This paper presents a method for determining shadow prices for a physician's services on the basis of actual prices charges. The Ramsey rule is used as the shadow-pricing formula. This is combined with the physician's profit-maximizing condition to produce an expression for the social prices in...

When there is no asset sale and thus no lump sum revenues to accrue to the government, one of the major benefits of privatization is then absent. Because of this, the revenues that were previously obtained from private clients assume more importance. This article incorporates these client...

It is now almost accepted practice that distributional weights be incorporated into cost-benefit criteria. While there are still major dissenters on this issue, notably Harberger, the relevant questions now involve the nature of the weights themselves. A number of alternative formulations have...

To date, the distinction between money income and utility income has been recognized only in an efficiency context. This article argues that it is also significant in an income redistribution context and can be used to identify the form which such redistribution is to take, cash or kind. To...

Time acts as the numeraire in life safety activities via it being a fixed endowment that is received by everyone in a generation in (roughly) equal amounts. A decision that requires using up time in a current preventative activity can only be justified if it provides more future time, in terms...

This article argues that numbers of uncompensated losers, here equated with numbers below the poverty line, should accompany distribution and efficiency as a third element in the SWF. No constant weights, efficiency and distribution SWF can satisfy two simple axioms

This article presents a set of policy decisions where a three-objective social welfare function (SWF) was used. In addition to efficiency and distributional elements there is a third constituent: the ‘numbers effect'. The cost–benefit criterion that results depends on the numbers who are...