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Consumer's surplus now plays an important role in public sector investment analysis (notably social cost‐benefit analysis) and is central to much of modern welfare economic theory. Despite this it is still a topic of considerable controversy and debate; indeed few concepts in the recent history of economic thought have aroused such a diversity of opinion. It must be almost unique, for example, for two Nobel laureates in the same discipline to take diametrically opposed positions over the importance of a basic method of measurement in their own subject. We find, however, Sir John Hicks arguing that ‘if economists are to play their part in shaping the canons of economic policy fit for a new age, they will have to build on the foundations of consumer's surplus’ whilst on the contrary Paul Samuelson dismisses the concept as being of ‘historical and doctrinal interest with a limited amount of appeal as a purely mathematical puzzle’.

In recent years, some peer-to-peer (P2P) service sharing platforms have improved their service quality by setting an entry quality threshold for service providers. Considering consumers' heterogeneous preferences for service quality and commission rate, it is worth studying how to select the commission rate contract for a P2P platform under a predetermined entry quality threshold for service providers.

In this study, the platform's profit-maximizing model is constructed under two proposed contracts: unilateral commission rate contract and bilateral commission rate contract. The optimal entry quality threshold and the optimal commission rate are obtained. This study also explores the impacts of cross-side network externality and service price on a platform's optimal decisions and social welfare.

Results show that it is always advantageous for the platform to adopt the bilateral commission rate contract, which is closely related to the strength of cross-side network externality, service price and quality sensitivity coefficient. Under certain conditions, adopting the unilateral commission rate contract can reduce platform profit and service provider surplus, and improve consumer surplus and social welfare.

This study analyzes the unilateral commission rate contract and the bilateral commission rate contract of the platform, and discusses which contract is beneficial to the platform, consumers and service providers. In addition, this study provides a basis for the operation decision of a P2P service sharing platform and the pricing decision of service providers.

The emergence of internet-enabled technology has led to the software service model in which the software firm, instead of the consumer, maintains software ownership. This model can curtail software piracy more effectively than the traditional on-premises software model. However, software firms are not abandoning traditional on-premises software but embracing both models simultaneously. In this study, the authors consider a firm’s software bundling decision in combination with its piracy deterrence strategy. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors build three stylized models to analytically compare the bundling strategies under three scenarios: no piracy, piracy is present and piracy is present while the firm applies digital rights management (DRM).

The authors find pure bundling (PB) to be the optimal strategy due to the combination of competition and cannibalization effects in mixed bundling (MB). Simultaneously, consumers may enjoy greater surplus in PB than in MB, making PB the preferred strategy for both the firm and consumers. Interestingly, the win-win outcome coexists with some degree of piracy in the market.

The results provide important insights for firms and policy-makers and contribute to the literature on piracy and product bundling. First, the authors show piracy could be another driver for product bundling, which has never been discussed in prior literature. Second, the authors suggest an alternative perspective; that PB may be a desirable outcome for both firms and consumers when considering piracy and DRM. More surprisingly, this desirable outcome occurs with some level of piracy in the market. The presence of piracy leads to competition and cannibalization effects in MB, which eventually results in the win-win outcome in the software market for both the firm and the consumers.

Merger review policy among countries varies according to the weight given to consumers relative to producers. When both receive their full welfare weight it is said that the efficiencies defense is fully realized. No well-developed economic rationale has been given for giving more weight to consumers. Such a rationale is given here by considering equity and efficiency both as goods for which there is a willingness to pay. The willingness to pay approach not only provides a rationale for giving consumers greater weight as with, e.g. a price standard, but also shows how in principle the weight is to be derived. The merger of Superior Propane and ICG Propane in Canada raises issues of the tradeoff of equity and efficiency. The willingness to pay approach is applied to this merger as an illustration.

To analyse the implications of signs of reform modification, stoppage or reversal, such as price controls, that have emerged in many developing economies, it is necessary to understand their efficiency consequences. This paper aims to study the effect of price interventions in imperfectly competitive product markets, to investigate whether reforms reversals are necessarily harmful.

The model assumes firm set prices and face sunk costs of entry.

The paper shows that a minimum price can induce a Pareto improvement, by preventing price wars and encouraging entry. The result is supported by empirical evidence from some developed economies, holds when sunk cost vanishes, and is robust to some extensions. A fixed price may be optimal in the environment investigated.

The results may be of interest to theorists and policy-makers interested in imperfectly competitive markets.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the pricing strategies for knowledge payment products, taking into account the quality level of pirated knowledge products, in the context of platform copyright supervision.

This study abstracts the knowledge payment transaction process and aims to maximize producer's revenue by constructing a pricing model for knowledge payment products. It discusses pricing strategies for knowledge payment products under two scenarios: traditional supervision and blockchain supervision. The analysis explores the impact of pirated knowledge products quality level and blockchain technology on pricing strategies and consumer surplus, while providing threshold conditions for effective strategies.

Deploying blockchain technology in platform operations can significantly reduce costs and increase efficiency. In both scenarios, knowledge producer needs to balance factors such as the quality of pirated knowledge products, the supervision level of platform, and consumer surplus to dynamically adjust pricing strategies in order to maximize his own revenue.

This study enriches the literature on the pricing models of knowledge payment products and has practical significance in guiding knowledge producer to develop effective pricing strategies under copyright supervision.

This chapter tests theoretically and empirically the existence of a stable relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Based on microeconomics and physics, a model has been specified and applied to annual data for twenty countries, which representing 61 percent of the world’s population in 2018, over the period 1995–2015. The data are from the International Energy Agency (2019) and econometric techniques including panel data and causality tests have been used. The results indicate that there is a causal relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. In general, consumers cannot directly change emissions caused by production processes, but they can act on emissions caused by their own domestic energy consumption. Approximately three quarters of domestic energy consumption is due to heating and domestic hot water consumption. Taking into account the lower emissions and the lower economic cost of the initial investment, four potential energy systems have been selected for use in heating and domestic hot water. Their social returns have been assessed across nine of the twenty countries in the sample over a lifecycle of 25 years from 2018: France, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Germany, United Kingdom, Morocco and the United States. Cost-benefit analysis techniques have been used for this purpose and the results indicate that the use of thermal water, where applicable, is the most socially profitable system among the proposed systems, followed by natural gas. The least socially profitable systems are those using electricity.