This article establishes conditions sufficient to ensure that a decision of a firm is judged to be desirable by any one shareholder (e.g., the firm's manager) if and only if every shareholder judges it to be desirable. One such condition is that the decision would not alter the set of...

Introduction to the Symposium on Peak Load Pricing

The labor market is viewed as a market for labor contracts. A firm is identified as having an internal labor market if the efficient mode of production requires that it employ heterogeneous worker types by offering a wage structure as a set of subsidizing contracts. If the firm is free to offer...

This paper studies the determination of the optimum size and arrangement of a monocentric city,. The major consideration is the trade-off between economies of scale in production in the central business district and the diseconomies of congestion in commuter transport. Planned optimum...

Book review

Instead of the Averch-Johnson assumptions of instantaneous regulation of the rate of return, but no regulation over the setting of individual rates, this note assumes that the regulator applies the new rates to the test year's output to predict the revenue requirements under the allowed rate of...

This paper analyzes the effects of market structure -- monopoly versus competition -- on the quality and durability of goods. Also, it tries to find the impact of government regulation on these variables. The types of quality improvements discussed are: quality as pure substitute for quantity;...

Forcing what is essentially a hyperbolic relationship into a linear regression model can create a "hyperbolic bag." This bag takes on importance if it is systematically related to other variables in the regression model. For the case at hand, it appeared that using a linear model might overstate...

In this paper an analysis is made of the investments in turbogenerator sets made by a sample of 15 firms in the electric utilities industry for the period 1948 through 1969. Two models of firm investment are proposed and tested. The first is directly related to an earlier work of Chenery, in...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the urgent need for an early-warning system covering the historically failure-prone railroad industry and to develop a tool for providing such a system. A multivariate statistical technique called linear discriminant analysis is utilized to identify and...