ORG: Competition Among Public Sector Organizations (Topic)最新文献

{"title":"Maximizing the U.S. Postal Service’s Profits from Competitive Products","authors":"J. Sidak","doi":"10.1093/JOCLEC/NHV026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOCLEC/NHV026","url":null,"abstract":"The Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) regulates the pricing of the U.S. Postal Service's products, including products not protected by the Postal Service's statutory monopolies that the enterprise sells in competition with the products of private firms. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) of 2006 created new requirements for the PRC's pricing regulation of competitive products. I evaluate the economic implications of the PAEA's three primary requirements with respect to the Postal Service's pricing of competitive products: preventing cross subsidy of competitive products by monopoly products, ensuring that competitive products cover their “attributable” costs, and allocating to competitive products an appropriate share of the Postal Service's common costs (known as “institutional” costs in postal regulatory jargon). The first has a relatively straightforward economic interpretation: the PRC can use either the incremental cost test or the standalone cost test to detect cross subsidy, subject to some nuances when the Postal Service does not break even. To ensure that the Postal Service's competitive products meet the PAEA's attributable-cost requirement, the PRC can apply an incremental cost test using Shapley values. Given the evolution of the Postal Service's network to support competitive products, the PRC should use incremental costs that are neutral with respect to the order in which the Postal Service has introduced its product lines. Next, I explain that the appropriate share of institutional costs for the Postal Service to recover from competitive products depends on understanding in precise economic terms the alternative rationales for empowering the PRC to regulate the Postal Service's competitive products. I identify and analyze the implications of three possible rationales: (1) ensuring that the Postal Service fulfills its essential mandate to deliver monopoly (“market-dominant”) mail services, (2) ensuring that the Postal Service fulfills its fiduciary duty to taxpayers as a state-owned enterprise, and (3) preserving competitive parity in markets in which the Postal Service competes with private firms. I find that those goals indicate that the optimal allocation of institutional costs to competitive products would maximize the Postal Service's profit from its sale of competitive products—thereby enabling revenues from competitive products to cover as much of the Postal Service's overhead as possible. I review how a multiproduct firm maximizes profits using Ramsey prices. I then propose a simple shortcut by which the PRC could approximate those prices for its competitive products with limited information and at relatively low administrative cost. By gradually increasing the share of institutional costs that competitive products must bear, the PRC can identify the profit-maximizing price for competitive products and thus iterate toward the precise allocation of institutional costs that maximizes the profits that the Pos","PeriodicalId":413011,"journal":{"name":"ORG: Competition Among Public Sector Organizations (Topic)","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131995994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Altruism Heterogeneity and Quality Competition Among Healthcare Providers","authors":"Nadja Kairies-Schwarz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2561319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2561319","url":null,"abstract":"New empirical evidence shows substantial heterogeneity in the altruism of healthcare providers. Spurred by this evidence, we build a spatial quality competition model with altruism heterogeneity. We find that more altruistic healthcare providers supply relatively higher quality levels and position themselves closer to the center. Whether the social planner prefers more or less horizontal differentiation is in general ambiguous and depends on the level of altruism. The more altruistic healthcare providers are, the more likely it is that the social planner prefers greater horizontal differentiation to offset costly quality competition.","PeriodicalId":413011,"journal":{"name":"ORG: Competition Among Public Sector Organizations (Topic)","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124973562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Consumer Behavior as a Factor of Change in Russian Health Care System","authors":"I. Baranov, T. Sklyar","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2010612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2010612","url":null,"abstract":"The paper addresses efficiency and inequality issues under the conditions of increasing competition in the health care sector in Russia. Co-existence of state-funded mandatory and market-based voluntary medical insurance as well as high proportion of direct out-of-pocket payments create the unique settings for analysis of causes and forms of competition among providers of medical services. Due to more than 10% annual growth of real income over the last six years, we can also observe tremendous changes in consumer behavior in health care and medical insurance markets. The authors make their conclusions on how all these changes effect the efficiency of health care provision and access of different groups of households to medical services. The paper is based on the results of two general public surveys and series of in-depth interviews with hospital and insurance organizations managers organized by the authors as part of Ford Foundation and USAID projects in years 2002 and 2005. The study focused on the two Russian regions with different potential for developing competition in health sector. We show that the conclusions are similar for both regions and, therefore, could be used for further development of health care sector in Russia in general. We also note that many trends are common for transition economies where health care reform is still on the agenda.","PeriodicalId":413011,"journal":{"name":"ORG: Competition Among Public Sector Organizations (Topic)","volume":"588 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116551249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}