When economists turned to applied benefit-cost analysis in the 1930s and 1940s, they adopted prices as indicators of benefits. This was consistent with both neoclassical economics (in which prices are marginal values) and institutional economics (which favored a plausible market mechanism to...

In the real world, markets are never in equilibrium and there is insufficient information to determine the ideal policy. Maximizing long-run consumer surplus is a heuristic for approximating optimal economic policy. Ideally, if the economy was at an efficient equilibrium, we'd maximize both...

Price controls lead to misallocation of goods and encourage rent-seeking. The misallocation effect alone ensures that a price control always reduces consumer surplus in an otherwise-competitive market with convex demand if supply is more elastic than demand; or with log-convex demand (e.g.,...

Willig (1976) argues that the change in consumer's surplus is often a good approximation to the willingness to pay for a price change: if the income elasticity of demand is small, or the price change is small, then the percentage error from using consumer's surplus is small. If the price of a...

Confidence seems to replace certain knowledge and the necessity for specific information. It simplifies economical processes and procedures, it motivates investing, and obviously, it enhances welfare — if it was missing, innumerable dealings would not be made. Consequently, if confidence among...

Based on a transparent analytical model of multiple markets including corn, ethanol, gasoline, and transportation fuel, this study estimates the welfare changes for consumers and producers resulting from ethanol production and related support polices in 2007. The welfare estimation takes into...

This paper illustrates that the usual consumer surplus approach to evaluation of the benefits of a futures market fails because of certain unobserved benefits. In particular, when futures markets provide benefits in the form of a reduced variability of future spot prices, the usual consumer...

We estimate consumer surplus gains and losses from concert ticket price discrimination. Fans purchasing low-priced tickets enjoy a surplus gain of about $9.26 per ticket while high-priced ticket buyers suffer a loss of about $17.63 per ticket.

We analyze competition between data intermediaries collecting information on consumers, which they sell to firms for price discrimination purposes. We show that competition between data intermediaries benefits consumers by increasing competition between firms, and by reducing the amount of...

The Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spans 3550-3700 MHz. It represents approximately a 16% expansion of licensed spectrum below 4 Ghz. Wireless services based on available wireless spectrum have been a substantial source of technological innovation and economic growth over the past few...