IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/rje/bellje/v4y1973ispringp118-140.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Pricing Decisions of Regulated Firms: A Behavioral Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Paul L. Joskow

Abstract

Once the prices for utility service are set by state regulatory authorities, they remain at fixed levels until they are officially increased or decreased by the regulatory agency. A utility company is not free to vary the prices of its service independently. This paper presents the results of an attempt to specify and estimate a behavioral model of the pricing decisions of regulated firms. The "threshold" behavior of regulated firms with regard to their decisions to seek general price increases from state regulatory authorities and their decisions to file "voluntary" price decreases is discussed, and two decision equations are specified and then estimated for regulated electric utilities in New York State. The decision to file for a price increase is shown to depend on the growth rate of earnings per share achieved by the firm in the current and previous year, on the level of interest coverage realized in the current year, and on a variable which measures prior expectations of success in the hearing room. The decision to file a voluntary price decrease is shown to depend on the growth rate in earnings per share and a variable which measures the expectations of "forced" regulation.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul L. Joskow, 1973. "Pricing Decisions of Regulated Firms: A Behavioral Approach," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 4(1), pages 118-140, Spring.
    • Handle: RePEc:rje:bellje:v:4:y:1973:i:spring:p:118-140
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0005-8556%28197321%294%3A1%3C118%3APDORFA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2&origin=repec
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rje:bellje:v:4:y:1973:i:spring:p:118-140. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.rje.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.