Tariff

Summary

A tariff is a tax imposed by the government of a country or by a supranational union on imports or exports of goods. Besides being a source of revenue for the government, import duties can also be a form of regulation of foreign trade and policy that taxes foreign products to encourage or safeguard domestic industry. Protective tariffs are among the most widely used instruments of protectionism, along with import quotas and export quotas and other non-tariff barriers to trade. Tariffs can be fixed (a constant sum per unit of imported goods or a percentage of the price) or variable (the amount varies according to the price). Taxing imports means people are less likely to buy them as they become more expensive. The intention is that they buy local products instead, boosting their country's economy. Tariffs therefore provide an incentive to develop production and replace imports with domestic products. Tariffs are meant to reduce pressure from foreign competition and reduce the trade d

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff

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Smart Products for Sharing

Thomas Alois Weber

Sharing markets create mutual insurance for consumers who are unsure about their future needs for goods, thus rendering products more valuable both before and after the purchase. By embedding intelligence in their products, enabling them to sense, monitor, and authorize transfers between users, firms can economically participate in the collaborative consumption of their goods after they have been sold. Building on a dynamic model with overlapping generations of heterogeneous agents, we determine a firm's jointly optimal product price and sharing tariff. The active use of product intelligence as a gatekeeper for collaborative consumption can narrow the gap between the retail and the equilibrium price in the sharing market. Because of its tendency to decrease the demand for ownership, the use of smart products with a positive sharing tariff does not always maximize the firm's overall expected profits. A positive sharing tariff tends to be profitable with relatively high unit production cost and impatient consumers.

2017

In the presence of a peer-to-peer economy, the option of sharing an item is valuable for consumers. By retaining control over the shareability of its products a monopolist can set a sharing tariff in conjunction with the purchase price of the product, in order to extract state-contingent surplus from consumers: the shareability rent. Using an overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous consumers, we determine the jointly optimal retail price and sharing tariff for durable products, and quantify the value for the control of shareability, thus defining the firm's financial boundary conditions for an investment in sharing-control technologies.

IEEE Computer Society, Washington2017

Nonlinear Pricing of Shareable Products

Thomas Alois Weber

We consider a durable-goods monopolist who is able to control the collaborative consumption of its goods on an aftermarket by a sharing tariff. Consumers are heterogeneous with respect to their respective need propensities in each period. We show that the firm may be able to extract this private information by offering a nonlinear pricing scheme, which amounts to a menu of options that distinguish themselves by different combinations of retail price and sharing tariff, whereby the latter is charged to owners at the point of sharing their item with a nonowner on the sharing market. The solution, which is obtained using optimal control theory, critically depends on the product's durability.

2020