Auction sellers can use a reserve price to require a minimum bid before items are sold. Theoretical and experimental research has tested the influence of a reserve price in an independent private values auction, but little focus has been given to the influence of a reserve price in a first-price...

Purpose: This paper aims to identify factors influencing the likelihood of consumers trying muscadine wines and among those who have tried them, willingness to pay (WTP) for an in-state produced muscadine wine. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses a 2015 survey of wine consumers residing...

Water utilities typically set residential water prices using one of three rate structures: increasing block rate (IBR), uniform rate (UR), or decreasing block rate (DBR). Historically, DBR has been the most widely used residential rate structure, but water utilities are increasingly switching to...

This article develops a measure of efficiency to use with aggregated data. Unlike the most commonly used efficiency measures, our estimator adjusts for the heteroskedasticity created by aggregation. Our estimator is compared to estimators currently used to measure school efficiency. Theoretical...

The effect of aggregation on estimates of stochastic frontier functions is considered. Inefficiency is assumed associated with the individual units being aggregated. In this case, the aggregated data have a closed skew normal distribution. Estimating the parameters of a closed skew normal...