Slavery versus Labor

Slavery has been a long-lasting and often endemic problem across time and space, and has commonly coexisted with a free-labor market. To understand (and possibly eradicate) slavery, one needs to unpack its relationship with free labor. Under what conditions would a principal choose to buy a slave rather than to hire a free worker? First, slaves cannot leave at will, which reduces turnover costs; second, slaves can be subjected to physical punishments, which reduces enforcement costs. In complex tasks, relation-specific investments are responsible for high turnover costs, which makes principals prefer slaves over workers. At the other end of the spectrum, in simple tasks, the threat of physical punishment is a relatively cheap way to produce incentives as compared to rewards, because effort is easy to monitor, which again makes slaves the cheaper alternative. The resulting equilibrium price in the market for slaves affects demand in the labor market and induces principals to hire workers for tasks of intermediate complexity. The available historical evidence is consistent with this pattern. Our analysis sheds light on cross-society differences in the use of slaves, on diachronic trends, and on the effects of current anti-slavery policies.

A Game Model for Medical Service Pricing Based on the Diagnosis Related Groups

Background: Currently there are various issues that exist in the medical institutions in China as a result of the price-setting in DRGs, which include the fact that medical institutions tend to choose patients and that the payment standard for complex cases cannot reasonably compensate the cost.Objective: The main objective is to prevent adverse selection problems in the operations of a diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) system with the game pricing model for scientific and reasonable pricing.Methods: The study proposes an improved bargaining game model over three stages, with the government and patients forming an alliance. The first stage assumes the alliance is the price maker in the Stackelberg game to maximize social welfare. Medical institutions are a price taker and decide the level of quality of medical service to maximize their revenue. A Stackelberg equilibrium solution is obtained. The second stage assumes medical institutions dominate the Stackelberg game and set an optimal service quality for maximizing their revenues. The alliance as the price taker decides the price to maximize the social welfare. Another Stackelberg equilibrium solution is achieved. The final stage establishes a Rubinstein bargaining game model to combine the Stackelberg equilibrium solutions in the first and second stage. A new equilibrium between the alliance and medical institutions is established.Results: The results show that if the price elasticity of demand increases, the ratio of cost compensation on medical institutions will increase, and the equilibrium price will increase. The equilibrium price is associated with the coefficient of patients' quality preference. The absolute risk aversion coefficient of patients affects government compensation and total social welfare.Conclusion: In a DRGs system, considering the demand elasticity and the quality preference of patients, medical service pricing can prevent an adverse selection problem. In the future, we plan to generalize these models to DRGs pricing systems with the effects of competition of medical institutions. In addition, we suggest considering the differential compensation for general hospitals and community hospitals in a DRGs system, in order to promote the goal of hierarchical diagnosis and treatment.

Assessment of Water Availabilities in The Tancítaro Area Through The Fuzzy Willingness To Pay

The Tancítaro peak is located in the State of Michoacán in Mexico. The current situation of unsustainable consumption of water resources can lead the region to a critical situation if adequate measures are not taken. An improvement in water management involving paying for the use of these resources could improve the situation. This work aims to propose a model allowing obtaining an equilibrium price of the use of water in the Tancítaro area. For this, experts will be consulted among the users of the water and experts among those who currently the right to use it, that is, inhabitant of the reserve area. The use of the Fuzzy logic will allow them to express their willingness to pay and collect data, not in a dichotomous way, but by grading their opinions. The use of Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) will allow the aggregation of these opinions bearing in mind different degrees of optimism or pessimism. The results obtained show an equilibrium price of $ 0.49 m-3 . It should be noted that these are preliminary results and the main objective of the work is the presentation of a methodological proposal.

Advertising Cooperation and Green Technology R&D Strategy in a Platform-Led Stackelberg Game

In this paper, we study a platform-led Stackelberg differential game over an infinite planning period considering an industry with two manufacturers competing in a common platform market. One manufacturer invests in R&D and produces green products, and the other produces nongreen products. Three platform advertising strategies are discussed systematically: the platform supports all advertising expenses for both manufacturers (PB), supports only green advertising expenses (PG), and implements a joint advertising plan (PJ) with the green manufacturer. The results reveal that the equilibrium price, R&D effort, and advertising level of products increase as the current green degree increases, while the green degree shows a monotonic trend over time and finally tends to be a stable value. The results also indicate that, in the three models, the green degree and the profits of all players with the PG strategy are the lowest. Compared with the PB strategy, although the PJ strategy may not maximize the profits of all players, from environmental perspective, the strategy would make the alliance achieve the best environmental performance.

The Fisher Market Equilibrium Price Based Multi-Access Edge Computing Coalition Formation

The emergence of multi-access edge computing (MEC) aims at extending cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the radio access network. As the large-scale IoT services are rapidly growing, a single edge infrastructure provider (EIP) may not be sufficient to handle the data traffic generated by these services. The coalition method has been used in MEC for resource optimization, latency, energy consumption reduction, computation offloading, etc. However, the majority of research does not consider the price of computing resources corresponded to a container. Moreover, each SP does not choose EIP with the highest cost-performance to sign a medium/long-term computing resource purchase or lease contract. In this work, we consider a scenario with a collection of SPs with different budgets and several EIPs distributed in geographical locations. During the first phase, we get the market equilibrium price and select the optimal EIPs to make a deal by solving the Eisenberg-Gale convex program. In the second stage, using a mathematical model, we maximize EIP's profits and form stable coalitions between EIPs by a distributed coalition formation algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that the effectiveness of our method is significantly better than the existing model.

REAL EXCHANGE RATE MISALIGNMENTS: THE CASE OF THE INDONESIAN RUPIAH

This paper analyses the equilibrium price of the Indonesian Rupiah using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) and assesses its misalignments. We find evidence of Rupiah misalignment, as the currency was undervalued for most periods, except for 1993-1996. This finding is robust across model specifications, predictors, and weighting. Our finding implies that keeping the exchange rate at its equilibrium level is ideal, and that policymakers can take advantage of the undervalued currency to promote economic growth via exports.

A resilient pricing and service quality level decision for fresh agri-product supply chain in post-COVID-19 era

PurposeThis paper investigates how the channel leadership strategies develop a post-coronavirus disease (COVID-19) resilient agri-supply chain, which reduces supplier and retailer's price loss and enhances the logistics service quality level considering logistics outsourcing of agri-product especially for the rapidly changing market condition.Design/methodology/approachBased on the classical leadership theory, two channel leadership strategies, i.e. LPL and SL, are considered. The proposed framework first derives the equilibrium price and service quality level decision among the supplier, the logistics provider and the retailer. Then it compares both leadership strategies in terms of the equilibrium prices and service quality theoretically. This article also presents a case study of Arabian dates pricing and supply chain to test the theoretically derived propositions.FindingsSelection of suitable leadership strategy is a critical factor for profit maximization of the supply chain drivers and proper optimization of equilibrium price and service quality. Here, the product's quality and the market's socio-economic condition play an important role in selecting a suitable leadership strategy. A random transformation of the physical market to an e-commerce portal creates a wide variation of the market's socio-economic parameters, affecting the equilibrium pricing and the logistics provider's service quality.Research limitations/implicationsThis study proposes a post-COVID-19 resilient agri-supply chain framework considering price and quality-dependent stochastic market demand, incorporating a wide range of socio-economic factors in the model to counteract the effect of rapid behavior change of agri-market due to COVID-19 norms. This research examines the effect of different channel leadership strategies to facilitate suitable decisions on prices and service quality and retrieve the profit of the supplier, retailer and logistics provider. The future models can incorporate competitiveness in logistics outsourcing, fourth-party logistics (4PL) and contract farming in the agri-supply chain. Each of the extensions can open avenues in different directions.Practical implicationsAs the post-COVID-19 market and the customer behavior is randomly changing, and the traditional market is rapidly converting into supermarkets and e-commerce portals, this paper examines the model with a wide variety of e-commerce portals with multi-variation of product. It is conclusive that the product's quality and the market's socio-economic behavior significantly impact the equilibrium decision. The drivers of the supply chain must take them into account before choosing a particular channel leadership strategy.Originality/valueThis study considers a multi-product and multi-market (e-commerce) model by integrating a wide variety of products and the market's socio-economic parameters. The model is tested in a price and quality-dependent stochastic market condition, contributing to the literature by reconciling two different channel leadership strategies into the global logistics of fresh agri-product.

Pay Transparency and Labor Market Justice

I argue that a general initial case for pay transparency can be made given the role played by transparency of information about prices in bringing markets closer to the ideal of competition or equilibrium price. This initial case might then be limited or enhanced depending on more specific considerations about the status of information about pay in particular. Privacy considerations seem to count against pay transparency, but I argue here that the context of pay information lacks some features present in other contexts in which appeals to privacy have force. Building on work by Estlund, Moriarty, Caulfield, and others, I argue that pay transparency may be favoured by considerations relating to personal autonomy in labour markets. Finally, I argue that pay transparency may contribute towards the realization of conditions of publicity, particularly relating to the value of citizens’ assurance about each other’s tax compliance.