This paper describes how a monopolist manipulates the balance of quantity and quality in order to increase revenue when its customers treat quantity and quality as substitutes. This 'skewing' of quality depends on the characteristics of customer's demand for quality. Customers differ in demand...

The Spence model (1975) is extended so that customers’ utility depends on their disposition to the firm in addition to quantity and quality of the good consumed. Disposition is determined by customers’ perception of firm’s pricing and quality decisions, which perception is...

Textbooks present the three ‘degrees’ of price discrimination as a sequence of independent pricing methods. These textbook treatments consequently provide inadequate insight as to when a firm might adopt a particular pricing strategy. The paper describes an informationbased taxonomy of price...

We experimentally investigate reference group formation and the impact of social comparisons in a three-player ultimatum game. The players compete in a real-effort task for the role of the proposer. The role of the responder is randomly allocated to one of the other two participants. The third...

The quality distortion caused by a linear pricing monopolist is separated into two components; one measures the imbalance of quality and quantity (the skewed component) and the other measures the restriction of production to increase marginal willingness to pay (the unskewed component)....

This paper describes how a monopolist manipulates the balance of quantity and quality in order to increase revenue when its customers treat quantity and quality as substitutes. This "skewing" of quality depends on the characteristics of customers' demand for quality. Customers differ in demand...

An unusual feature of the management of wilderness and other natural areas is that price is rarely used to ration recreational access. This often leads to queuing for access. At the same time there is often a relatively poor level of infrastructure provided for recreation. This paper argues that...

This paper proposes a market-based reform that would introduce competition into the provision of urban water. This proposal calls for a decoupling of infrastructure control and ownership of water whereby the property rights to water would be transferred to private hands. The proposal involves...