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Ramsey Pricing in The Presence of Externality Costs. Authors: Tae Hoon Oum and Michael W. Thretheway. Lecturer: Chaowei Fan. A. Brief Review of Simplest Version of Ramsey Prices. Why do we need Ramsey Price? 1. First-best prices are nonviable.
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Ramsey Pricing in The Presence of Externality Costs Authors: Tae HoonOum and Michael W. Thretheway Lecturer: Chaowei Fan
A. Brief Review of Simplest Version of Ramsey Prices • Why do we need Ramsey Price? • 1. First-best prices are nonviable. • 2. Welfare-maximizing regulator must find an optimum set of prices subject to • these constraints. • How do we start? • 1. Requiring firm to adopt prices that deviate from marginal costs in order to • reach the target profit level. • 2. Assumptions: • 1). There is only one strong natural monopolist, who faces no completion • 2). The demands of products manufactured by this natural monopolist are • independent of one another • What do we obtain?
B. What problems does Ramsey Pricing have? Independent Demands There should not exist only one multiproduct firm; there should exist many other multiproduct firms, thereby the goods are interdependent. Private Cost Ramsey only considers private costs But, we have to consider Social Cost Social Cost=Private Costs + External Costs 1). Private Cost: the costs that the buyer of a good or service pays the seller. This can also be described as the costs internal to the firm’s production function 2). External Costs: The costs that people other than buyer are forced to pay as a result of the transaction. The bearers of such costs can be either particular individuals or society at large Note: External costs are often both non-monetary and problematic
C. What do Tae HoonOum and Michael W. Tretheway want to do? • Examining the Ramsey pricing rule • Where there are potential externality costs for all goods, • And where all demands can be interdependent • D. How do they proceed?
Two sets of first order conditions must be satisfied to maximize the Lagrangian function
D. What conclusion do we get? • When externality costs are present, the Ramsey rule is computed on the • basis of the sum of marginal private cost and a fraction of marginal • externality costs. It is not computed on the basis of social marginal costs. • The quantity shares under the first best social marginal cost pricing would • not be preserved under Ramsey pricing.