfareloss of variable size as explored in thisarticle counterbalances a fraction of thewelfare gain due to internalization

bidding in sequential electricity markets the nordic case abstract for electricity market participants trading in sequential markets with differences in price levels and risk exposure it is relevant to analyze the potential of coordinated bidding we consider a nordic power producer who engages in the day ahead spot market and the hour ahead balancing market in both markets clearing prices and dispatched volumes are unknown at the time of bidding however in the balancing market the market participant faces an additional risk of not being dispatched taking into account the sequential clearing of these markets and the gradual realization of market prices we formulate the bidding problem as a multi stage stochastic program we investigate whether higher risk exposure may cause hesitation to bid into the balancing market furthermore we quantify the gain from coordinated bidding and by deriving bounds on this gain assess the performance of alternative bidding strategies used in practice

monopoly extraction of a durable non renewable resource failure of the coase conjecture the author studies a perfect information rational expectations markov equilibrium for the situation where a monopolist extracts a nonrenewable resource that is converted to a durable good even if short run extraction costs are constant the coase conjectur e fails provided that the depreciation rate of the durable good is positive copyright 1993 by the london school of economics and political science

towards sustainable consumption economic modelling of mobility and heating for austria abstract the paper focuses on economic modelling and empirical analysis of sustainable structures in private consumption and strives to extend conventional economic consumption models the model analysis of sustainable consumption in the areas heating and transport for austria attempts to depart from traditional measurement of consumption in national accounts and economic consumption models the focus of the analysis is laid on consumer services derived from a combination of stocks e g building stock transport systems and flows mainly energy this approach intends to illustrate that a concentration on flows in consumption models lacks important aspects of sustainable consumption the economic analysis of sustainable consumption patterns aims to highlight the effects related to the substitution of flows by stocks in the consumption areas transport and heating e g improvements in thermal quality of buildings more energy efficient transport systems relevant too in this respect is the role that can be played by technological innovation improvements in energy efficiency of stocks the potential for specific incentives to promote new technologies two essential factors are crucial in the context of sustainable consumption the demand shifts concerning the consumer services desired and the composition of the stock flow mix necessary for the service provision

depreciation erodes the coase conjecture if a durable good monopolist produces at constant marginal costs and the good depreciates there exists a family of strong markov perfect equilibrium smpe one member of this family entails instantaneous production of the level of stock produced in a competitive equilibrium this is consistent with the coase conjecture other smpe in the family entail steady state production at a stock level lower than in the competitive equilibrium there may be a jump to these steady states or they may be approached asymptotically monopoly profits are positive in these equilibria and the coase conjecture fails

offer stack optimization in electricity pool markets we consider a generator making offers of energy into an electricity pool market for a given time period it must submit an offer stack consisting of a fixed number of quantities of energy and prices at which it wants these quantities dispatched we assume that the generator cannot offer enough power to substantially affect the market price so the optimal response would be to offer energy at marginal cost however the market rules do not permit an arbitrary function so the problem is to find an offer stack approximating marginal cost in a way that maximizes its profit we give optimality conditions for this problem and derive an optimization procedure based on dynamic programming this procedure is illustrated by applying it to several examples with different costs of production

market offering strategies for hydroelectric generators this paper considers the problem of offering electricity produced by a series of hydroelectric reservoirs to a pool type central market the market model is a simplified version of the new zealand wholesale electricity market with prices modelled by a first order markov process the demand for electricity is not explicitly modelled the hydroelectric generator is assumed to be unable to influence market prices i e to be a price taker we discuss the resulting stochastic dynamic program methods for its solution and the explicit optimal offer curves that it produces it is shown that the utility function is monotone increasing with respect to both reservoir level and current price however the optimal offer curves need not be monotone this is shown by example numerical results are provided

monopoly power and the recycling of raw materials due to increased interest in resource conservation the recycling of raw materials has grown in significance in most industrialized economies in general recycled raw materials require a smaller net input of other basic resources such as energy than do the original primary materials as a consequence the long run cost trends seem to favor an ever higher use of secondary materials over primary materials many of the industries currently practicing recycling are highly concentrated i e aluminium steel newsprint motor oil and other metals with a few exceptions1 the impact of recycling on industry output and price remains largely unexplored the welfare implications of a monopolist confronted by an independent and competitive secondary materials sector are not exactly new concerns in the field of anti trust economics the problem was given its sharpest judicial focus in the famous aluminium company of america alcoa case of 1945 the celebrated jurist learned hand ruled that alcoa did constitute an illegal monopoly under the law since it ultimately had control of the secondary ingot sector through the stock of scrap aluminium milton friedman has suggested however that judge hand was in error and that a competitive recycling sector would tend to push the price of aluminium down to the marginal cost of virgin aluminum production 3 pp 278 79 two authors of a more contemporary genre have drawn conclusions that differ substantially on the important issue of whether or not the procompetitive effects of the recycling sector will be sufficient to achieve pareto optimal results gaskins concludes that the existence of a competitive secondhand market makes things worse in the short run and does not substantially lower the price of aluminum in the long run 4 p 255 alternatively swan finds conditions under which the price of aluminum would be driven down to the marginal cost of virgin aluminum ingot production 7 p 83 gaskins formulates a dynamic model of the aluminurm industry where he considers the impact of recycling on alcoa s monopoly power the critical assumptions of gaskin s model are a linear demand curve with time stationary elasticity and a linear secondary ingot supply function in addition the

what is a fair co2 tax increase on fair emission reductions in the transport sector we examine how individual preferences for fair reductions of carbon dioxide co2 emissions affect the support for increases in the co2 tax on gasoline and diesel we assume that people not only care about their own material welfare but also have preferences for fairness in policy design and we explore the implications using original data from a mail questionnaire sent to a representative sample of the swedish population the main result is that fairness in policy design does matter those respondents who adhere to a fairness principle tend to be relatively more positive to increases in the co2 tax one possible explanation for this result is that there is a relatively high degree of reciprocity regarding the origin of emissions and the fairness regarding who should bear the burden of co2 reductions via a split sample analysis we also find that the relative importance of fairness principles is dependent upon whether one uses a car often or not this sheds light on the potential goal conflict between the importance of fairness principles and self interest in the form of a need for private car transportation

strategic bidding for price taker hydroelectricity producers this paper introduces a stochastic programming model that integrates strategic bids or offers for electricity in quantities and prices in a deregulated electricity market the model is designed to maximize the profits of a producer of electricity who manages a series of power plants along a river the model is compared with a previously reported stochastic model where the bidding process is disregarded the superiority of the new model is empirically demonstrated on historical data

oligopoly extraction of a common property natural resource the importance of the period of commitment in dynamic games the theory of noncooperative dynamic games has provided an extremely powerful framework for studying many of the classic questions in industrial organization for example questions about resource extraction advertising research and development investment in new capacity and barriers to entry where interactions over time among few firms are involved however an important methodological issue arises when economic competition over time is modeled as a dynamic game the issue is the appropriate formulation of the players strategy spaces

estimating individual driving distance by car and public transport use in sweden how much to drive and how much to use public transport are modelled as three and two level decisions respectively based on micro data for sweden the choices whether to have a car whether to drive given access to a car and how much to drive given that the individual drives at all are then estimated using a three equation model also after correcting for other variables such as income men are driving much more and using less public transport compared to women people living in big cities are less likely to drive but those who do are on average driving about as much as others age and access to company cars are also important determinants for travel behaviour but being a member of an environmental organization is not driving increases with income but to a lower degree compared to most aggregated studies on national level the difference is explained in a model with income dependent structural changes implying that it becomes more difficult to live without a car when average income increases

distributional effects of alternative vehicle pollution control policies abstract previous work shows that policies that subsidize new vehicles and tax size miles or gasoline efficiently reduce pollution less is known about their distributional effects this paper examines distributional effects by estimating the joint demand for vehicles and miles using the consumer expenditure survey greater price responsiveness among low income households enhances progressivity of gas or miles taxes across lower incomes and mitigates regressivity across upper incomes taxes on engine size or subsidies to new vehicles are significantly more regressive than gas or miles taxes

optimal bidding strategies for hydro electric producers a literature survey in a competitive environment with bid based markets power generation companies desire to develop bidding strategies that maximize their revenue in this paper we ask what approaches and methodologies have been used to model the bidding problem for hydro electric producers we present the problem s developments over time and through reviewing different variants of the problem progressively build to the case in which the agent is a price maker hydro electric producer in each variant of the bidding problem we examine how the approaches used to solve it may or may not be applicable to other variants last for the price maker hydro electric producer s bidding problem we recognize the most recent developments and illuminate a path for future efforts