Price Discrimination and Quality Improvement

Price Discrimination and Quality Improvement
Author: Amy Jocelyn Glass
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2000
Genre:
ISBN:

'Top-of-the-line PCs and servers ... tend to be purchased by early adopters, technophiles who just can't wait' (Fortune, February 17, 1997). This paper constructs a model of quality improvements where multiple quality levels can sell due to differences in consumers' valuations of quality. Firms can price discriminate against consumers so that afficionados pay a price premium, while frugal consumers receive a quality level below the highest available. When the spending share of quality enthusiasts is sufficiently large, government intervention to ensure that only the highest quality level available of each product is sold must be welfare reducing due to reduced innovation.

Recent Advances in the Theory of Third-Degree Price Discrimination

Recent Advances in the Theory of Third-Degree Price Discrimination
Author: Takanori Adachi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2023-07-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 981993205X

​This book provides an updated overview of the recent progress in the theoretical study of third-degree price discrimination. It is a marketing tactic and is said to be present if the unit price is different across different groups of buyers. Its welfare evaluation is often difficult because it entails two countervailing effects: on one hand, it exploits surplus from consumers who have high willingness-to-pay, but on the other hand, it generates gains from trade from consumers who otherwise would not purchase the good. Recognizing this difficulty, we provide new insights on evaluation of third-degree price discrimination in consideration of network effects and vertical product differentiation. Our analysis is particularly useful for the industries related to information and communication technologies (ICT) because these two elements characterize them. Furthermore, we also study the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination under imperfect competition other than monopoly. At first, it seems that it may complicate the analysis under monopoly. However, we argue that the main thrusts of analysis under monopoly carry over to the case of oligopoly. We also take into account behavioral aspects and their implications for studying third-degree price discrimination. Overall, this book is designed to provide implications for contemporary management and policy issues by advancing theoretical issues in industrial organization.

Price Discrimination in Public Healthcare

Price Discrimination in Public Healthcare
Author: Nathan Berg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

Could a public healthcare system use price discrimination--paying medical service providers different fees, depending on the service provider's quality--lead to improvements in social welfare? We show that differentiating medical fees by quality increases social welfare relative to uniform pricing (i.e. quality-invariant fee schedules) whenever hospitals and doctors have private information about their own ability. We also show that by moving from uniform to differentiated medical fees, the public healthcare system can effectively incentivise good doctors and hospitals (i.e. low-cost-types) to provide even higher levels of quality than they would under complete information. In the socially optimal quality-differentiated medical fee system, low-cost-type medical-service providers enjoy a rent due to their informational advantage. Informational rent is socially beneficial because it gives service providers a strong incentive to invest in the extra training required to deliver high-quality services at low cost, providing yet another efficiency gain from quality-differentiated medical fees.

Doctors and Their Workshops

Doctors and Their Workshops
Author: Mark V. Pauly
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0226650464

Doctors are obviously influential in determining the costs of their services. But even more important, many believe, is the influence physicians have over the use and cost of nonphysician health-care resources and services. Doctors and Their Workshops is the first comprehensive attempt to use economic analysis to understand some of the physician effects on nonphysician aspects of health care.

Communities in Action

Communities in Action
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2017-04-27
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309452961

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.