234 research outputs found
Making Government Accountable: Lessons from a Federal Job Training Program
Get PDFWe describe the evolution of a performance measurement system in a government job-training program. In this program, a federal agency establishes performance measures and standards for sub-state agencies. We show that the performance measurement system’s evolution is at least partly explained as a process of trial-and-error, characterized by a feedback loop: the federal agency establishes performance measures, the local managers learn how to game them, the federal agency learns about gaming and reformulates the performance measures, leading to possibly new gaming, and so on. The dynamics suggest that implementing a performance measurement system in government is not a one-time challenge but benefits from careful monitoring and perhaps frequent revision.performance measurement, performance incentives, government organisation, organisational dynamic
Replication Data for: "Sales, Quantity Surcharge, and Consumer Inattention"
No full textClerides, Sofronis, and Courty, Pascal, (2017) "Sales, Quantity Surcharge, and Consumer Inattention." Review of Economics and Statistics 99:2, 357-370
Replication Data for: "Sales, Quantity Surcharge, and Consumer Inattention"
No full textClerides, Sofronis, and Courty, Pascal, (2017) "Sales, Quantity Surcharge, and Consumer Inattention." Review of Economics and Statistics 99:2, 357-370
Supplemental Material, Appendix - The Impact of Variable Pricing, Dynamic Pricing, and Sponsored Secondary Markets in Major League Baseball
No full textSupplemental Material, Appendix for The Impact of Variable Pricing, Dynamic Pricing, and Sponsored Secondary Markets in Major League Baseball by Pascal Courty and Luke Davey in Journal of Sports Economics</p
Buying Frenzies
Get PDFI extend DeGraba's model of buying frenzies. I identify conditions under which buying frenzies are the only possible equilibrium and under which rationing occurs in equilibriumBuying Frenzy, Rationing
Does Responsive Pricing Smooth Demand Shocks?
Get PDFUsing data from a unique pricing experiment, we investigate Vickrey’s conjecture that responsive pricing can be used to smooth both predictable and unpredictable demand shocks. Our evidence shows that increasing the responsiveness of price to demand conditions reduces the magnitude of deviations in capacity utilization rates from a pre-determined target level. A 10 percent increase in price variability leads to a decrease in the variability of capacity utilization rates between 2 and 6 percent. We discuss implications for the use of demand-side incentives to deal with congestible resources.Consumer demand, responsive pricing, capacity utilization, price variability
The Impact of Price Discrimination on Revenue: Evidence from the Concert Industry
Get PDFConcert tickets can either be sold at a single price or at multiple prices corresponding to different seating categories. We study the relationship between price discrimination and revenue by examining variations in the number of seating categories across concert, tour, artist, location, and time. Offering multiple seating categories leads to revenues that are approximately 5 percent higher than with single price ticketing. The return to price discrimination is higher in markets with more heterogeneous demand, in smaller venues and in more competitive markets. The return of increasing from three to four categories of seating is about half that of increasing from one to two.Price discrimination, return to price discrimination, second degree price discrimination
Identical Price Categories in Oligopolistic MArkets. Innocent Behaviour or Collusive Practice?
No full textIn many sectors competing firms choose the same (or similar) price categories - a price category being defined as a situation where a firm commits to sell a given set of products (or to supply a given set of markets), at a single price. In this Report we show that firms might choose homogeneous price categories
in order to facilitate collusion. The reason being that similar price categories might make the enforcement of a given collusive outcome more likely; moreover, they may facilitate coordination on a given collusive outcome simpler; and they may make the market more transparent from the sellers’ side, thereby
facilitating reciprocal monitoring. However, homogeneous price categories might simply result from noncollusive
competitive interaction. Specifically, firms will tend to adopt similar price categories because they face similar demand or cost conditions. Historical reasons and habits, as well as the design of efficient incentive schemes for employees represent other innocent motives for homogeneous price categories.
Finally, the choice of the same price categories as rivals, by making the market more transparent from the
demand side, may make a firm’s aggressive pricing strategy more effective. Hence, our study suggests that
adopting the same (or similar) categories should not be considered per se illegal, nor competition
authorities should devote extra-effort to investigate sectors characterized by similar price categories. It is
only an explicit agreement among firms to use homogeneous price categories that should be considered
unlawful
Curbing Cream-Skimming: Evidence on Enrolment Incentives
Get PDFCan enrolment incentives reduce the incidence of cream-skimming in the delivery of public sector services (e.g. education, health, job training)? In the context of a large government job training program, we investigate whether the use of enrolment incentives that set different 'shadow prices' for serving different demographic subgroups of clients, influence case workers' choice of intake population. Exploiting exogenous variation in these shadow prices, we show that training agencies change the composition of their enrollee populations in response to changes in the incentives, increasing the relative fraction of subgroups whose shadow prices increase. We also show that the increase is due to training agencies enrolling at the margin weaker members, in terms of performance, of that subgroup.performance measurement, cream-skimming, enrolment incentives, bureaucrat behavior, public organizations
Making Government Accountable: Lessons from a Federal Job Training Program
Get PDFWe describe the evolution of a performance measurement system in a government job-training program. In this program, a federal agency establishes performance measures and standards for sub-state agencies. We show that the performance measurement system's evolution is at least partly explained as a process of trial-and-error, characterized by a feedback loop: the federal agency establishes performance measures, the local managers learn how to game them, the federal agency learns about gaming and reformulates the performance measures, leading to possibly new gaming, and so on. The dynamics suggest that implementing a performance measurement system in government is not a one-time challenge but benefits from careful monitoring and perhaps frequent revision.
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