Electric utility system planners must design system capacity expansion paths that satisfy generation requirements at least cost. Historically, doing this required information regarding the system load duration curve and alternative fuel and capital costs. By putting fuel and capital costs into a...

The first half of this paper overviews traditional methods of rate-making--embedded and marginal cost pricing--and four recent alternatives--automatic rate adjustments, profit-sharing, tariff menus, and the Vogelsang-Finsinger convergence mechanism--that have come to challenge them. The authors...

Redistribution strategies that have been implemented to promote universal service in telecommunications subscriptions now face two problems. First, in order to avoid higher prices, customers have moved away from services that bear revenue-providing subsidies that are unrelated to cost. Second,...

The American copyright system separately protects the sounds in music recordings and the words and music of the underlying musical composition upon which they are based; separate rights are further defined for the reproduction and public performance of both the recording and the composition. The...

A Handbook of Cultural Economics includes over 60 eminently readable and concise articles by 50 expert contributors. This unique Handbook is both highly informative and readable; it covers a wide area of cultural economics and its closely related subjects. While being accessible to any reader...

Several of the authors question the efficacy of copyright, which is increasingly regarded as benefiting multinational organisations rather than individual authors and performers. Others are less critical of copyright per se, but question its ability to meet the new challenges of a digital era....

Economists have long recognized that the cost of using an appliance or machine should incorporate both the associated energy cost and a user cost for the depreciation of capital that results. One must be careful in measuring the latter. Depending on whether the appliance or machine depreciates...

Energy economists have long recognized the fact that changes in energy prices can affect the demand for energy in several ways (e.g., see Fisher and Kaysen, 1962; Taylor, 1975). In the short run, energy users can change their utilization of a fixed appliance stock or a fixed set of capital...

A new era may be emerging for the strategists and decision makers who are responsible for reliably and economically supplying electricity to America's homes and businesses. In the last decade, fuel shortages, price hikes, record-high interest rates, and a new environmentalist awareness have led...

This article considers a duopoly in which each firm produces two components of a system. If the components are compatible, consumers may "mix and match" the firms' components. The system components and consumer tastes are assumed to differ with regard to vertical characteristics. In the model,...