Marginal Cost Research Articles

VJY36 Novel “5 point” retraction sutures for the reduction of iatrogenic margin positivity and cost of Robot-Assisted Radical Prostatectomy (RARP)

VJY36 Novel “5 point” retraction sutures for the reduction of iatrogenic margin positivity and cost of Robot-Assisted Radical Prostatectomy (RARP)

Research on the energy transition pathways of the transportation sector in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, China

Energy transitions is an effective way to achieve sustainable development in the transportation sector. To explore the pathways to energy transitions in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) transportation sector, the article evaluated the potential of energy savings and CO2 emission reduction of different measures in a quantitative way, based on the long-range energy alternatives planning (LEAP) platform. The marginal abatement cost curves are used to visually reflect the cost–benefit of these measures, and to develop cost-effective pathways to energy transitions. The results show that the measures of transportation modes adjustment and private cars regulating should be prioritized due to the potential of significant emission reduction with good cost-effectiveness. The measures of promoting electricity and hydrogen energy have large emission reduction potential, but only those for road traffic are cost-effective, and should be treated with a lower priority. Considering the high cost, the measures of promoting biofuel should be implemented as least priority. Moreover, the measures of liquefied natural gas (LNG) application have good cost-effectiveness, as opposed to limited CO2 emission reduction potential. It can only be used as a transitional fuel for the energy transitions. The findings and research methodology will provide theoretical support for the formulation of transportation energy transition pathways in the GBA and other regions.

Carbon footprint and techno-economic analysis to decarbonize the production of linerboard via fuel switching in the lime kiln and boiler: Development of a marginal abatement cost curve

Carbon footprint and techno-economic analysis to decarbonize the production of linerboard via fuel switching in the lime kiln and boiler: Development of a marginal abatement cost curve

Distributed economic control strategy based on reinforcement pinning control for microgrids

Traditional droop control allocates distributed generation (DG) power based on capacity proportion, which leads to high system operating costs. To address this issue, this study proposes a distributed economic control strategy for microgrids based on reinforcement pinning (RP) control. To minimize operating costs, reinforcement learning (RL) continuously updates the Q-value table through reward feedback to obtain the optimal strategy. The optimal action determined by RL is set as the pinning reference value and transmitted to the pinning agent. Other agents achieve marginal cost consistency through the pinning information iteration matrix. To correct frequency deviations, proportional-integral (PI) control is used to ensure frequency stability for the system's operation. Simulations under different scenarios were conducted in MATLAB/Simulink. The results show that the proposed approach can coordinate the output of distributed power sources, reduce the operating costs of the microgrid, and maintain frequency stability.

Social Signaling and Childhood Immunization: A Field Experiment in Sierra Leone.

This article explores the use of social signaling as a policy tool to sustainably affect childhood immunization. In a 26-month field experiment with public clinics in Sierra Leone, I introduce a verifiable signal-in the form of color-coded bracelets-given to children upon timely completion of the first four or all five required vaccinations. Signals increase parents' belief in the visibility of their actions and knowledge of other children's vaccine status. The impact of signals varies significantly with the cost and perceived benefits of the action. There are no discernible effects on timely and complete immunization when the signal is linked to an easier-to-complete vaccine with low perceived benefits, and large positive effects when the signal is linked to a costlier-to-achieve vaccine with high perceived benefits. Parents adjust their behavior nine months before realizing the social image benefit, demonstrating the motivational strength of signaling incentives. Of substantive policy importance, bracelets increase full immunization at one year of age by 9 percentage points, with impacts persisting at two years of age. At a marginal cost of US$24.7 per fully immunized child, social signals can be as cost-effective as financial or in-kind incentives.

Contextual Dynamic Pricing with Strategic Buyers

Personalized pricing, which involves tailoring prices based on individual characteristics, is commonly used by firms to implement a consumer-specific pricing policy. In this process, buyers can also strategically manipulate their feature data to obtain a lower price, incurring certain manipulation costs. Such strategic behavior can hinder firms from maximizing their profits. In this article, we study the contextual dynamic pricing problem with strategic buyers. The seller does not observe the buyer’s true feature, but a manipulated feature according to buyers’ strategic behavior. In addition, the seller does not observe the buyers’ valuation of the product, but only a binary response indicating whether a sale happens or not. Recognizing these challenges, we propose a strategic dynamic pricing policy that incorporates the buyers’ strategic behavior into the online learning to maximize the seller’s cumulative revenue. We first prove that existing nonstrategic pricing policies that neglect the buyers’ strategic behavior result in a linear Ω ( T ) regret with T the total time horizon, indicating that these policies are not better than a random pricing policy. We then establish an O ( T ) regret upper bound of our proposed policy and an Ω ( T ) regret lower bound for any pricing policy within our problem setting. This underscores the rate optimality of our policy. Importantly, our policy is not a mere amalgamation of existing dynamic pricing policies and strategic behavior handling algorithms. Our policy can also accommodate the scenario when the marginal cost of manipulation is unknown in advance. To account for it, we simultaneously estimate the valuation parameter and the cost parameter in the online pricing policy, which is shown to also achieve an O ( T ) regret bound. Extensive experiments support our theoretical developments and demonstrate the superior performance of our policy compared to other pricing policies that are unaware of the strategic behaviors. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

The marginal value of public funds: a brief guide and application to tax policy

AbstractThis paper provides a brief and accessible guide to the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) and offers some new perspectives on its application to the evaluation of tax policy. Specifically, the paper aims to: (i) bridge the gap between traditional uses of the Marginal Cost of Public Funds and the growing interest in the MVPF approach, (ii) highlight the crucial link between the MVPF and tax policy, (iii) critically discuss empirical quantification, particularly with respect to tax elasticities, and (iv) explore distributional considerations and their connection to the literature on optimal redistributive taxation.

Short- and long-term effects of carbon taxation on the prices of products shipped by sea

This study analyzes econometrically the effect of fuel carbon taxation on the prices of internationally traded goods transported by the maritime sector. Around 80% of global trade by volume is transported by sea, contributing to a nontrivial level of carbon emissions. This study is the first to analyze the effect of carbon taxation on the prices of export products transported by sea, using detailed data for the heaviest 6-digit products from 21 industries that account for 75% of the total weight of goods transported by sea. The results reveal that the closer a product is to the core competence of the exporting firm (lowest marginal production costs), the weaker the effect of the carbon tax will be on prices. This effect on export prices will be even weaker for products of certain industries that have the highest unit sales value/weight ratios. To contribute to decarbonizing the maritime sector, a carbon tax should be maintained uninterruptedly to fully internalize the awareness that improving fuel consumption competitiveness by considering the distance traveled and weight of traded products to ultimately reduce carbon tax costs.

Techno-Economic and CO2 Emissions Analysis of the Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell Integration in a DRI Production Plant for the Decarbonization of the Steel Industry

Developing low-carbon systems for the steel industry is increasingly considered necessary for contributing to the targets of CO2 emission reduction requested by modern environmental policies. This work focuses on a process for decarbonizing primary steel production by integrating an MCFC system in a DRI production plant based on the Energiron ZR process configuration. An MCFC system can be used to remove CO2 from the flue gases while producing electricity and reducing the net electric consumption of the DRI plant. The reference scenario, the carbon capture case, and an additional hydrogen-based H-DRI system using high temperature electrolysis are simulated using Aspen Plus to evaluate and compare their energy and environmental performance. The results show that even considering the additional power consumption of the complete carbon capture and separation system, the overall electrical consumption of the carbon capture case is decreased by 78 % and the direct CO2 emissions by up to 95 %. Furthermore, reduced electricity consumption reduces scope 2 emissions, increasing the sustainability of the process in the steel industry. On the other hand, the H-DRI case decreases primary energy consumption by 24 % but significantly increase electricity requirement; thus, it represents a better future solution when cheap low-CO2 electricity is available. The plant configurations are compared economically by retrieving investment and operational costs from the open literature to estimate the levelized cost of DRI and the cost of CO2 avoided. The results show that installing the MCFC and the anode purification system increases the investment costs by 38 % compared to a conventional plant. However, the lower electricity consumption and carbon tax expenditure lead to a comparable final DRI product cost. Contrarily, due to the electrolyzer high investment and operational costs, the additional marginal DRI cost of the H-DRI case is 31 % higher. Finally, the sensitivity analysis on the main variable costs shows that, independently from the electricity and natural gas price, the carbon capture case is economically competitive to the reference scenario, considering a carbon tax of 60 €/tCO2 or higher. At the same time, the H-DRI solution requires low electricity prices to be competitive. In conclusion, even if, in the long term, the objective is to completely replace the use of fossil fuels with renewable energy, in the short term, the implementation of MCFC in the DRI plant can significantly reduce the environmental impact of primary steel production without significant economic penalization.

The High Cost of Raising Provincial Tax Revenues Has Gotten Even Higher

Households and firms’ responses to higher tax rates alter the volume and the allocation of land, labour and capital in the economy, reducing our income and consumption opportunities. These economic losses from raising tax revenues have increased for provincial governments across Canada in the last decade with the problem being especially acute in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and British Columbia. However, by lowering personal and corporate income tax rates and shifting more of the tax burden to a sales tax harmonized with the federal GST, the provinces could lower the economic cost of raising tax revenues. Taxpayers’ responses to higher tax rates adversely affect the economy. When rates go up, people are less inclined to save for the future because they must pay higher taxes on interest and dividends, and workers react by avoiding overtime and retiring early. When returns on investment generate higher taxes for corporations, they respond by cutting back their capital expenditures. Also, when people and companies can avoid paying a tax by shifting income or consumption to another jurisdiction with lower tax rates, the tax base will shrink as the tax rate goes up, reducing both income and consumption opportunities — an effect known as the deadweight loss from taxation. The larger the tax base, measured as a share of tax revenues, the greater the deadweight loss from a tax-induced decline in the tax base. All of these reactions to higher tax rates change the volume and allocation of land, capital and labour in the economy. The societal cost from raising extra revenue through a small tax rate increase is called the marginal cost of public funds (MCPF). It can be used to determine which taxes are causing the greatest welfare losses and to measure the gains from shifting the tax burden from the high-cost sources of tax revenues to those that impose a lower deadweight loss. Public projects should use the MCPF in doing a cost-benefit analysis, comparing the project’s benefits with the welfare loss from financing the project through higher taxes. The more reactivehousehold and business decisions are to tax rates, the greater the MCPF. When sales taxes are applied to a wide range of goods and services, people are limited by how much they can change their spending patterns to avoid paying those taxes. Thus, revenue is generated with lower detrimental economic effects than those created by increased personal and corporate income tax rates. Provinces could reduce the problems created by the public’s incentive to avoid paying taxes by both lowering their personal and corporate income tax rates and moving the tax burden over to a general sales tax.

Home market effects and increasing returns with non-constant marginal costs

Abstract We reexamine the role of increasing returns in production, central to trade and economic geography theories, focusing on the home market effect. We extend the conventional multi-industry new trade model to introduce (1) nonconstant marginal costs and (2) nonhomothetic production in factors. If factors that are more (less) intensively used in fixed costs than variable costs also have higher relative prices in large countries compared to small countries, then large countries exhibit larger (smaller) firm sizes and specialize in industries with decreasing (increasing) marginal costs. Notably, different levels of fixed costs have a limited impact on these patterns.

Progressing from first-of-a-kind to Nth-of-a-kind: Applying learning rates to carbon capture deployment in Sweden

The deployment of CO2 capture technologies presents opportunities to store fossil fuel emissions from industries and power generation (CCS) and to enable carbon utilization (CCU). However, the costs for early CCS projects are high, and this is a challenge in terms of their economic viability, requiring a strong climate policy with high carbon prices for implementation. This work details a techno-economic assessment of the cost of carbon capture based on a hybrid method and individual project approach, using first-of-a-kind contingency factors and learning rates to study the evolution of carbon capture costs as installed capacity increases over time. The work is based on a case study of 147 Swedish industrial and combined heat and power plants (total of 176 stacks). The results are presented as marginal abatement cost curves, with consideration of early mover CCS projects and learning rates. Deployment scenarios are also presented that take into account an expected increase in the CO2 price. The findings indicate that when accounting for first-of-a-kind contingencies (100 % and 200 % increases in Nth-of-a-kind costs), 90 and 17 projects, respectively, of the total 176 emission sources studied have specific CO2 costs of <300 €/t. However, high learning rates (12 %) can reduce the capture costs from first-of-a-kind to Nth-of-a-kind levels within some 30 project installations (100 % contingency). With lower learning rates (3 %), the first-of-a-kind costs are reduced by 10 %–20 %. With the expected increase in CO2 prices, a peak in carbon capture deployment is observed around Year 2035, at a carbon price of 200 €/t.

The enteric methane emission conundrum: U.S. beef cattle producer adoption of climate-focused technology

Cattle are ruminant livestock that emit enteric methane (CH4) as part of their natural digestive process. The U.S. beef cattle industry is receiving pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including methane. The U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef has set a target for the U.S. feedlot sector to reduce emissions by 10 % per pound of beef by 2030. Feed additive 3-Nitrooxypropanol (3-NOP) has been developed to help mitigate methane emissions. While not yet approved for use in U.S. beef production, adoption of 3-NOP in U.S. feedlots upon approval remains unknown as no widespread economic incentive currently exists in the marketplace to spur adoption. The objectives of this study are: (1) to determine potential 3-NOP adoption by U.S. feedlot cattle producers given various marketplace incentives and (2) to explore how differing approaches to reducing emissions from beef production to achieve sector targets impact social welfare. Our study uses data from a U.S. feedlot producer survey to estimate willingness-to-adopt (WTA) measures. Regression results are used to map potential adoption of 3-NOP given various market and policy scenarios. The survey sample is then split into small producers (<2000 head sold in last 12 months) and large producers (2000+ head sold in last 12 months) to determine differences in WTA based on operation size. We find that producers prefer incentives in the form of processor premiums over government subsidies. The incentive level needed to spur adoption increases as the implementation cost of 3-NOP increases and decreases if net profit estimations are included in the messaging. On average, small producers require a higher incentive to adopt 3-NOP than large producers. Improving the emissions reduction efficacy of 3-NOP reduces the level of incentive needed to achieve aggregate emissions targets. The least expensive avenue to achieve emissions reduction targets results in greater outlays to large producers as compared to small producers. The marginal cost to society of feeding 3-NOP to an additional steer or heifer in the feedlot increases with each animal. As such, it may be that improving the efficacy of 3-NOP through increased investment in research and development is less costly than spurring more producers to adopt the additive in their feed rations. Ultimately, producers, processors, beef consumers, voting residents, taxpayers, and policymakers all have influence in shaping how the beef industry tackles the emissions reduction conundrum.

Achieving Canada's Nationally Determined Contribution: Assessing the Cost of Reducing GHG Emissions

Amidst the growing urgency of climate change, this study delves into Canada's commitment to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as part of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. It aims to comprehensively understand the economic dimensions of Canada's NDC goals. Through an extensive literature review, the research establishes the groundwork for examining emission reduction targets, policy effectiveness, technological feasibility, and socio- political factors. Building on this foundation, a conceptual framework is developed, outlining key relationships among NDC targets, policies, economics, feasibility, socio-political contexts, and international cooperation. The research employs a multifaceted methodology, incorporating data collection and a marginal cost of abatement analysis to assess cost-effectiveness across emission reduction options. We expect to build the marginal cost of abatement curve based on the results from research institutions, government websites, and other NGOs. All in all, this research contributes nuanced insights into Canada's emission reduction pursuits, unveiling the intricate dynamics between policies, economics, and technology.

Building retrofit optimization considering future climate and decision-making under various mindsets

Building retrofit is effective in reducing building energy use and improving comfort levels for existing buildings. However, conducting multi-objective optimization for individual buildings can be challenging due to the laborious computational cost of using white box models and the difficulty in visualizing and understanding the decision-making process. Additionally, the impact of climate change has not been fully considered for the post-retrofit lifecycle. This research proposes a pragmatic automated scheme that integrates a feature selection method based on marginal abatement cost analysis and variance-based sensitivity analysis, multi-objective optimization supported by non-dominated sorting differential evolution (NSDE) algorithm, tailor-made decision-making support under different mindsets, and tree-based retrospection scheme of decision-making pathways. The simulation engine used in this study is a low-order white box modeling tool developed by the research team. The proposed scheme was applied to two educational buildings with different thermal characteristics, and the results showed that a certain number of sampling sizes were needed to achieve reliable feature selection results. The hierarchical clustering based decision-making support scheme has demonstrated robustness in visualizing and supporting decision-making for Pareto front. Two retrofit mindsets - aggressive and balanced - were assumed in the decision-making process, and the proposed method produced distinct final solutions accoridng to the two mindsets. This framework can support informed decision-making, helping stakeholders implement sustainable practices and transition to a low-carbon built environment.

Advancing Low-Cost Flow Battery Chemistries

Pumped-hydroelectric presently dominates U.S. grid electricity storage capacity resources, but the past decade has brought increasing levels of electrochemical energy storage (EES) installations.1 Policymakers have recognized the need for longer-duration systems as more EES gets added to the grid and sought systems that can provide durations of 8+ hours.2 , 3 Although Li-ion presently dominates EES deployments, the average duration of U.S. utility-based-systems are relatively short at 3 hours.4 Redox flow batteries (RFBs) have an advantage over Li-ion systems at long durations due to their system architecture. The marginal cost of another hour of RFB duration asymptotes to the cost of additional active materials and their storage containers, as opposed to the cost of additional Li-ion cells, packs, and modules.Leading vanadium RFBs have made cost reductions by improving the power density of their energy conversion stacks,5 , 6 but eventually are limited by the relatively high cost of their vanadium active materials. Vanadium RFB suppliers are actively seeking to reduce this cost through business innovations. Yet, from a technical perspective, switching to lower cost active materials can also permit economically feasible long duration RFB systems.7 RTX Technology Research Center has previously reported on the low cost active material chemistries including the sulfur/manganese (S-Mn) chemistry and ligand-coordinate metals (LCM, e.g. chromium/iron).8 , 9 S/Mn uses active materials based on low-cost sulfur, a waste product of fossil fuel production, and inexpensive manganese, an element presently used commercially in disposable primary cells. LCM chemistries use mass-produced organic ligands and inexpensive metal centers like iron, chromium, and titanium, and can rely on more neutral, and benign, electrolyte pH conditions that offer wider electrochemical stability windows. Along with these benefits, LCM chemistries bring new challenges such as managing pH in an environment where small absolute concentration changes have outsized effects. This abstract will focus on the progress made advancing low-cost chemistries toward industrial relevance via thousands of hours of operation and in full-sized cell/stack form-factors. Acknowledgements: The work presented herein was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), U.S. Department of Energy, under Award Number DE-AR000994. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof. References Chalamala, B., DOE Global Energy Storage Database. Sandia National Laboratories: 2020.Padilla, M., Joint Long Duration Storage Request for Offers. Energy, S. V. C., Ed. Silicon Valley Clean Energy: 2020.Albertus, P.; Manser, J. S.; Litzelman, S., Long-Duration Electricity Storage Applications, Economics, and Technologies. Joule 2020, 4 (1), 21-32.Linga, V. Duration of utility-scale batteries depend on how they're used; EIA: U.S. EIA 'Today in Energy', March 25, 2022, 2022.Sun, C. N.; Mench, M. M.; Zawodzinski, T. A., High Performance Redox Flow Batteries: An Analysis of the Upper Performance Limits of Flow Batteries Using Non-aqueous Solvents. Electrochimica Acta 2017, 237, 199-206.Perry, M. L.; Darling, R. M.; Zaffou, R., High Power Density Redox Flow Battery Cells. ECS Transactions 2013, 53 (7), 7-16.Wadia, C.; Albertus, P.; Srinivasan, V., Resource constraints on the battery energy storage potential for grid and transportation applications. Journal of Power Sources 2011, 196 (3), 1593-1598.Yang, Z.; Gerhardt, M. R.; Fortin, M.; Shovlin, C.; Weber, A. Z.; Perry, M. L.; Darling, R. M.; Saraidaridis, J. D., Polysulfide-Permanganate Flow Battery Using Abundant Active Materials. Journal of The Electrochemical Society 2021, 168 (7), 070516.Saraidaridis, J.; Yang, Z., Electrolyte Takeover Strategy for Performance Recovery in Polysulfide-Permanganate Flow Batteries. Journal of The Electrochemical Society 2021, 168 (11), 110556.

Study on the guidelines for the efficient and sustainable management of groundwater usage revenue collection in relation to groundwater usage fees and groundwater preservation fees in the groundwater crisis areas of Thailand

This study attempts to examine the cost and benefits of shifting the collection process of groundwater revenue and groundwater preservation fees from a manual to automatic meter reading (AMR) system, utilizing marginal cost and marginal benefit. The methodology is based on a benefit-cost analysis, taking into account the monetary value of time. The following specific results are revealed: (1) Changing to an AMR system can provide additional benefits in terms of time-savings for current personnel since the administrative work relating to the collection of groundwater usage fees and groundwater preservation fees can be reduced by 70%. This study is based on two personnel per province, calculated using the rate of 26,397.46 baht (or 792.95 USD) per person per month, 70% of which equates to an opportunity cost of 18,000 baht (or 540.70 USD) per person per month. (2) The accident rate can be reduced if personnel do not need to travel to examine the groundwater usage of licensees. However, because the AMR system is complicated and customizable, transitioning from manual to AMR systems is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. We propose that a pilot project be carried out to properly implement the AMR installation process.

Dynamic determinants of optimal global climate policy

We explore the impact of dynamic characteristics of greenhouse-gas emitting systems, such as inertia, induced innovation, and path-dependency, on optimal responses to climate change. Our compact and analytically tractable model, applied with stylized damage assumptions to derive optimal pathways, highlights how simple dynamic parameters affect responses including the optimal current effort and the cost of delay. The conventional cost-benefit result (i.e., an optimal policy with rising marginal costs that reflects discounted climate damages) arises only as a special case in which the dynamic characteristics of emitting systems are assumed to be insignificant. Our analysis highlights and distinguishes from the (often implicit) assumption in many cost-benefit models, which neglect inertia and assume exogenous technology progress. This tends to defer action. More generally, our model yields useful policy insights for the transition to deep decarbonization, showing that enhanced early action may greatly reduce both damages and abatement costs in the long run.

Limited (energy) supply, monetary policy, and sunspots

In a simple New Keynesian open economy setting, we analyze how local input shortages influence policy transmission and equilibrium determinacy. Shortages increase the elasticity of the local price of the scarce factor to domestic economic activity, affecting the cyclicality of marginal costs and incomes. As a result, the slope of both the Phillips and the IS curve is altered, crucially influencing monetary and fiscal policy transmission. These changes are affected by factor ownership and propensities to consume. Theoretically, shortages can also raise the risk of self-fulfilling fluctuations if a rising price of the constrained factor boosts incomes for agents with high propensities to consume. We illustrate these channels for the 2022 German energy crisis.

Quasi linear and stone geary utility functions based-internet service financing scheme with marginal costs and monitoring costs

The use of computer network technology is currently increasing, especially on the internet network. To connect to the actual internet, it is a task for internet service provider (ISP). Providing advantages to ISPs, it requires a financing scheme. This study's goal is to present a modified model for internet service financing schemes, within the customer choices and consumer satisfaction levels to maintain the schemes. To achieve the best outcomes, this updated model is built through marginal costs and cost monitoring while taking into account service quality based on stone-geary utility functions and quasi-linear utility functions. This research provides a solution regarding the differences in increasing consumer interest with payment options on model modification that will be provided. Traffic Digilib in a local server in Palembang. According to this study, a usage-based financing strategy and a two-part pricing of IDR 2727.8 per kbps will yield the highest revenues.