Pricing Damaged Goods

Companies with market power occasionally engage in intentional quality reduction of a portion of their output as a means of offering two qualities of goods for the purpose of price discrimination, even absent a cost saving. This paper provides an exact characterization in terms of marginal revenues of when such a strategy is profitable, which, remarkably, does not depend on the distribution of customer valuations, but only on the value of the damaged product relative to the undamaged product. In particular, when the damaged product provides a constant proportion of the value of the full product, selling a damaged good is unprofitable. One quality reduction produces higher profits than another if the former has higher marginal revenue than the latter

Radio frequency coaxial high pass filter Patent

Radio frequency coaxial filter to provide dc isolation and low frequency signal rejection in audio rang

Dynamic pricing with constant demand elasticity

The model of Gallego and van Ryzin (1994) is specialized to the case of constant elasticity of demand. A closed form is developed, which has an even simpler form than that arising with exponential demand, and possesses an excellent approximation. It is shown in this environment that monopoly is efficient, which means that all the behavior usually attributed to monopoly pricing is actually a consequence of efficient pricing and would arise even in a perfectly competitive environment. If the initial supply is not too large, it is shown that consumers have no incentive to delay their purchases in order to get a lower price at the average inventory prevailing at any time

The effects of potential organic apple fruit thinners on gas exchange and growth of model apple trees: A model plant study of transient photosynthetic inhibitors and their effect on physiology and growth

Few fruit thinners have been certified for organic fruit growers. Previous studies have shown that herbicides or shade are capable of reducing photosynthesis and are effective fruit-thinning techniques, although impractical. This project evaluated use of a model plant system of vegetative apple trees grown under controlled conditions to study photosynthetic inhibitors, which could be used as potential organic thinning agents. Various concentrations of osmotics, salts, and oils (lime-sulfur, potassium bisulfite, potassium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, soybean oil) were applied to actively growing apple trees and showed a reduced trend on the rate of apple tree photosynthetic assimilation (Pn), evapotranspiration (Et), and stomatal conductance (gs). From two studies, it was observed that treatments of 2% lime-sulfur (LS) + 2% soybean oil (SO), 4% SO, 8% LS, 5% potassium bicarbonate (KHCO3), and 5% potassium bisulfite (KHSO4) all significantly reduced Pn. The 4% LS + 2% SO, 4% LS + 4% SO, 0.5% sodium chloride (NaCl), and 2% NaCl did not significantly reduce Pn. The response of Et was significantly reduced by 2% LS + 2% SO, 5% KHCO3, and 4% SO. In a second study, trees had reduced Pn, Et, and gs after the application of 4% LS + 4% SO, 2% NaCl, 5% KHCO3, and 5% KHSO4. Stem weight, total plant weight, average leaf weight, and leaf surface area of the treated plants, although reduced, were not significantly so when compared to the control 20 d after treatment

License Prices for Financially Constrained Firms

It is often alleged that high auction prices inhibit service deployment. We investigate this claim under the extreme case of financially constrained bidders. If demand is just slightly elastic, auctions maximize consumer surplus if consumer surplus is a convex function of quantity (a common assumption), or if consumer surplus is concave and the proportion of expenditure spent on deployment is greater than one over the elasticity of demand. The latter condition appears to be true for most of the large telecom auctions in the US and Europe. Thus, even if high auction prices inhibit service deployment, auctions appear to be optimal from the consumers' point of view.

Fraud cycles

Fraud is an ancient crime and one that annually causes hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. We examine the behavioral patterns over time of different types of frauds, which illustrate cyclical frequencies. We develop an evolutionary theory that suggests cyclic behavior in frauds should be common.fraud, cycle, steady state

Bi-polar phase detector and corrector for split phase PCM data signals Patent

Bipolar phase detector and corrector for split phase PCM data signal

Fixed Price Approximability of the Optimal Gain From Trade

Bilateral trade is a fundamental economic scenario comprising a strategically acting buyer and seller, each holding valuations for the item, drawn from publicly known distributions. A mechanism is supposed to facilitate trade between these agents, if such trade is beneficial. It was recently shown that the only mechanisms that are simultaneously DSIC, SBB, and ex-post IR, are fixed price mechanisms, i.e., mechanisms that are parametrised by a price p, and trade occurs if and only if the valuation of the buyer is at least p and the valuation of the seller is at most p. The gain from trade is the increase in welfare that results from applying a mechanism; here we study the gain from trade achievable by fixed price mechanisms. We explore this question for both the bilateral trade setting, and a double auction setting where there are multiple buyers and sellers. We first identify a fixed price mechanism that achieves a gain from trade of at least 2/r times the optimum, where r is the probability that the seller's valuation does not exceed the buyer's valuation. This extends a previous result by McAfee. Subsequently, we improve this approximation factor in an asymptotic sense, by showing that a more sophisticated rule for setting the fixed price results in an expected gain from trade within a factor O(log(1/r)) of the optimal gain from trade. This is asymptotically the best approximation factor possible. Lastly, we extend our study of fixed price mechanisms to the double auction setting defined by a set of multiple i.i.d. unit demand buyers, and i.i.d. unit supply sellers. We present a fixed price mechanism that achieves a gain from trade that achieves for all epsilon > 0 a gain from trade of at least (1-epsilon) times the expected optimal gain from trade with probability 1 - 2/e^{#T epsilon^2 /2}, where #T is the expected number of trades resulting from the double auction