Optimal Fee Research Articles

When Courts Determine Fees in a System with a Loser Pays Norm: Fee Award Denials to Winning Plaintiffs and Defendants

Unlike the English rule governing court fees and costs, under which the loser pays litigation costs, and the American rule, under which each party pays its own costs, Israel vests in judges full discretion to assess fees and costs. Given concerns about both the English and American rules, and the absence of empirical information about how either functions, an empirical study of judicial fee award practices should be of general interest. We report evidence that Israeli judges apply multiple de facto fee systems: a nearly one way fee-shifting system that dominates in tort cases, a loser pays system that operates when publicly owned corporations litigate, and a loser pays system with discretion to deny fees in other cases. Although a loser pays norm dominates in Israel, with fees awarded in 80% of cases, Israeli judges often exercised their discretion to protect losing litigants, especially individuals, by denying fees. For individual plaintiffs and defendants, the denial rate exceeded 30% for defendants who prevailed against individuals and was about one-quarter for plaintiffs who prevailed against individuals. Judges protected individual plaintiffs against fee awards more than corporations. In cases lost by individual plaintiffs, fees were denied to successful defendants 29.9% of the time compared to denials in 18.0% of cases lost by corporate plaintiffs and 16.7% of cases lost by governmental plaintiffs. In cases lost by individual defendants, fees were denied to successful plaintiffs 22.7% of the time compared to 9.8% denials in cases lost by corporate defendants and 28.6% denials in cases lost by government defendants. In addition to varying by whether plaintiffs or defendants prevailed and by party status, the fee denial pattern varied by case category and judicial district. Theorizing about optimal fee rules should account for the variety of fee outcomes observed in practice.

Optimal Design of Two-Sided Market Platforms: An Empirical Case Study of Ebay

While much is known about optimal design of auctions within the context of a single item for sale, little is known about optimal design of large platform markets like eBay and auto auction houses that house large numbers of concurrent auctions. We attempt a macro-level empirical market design exercise by combining a unique dataset on tablet sales collected from eBay over the course of a year with methodologies developed by Bodoh-Creed (2011) and Backus and Lewis (2013). The former proposes a tractable approach to studying dynamic auction markets when the number of participants on both sides is sufficiently large. The model also delivers predictions on optimal fee schedule design -- specifically, in terms of listing fees and percentage charges for a sale -- for an auction house wishing to maximize profits by attracting the appropriate mix of buyers and sellers into the market. We begin by empirically investigating the key assumptions of the model which deliver (computational and empirical) tractability, and find that they are reasonable. We then estimate consumer demand, market supply, and the distributions of market entrants (this part still in progress). These figures are plugged into the Bodoh-Creed (2011) framework in order to compute optimal fee schedules and draw comparisons to actual fee schedules, as well as to make policy prescriptions.

Assessing the Durbin Amendment's Debit Card Interchange Fee Cap: An Application of the 'Tourist Test' to US Retailer Data

Payment cards have been a perennial source of debate among economists. That debate received additional fodder in 2010 with passage in the US of the Durbin Amendment, which targets debit card interchange fees. I assess the Durbin Amendment, testing the interchange fee cap it imposes against the “tourist test” proposed in the theoretical literature. I first calculate merchant incremental payment processing costs across payment instruments. While I find that debit card bank fees are higher than bank fees for other instruments, a comparison of other incremental costs softens that conclusion. With the cost estimates in hand, I then compare the interchange fee suggested by the “tourist test” with that set by the Durbin Amendment. The empirical assessment of the tourist test highlights the importance of the instrument whose costs are “avoided” – whether cash or check is used dramatically alters the test and indicates that an optimal one-size fits-all interchange fee cap will be difficult to achieve.

Demand Externalitites and Price Cap Regulation: Learning from a Two-Sided Market

This paper studies unintended consequences of price cap regulation in the presence of demand externalities in the context of payment cards. The recent U.S. debit card regulation was intended to lower merchant card acceptance costs by capping the maximum interchange fee. However, small-ticket merchants found their fees instead higher after the regulation. To address this puzzle, I construct a two-sided market model and show that card demand externalities across merchant sectors rationalize card networks’ pricing response. Based on the model, I study socially optimal card fees and an alternative cap regulation that may avoid the unintended consequence on small-ticket merchants.

Option Values and Penalty Fees in Concession Contracts: a Real Option Approach

Concession contracts are agreements granting the right to construct public works, operate and provide a service or a good. Although most contracts include penalties for delays, evidence from ongoing concession contracts shows that time overruns are widespread. Uncertainty over future payoffs generates investment timing flexibility that, if optimally exercised, can increase the contract value for the contractor firm. Therefore concessionaires may find it optimal to delay irreversible investments regardless the presence of penalty clauses. This investment timing flexibility should be taken into account when determining the penalty fees. Following the Real Option Approach we model the concessionaire’s optimal investment strategy and determine the optimal penalty fee that induces the concessionaire to comply with contract provisions on time. The higher the concessionaire’s option value to delay, the higher the optimal penalty to be set.

Optimal Taxes and User Fees in a Growing Economy with Excludable and Nonexcludable Public Inputs

This paper examines optimal policies on taxation and user fees in a model where government spending is productive, rival, and congestive, and can be further classified as excludable and nonexcludable public inputs. We propose functions for the services of excludable and nonexcludable public inputs received by the individual firm that allow the individual firm to choose its usage of public inputs. Under this setting, the user fee will influence the individual's incentive in determining his usage of public inputs. We find that an increase in the degree of congestion, under the first- and second-best optima, should be associated with an increase in the user fee to induce the efficient usage of public inputs. This conclusion contradicts recent studies but accords well with economic intuitions.

Water Externalities: Tragedy of the Common Canal

Laboratory experiments are used to investigate alternative solutions to the allocation problem of a common-pool resource with unidirectional flow. Focus is on the comparative economic efficiency of nonbinding communications, bilateral “Coasian” bargaining, allocation by auction, and allocation by exogenous usage fee. All solutions improve allocative efficiency, but communication and bilateral bargaining are not generally as effective as market allocations. An exogenously imposed optimal fee results in the greatest allocative efficiency, closely followed by an auction allocation that determines the usage fee endogenously.

THE ROLE OF FEES IN PATENT SYSTEMS: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

AbstractThis paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inelastic good. Studies in the latter group provide grounds for both low and high application (or pre‐grant) fees and renewal (or post‐grant) fees, depending on the structural context and policy objectives. The paper also presents new stylized facts on patent fees of 30 patent offices worldwide. It is shown that application fees are generally lower than renewal fees, and renewal fees increase more than proportionally with patent age.

Internalization, Clearing and Settlement, and Liquidity

Abstract: We study the relation between liquidity in financial markets and post-trading fees (i.e. clearing and settlement fees). The clearing and settlement agent (CSD) faces different marginal costs for different types of transactions. Costs are lower for an internalized transaction, i.e. when buyer and seller originate from the same broker. We study two fee structures that the CSD applies to cover its costs. The first is a uniform fee on all trades (internalized and non-internalized) such that the CSD breaks even on average. Traders then maximize trading rates and higher post-trading fees increase observed liquidity in the market. The second fee structure features a CSD breaking even by charging the internalized and non-internalized trades their respective marginal cost. In this case, traders face the following trade-off: address all possible counterparties at the expense of considerable post-trading fees, or enjoy lower post-trading fees by targeting own-broker counterparties only. This difference in post-trading fees drives traders'strategies and thus liquidity. Furthermore, across the two fee structures, we find that observed liquidity may differ from cum-fee liquidity (which encompasses the post-trading fees). With trade-specific fees, the cum-fee spread depends on the interacting counterparties. Next, regulators can improve welfare by imposing a particular fee structure. The optimal fee structure hinges on the magnitude of the post-trading costs. Noteworthy, a fee structure yielding higher social welfare may in fact reduce observed liquidity. Finally, we consider a number of extensions including market power for the CSD, anonymous trading and differences in broker size.

The existence of optimal copyright fee of indefinitely renewable copyright

Copyright fee is the new main policy variable to be set by copyright authority under indefinitely renewable copyright (IRC) proposed by Landes and Posner (2003). This study models and simulates IRC based on a market of information products with a monopolistically competitive creative industry. It shows that optimal copyright fee leading to maximal social welfare under such a copyright system can exist and that the availability of original information products decreases with copyright fee monotonically.

Ad-Valorem Platform Fees and Efficient Price Discrimination

This paper investigates a puzzle and possible policy concern: Why do platforms such as eBay and Visa that enable the trade of goods of different unobserved costs and values rely predominantly on linear ad-valorem fees, that is, fees that increase in proportion to the sale price of the trades that they enable? Under a broad class of demand functions, we show that a linear ad-valorem fee schedule enables a platform to maximize its profit as if it could actually observe the costs and values of the goods traded and set a different optimal fee for each good. Surprisingly, we find for this class of demands, allowing the platform to set ad-valorem fees (i.e. price discriminate) increases social welfare, both when the platform is regulated to recover costs and when the platform is unregulated.

Fee-Setting Mechanisms: On Optimal Pricing by Intermediaries and Indirect Taxation

Mechanisms according to which private intermediaries or governments charge transaction fees or indirect taxes are prevalent in practice. We consider a setup with multiple buyers and sellers and two-sided independent private information about valuations. We show that any weighted average of revenue and social welfare can be maximized through appropriately chosen transaction fees and that in increasingly thin markets such optimal fees converge to linear fees. Moreover, fees decrease with competition (or the weight on welfare) and the elasticity of supply but decrease with the elasticity of demand. Our theoretical predictions fit empirical observations in several industries with intermediaries.

Optimal Payment Cards' Fees: A Credit-Debit Comparison

Credit card rebates, which are paid to all credit card users regardless of borrowing, have grown substantially. This paper analyzes the optimal interchange fees in credit cards relative to the interchange fees in debit cards. Compared to debit cards, credit cards raise efficiency by allowing convenient borrowing, but also tax nonholders in order to finance the rebates paid to credit card users. A welfare enhancing and legally feasible policy is suggested, under which the regressive tax is cancelled while the efficiencies of credit cards are preserved. An outcome of the proposed policy is that credit cards are used for credit purposes only, while debit cards are used as a convenient payment instrument.

On the Optimality of Clickthrough Fees in Online Markets

We study optimal fee setting decisions by a monopoly online platform connecting advertisers with potential buyers in two environments: a simple model that captures stylised features of advertising on search engines, social networks and advertisement‐supported email; and a richer model that is more relevant for ‘directed’ search at price comparison sites. While the platform can choose to charge for both impressions and clicks, we show that the platform maximises profits by using clickthrough fees exclusively. Our model offers a rationale for the evolving practice of relying purely on clickthrough fees for revenues in many online advertising markets.

Balance billing: the patients' perspective

We study the effects of 'balance billing', i.e., allowing physicians to charge a fee from patients in addition to the fee paid by Medicare. First, we show that on pure efficiency grounds the optimal Medicare fee under balance billing is zero. An active Medicare policy thus can only be justified when distributional concerns are accounted for. Extending the analysis by Glazer and McGuire, we therefore analyze the optimal policy from the patients' point of view. We demonstrate that, from the patients' perspective, a positive fee can be superior under balance billing. Furthermore, patient welfare can be lower if balance billing is prohibited. In particular, this is the case if the administrative costs of Medicare are large. However, we cannot rule out that prohibiting balance billing may be superior. Finally, we show that payer fee discrimination increases patient welfare if Medicare's administrative costs are high or if Medicare's optimal fee under balance billing implies lower quality for fee-only patients.JEL-classification: I11, I18, H51

Pricing of payment cards, competition, and efficiency: a possible guide for SEPA

This paper analyzes equilibrium pricing of payment cards and welfare consequences of payment card competition. In particular, we model competition between debit and credit cards. The paper argues that optimal consumer and merchant fees must take safety, income uncertainty, default risk, and the merchant’s handling cost of cash into account. Market segmentation where debit and credit cards serve different merchant segments yields a preferred “payment mix”. However, when markets are segmented, payment card fees do not necessarily reach their socially efficient levels. Hence, thoughtful regulatory intervention regarding merchant fees may still be necessary to raise total surplus.

Internalization, Clearing and Settlement, and Liquidity

Abstract: We study the relation between liquidity in financial markets and post-trading fees (i.e. clearing and settlement fees). The clearing and settlement agent (CSD) faces different marginal costs for different types of transactions. Costs are lower for an internalized transaction, i.e. when buyer and seller originate from the same broker. We study two fee structures that the CSD applies to cover its costs. The first is a uniform fee on all trades (internalized and non-internalized) such that the CSD breaks even on average. Traders then maximize trading rates and higher post-trading fees increase observed liquidity in the market. The second fee structure features a CSD breaking even by charging the internalized and non-internalized trades their respective marginal cost. In this case, traders face the following trade-off: address all possible counterparties at the expense of considerable post-trading fees, or enjoy lower post-trading fees by targeting own-broker counterparties only. This difference in post-trading fees drives traders'strategies and thus liquidity. Furthermore, across the two fee structures, we find that observed liquidity may differ from cum-fee liquidity (which encompasses the post-trading fees). With trade-specific fees, the cum-fee spread depends on the interacting counterparties. Next, regulators can improve welfare by imposing a particular fee structure. The optimal fee structure hinges on the magnitude of the post-trading costs. Noteworthy, a fee structure yielding higher social welfare may in fact reduce observed liquidity. Finally, we consider a number of extensions including market power for the CSD, anonymous trading and differences in broker size.

The Role of Fees in Patent Systems: Theory and Evidence

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inelastic good. Studies in the latter group provide grounds for both low and high application (or pre‐grant) fees and renewal (or post‐grant) fees, depending on the structural context and policy objectives. The paper also presents new stylized facts on patent fees of 30 patent offices worldwide. It is shown that application fees are generally lower than renewal fees, and renewal fees increase more than proportionally with patent age.

Federal User Fees: Considering the Challenges and Advantages of the Development Process

There is a broad spectrum of components that substantially impact user fee development in the federal government. Observations of the fees discussed in this paper lead to the conclusion that a full understanding and consideration of each of these influences is necessary to successfully navigate the challenges and advantages of the fee development process. In conjunction with these considerations, practitioners are advised to adhere to the guidance of full and uniform costing methodologies to achieve optimal fee outcomes.

Performance-Based Fees and Moral Hazard: Aligning the Interests of Investors and Managers

In an ideal world, the financial interests of asset managers would be perfectly aligned with those of their investors via optimal incentive contracts. In the real world, this is often not the case. It is worthwhile investigating how to improve the current situation. In the theory of delegated management the optimal incentive fee is often linear, under stringent assumptions. In practice we see that a lot of the incentive contracts are convex rather than linear, with option characteristics. This typically introduces moral hazard on the side of the manager. This article examines a number of fee contracts in practice. We propose several improvements on the standard convex fee contracts to better align them with the interests of investors. The key is to make actual fee arrangements more linear.