Resource Allocation and the Regulated Firm

Abstract

This paper extends a simple economic model of the regulated firm to include a wider range of both management objectives and of regulatory constraint. The authors find that these generalizations in the assumptions are able to effect profound alterations in the conclusions. For example, if a firm is constrained to a fair return on invested capital, we find that the profit-maximizing firm would have an incentive to overcapitalize (the Averch-Johnson result), while the sales or output maximizing firm would have an incentive to undercapitalize. If any of several other methods of constraint are used, the authors find that there is no incentive to alter the relative amounts of labor and capital employed in the production process.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 70 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.