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Purpose One academic medical center’s efforts to move toward compliance with requirements of United States Pharmacopeia ( USP ) chapter 800 through a multidepartmental collaborative initiative are described. Summary Requirements of USP general chapter 800 (enforceable as of December 2019) address the handling of hazardous drugs (HDs) throughout the entire operational and clinical cycle, from receiving to compounding, administration, and waste disposal. Due to the variety of pharmacy operational areas in which HDs are encountered at University of North Carolina Medical Center (UNCMC), multiple pharmacy managers oversee the safe handling of HDs. To determine baseline compliance with USP chapter 800 requirements, a common assessment tool was developed to ensure a standardized approach to compliance assessment in all areas. An interdepartmental workgroup was created to ensure institutionwide support for a collaborative compliance initiative, a uniform understanding of compliance risks, and robust action planning. UNCMC has taken a number of steps toward USP chapter compliance in areas such as engineering controls, environmental quality and controls, use of personal protective equipment, hazard communication programs, personnel training, spill control, and medical surveillance. Conclusion Achieving USP chapter 800 compliance presented several operational, clinical, and financial challenges for the medical center, requiring months of preparation and diligence by the hospital leadership. The pharmacy department–led compliance collaborative allowed departments to proactively align while implementing practice and quality standards to foster safety for patients, workers, and the environment.

We extend Train (2015) to explicitly allow the product attributes and price to differ conditional on whether a firm acts to induce a difference between anticipated and experienced attributes. This allows the firm to change price for a good depending on the context. Unlike in the base model, here, a consumer that chooses some alternative j∗ independent of firm practices can still be injured relative to the but for world because of a price increase that does not change the choice probabilities. We provide some examples of how various conditions on price changes between the observed and but-for states effects the welfare calculation.

Multi-level marketing (MLM) presents a challenging informational environment for participants. MLMs offer participants the right to sell a product with the recursive right to recruit new participants. In addition to typical business opportunity challenges of assessing retail demand, individuals face challenges in trying to understand the recruitment opportunity. To illuminate the difference between a potentially beneficial MLM and a harmful one - typically referred to as a pyramid - we model the pricing decisions of an MLM firm. We take beliefs about the value of an associated product and about the probability of recruitment as given, but potentially wrong. We find that participant optimism about the offer creates expected loss from demand - as is usual for deceptively marketed business opportunities - but also creates an opportunity for the firm to induce a transfer scheme, and associated losses related to that scheme, independent of consumer demand for any product.

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This note provides an economic approach to consumer privacy and data security based on the extensive economic literature on how information flows, and is used, in the marketplace. We apply that approach to consumer protection in privacy and data security, as a step toward the ultimate goal of facilitating well-grounded cost-benefit analysis of future policy and law enforcement action in this area. Over the past two decades, the FTC has led the governmental effort to protect the integrity of consumer privacy choices in the market. This note attempts to describe the economic basis for that work in one coherent piece. Given the scope of the topic, this note is only a first step in providing clarity on the economic perspective on consumer protection in this area. We hope the note will improve future actions in privacy and data security. As a matter of scope, we do not discuss the potential implications of privacy and data security for antitrust or competition. Nor do we discuss data access and data use beyond domestic commerce. We also do not claim to provide the economics of privacy and data security. Other authors have provided the basic research and surveys that this work builds on. Other perspectives might usefully focus on how property rights in information influence the creation and flow of information through the market, or how structuring privacy as a human right would change markets and influence social welfare. Such other perspectives might also facilitate cost-benefit analyses of privacy and data security policy and enforcement. In comparison, we articulate privacy and data security issues primarily in information economic terms. In particular, we highlight the distinction between process and outcome: while an individual’s privacy outcome is the realized restriction on the flow and use of information, the process that leads to that outcome depends on many parties. The decisions that each of those parties make about how that information flows, and the control that each party exercises over the flow of the individual’s information, all contribute to the privacy outcome. The distinction between process and outcome is important. This is in part because while consumers may prefer more or less privacy – the outcome – given a particular situation, they all want themselves, and by extension the sellers they interact with, to have a certain amount of control over the flow. In line with other areas of market intervention, a focus on the process ensures that consumers and sellers have the tools to exercise appropriate control on the process. In turn, this should help bolster a healthy market to facilitate and honor their choice of privacy. This approach is in contrast to a more paternalistic approach that attempts to determine consumer preferences on privacy outcomes and directly impose that determination on the market. Next, we articulate how consumer-to-seller information flows are more complicated in practice than the typical seller-to-consumer information flows that typically concern the FTC in other areas, such as advertising enforcement. In particular, information flows generated by a transaction can persist over time and create effects outside of that initial transaction. These persistent effects often complicate market incentives. Because the persistence of information can cause commitment problems, and tends to exacerbate information asymmetry and externality, it is more starkly important for policy makers to foster a healthy information environment about privacy outcomes and processes, to encourage industry to develop standards and mechanisms that support a healthy information market, and to police that market if necessary. In this document, we identify some market mechanisms that have arisen to address potential market failures, and when interventions in consumer protection are most likely justified. In light of these potential market failures, we then list potential policy tools and discuss their pros and cons.

We analyze an oligopolistic competition with differentiated products and qualities. The quality of a product is not known to consumers. Each firm can make an imperfect disclosure of its product quality before engaging in price-signaling competition. There are two regimes for separating equilibrium in our model depending on the parameters. Our analysis reveals that, in one of the separating regimes, price signaling leads to intense price competition between the firms under which not only the high-quality firm but also the low-quality firm chooses to disclose its product quality to soften the price competition. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Truth-telling regulations in market language are commonly understood to be necessary to allow credible information transmission by sellers. These requirements turn natural language into a set of signals that can be used to differentiate products. But while these regulations solve the information problem, they do not necessarily solve an underlying market failure of allocation of language resources. It is this failure in allocation that regulators use to justify explicit rules allowing, requiring, or banning certain uses of market language. Given this justification, the obvious issue is what criteria should be used to impose, or not, specific language requirements. This paper uses a rich model of language to illustrate the justification for regulating language and develops a rough set of criteria for applying language regulations.

In this article, we draw an analogy between the regulation of market language (including official definitions of `organic', `ice cream', and `diamond') and the regulation of the social and legal label `marriage'. Many of the issues raised in the debate over same-sex marriage are less about access to material benefits than about the social and cultural meaning of `marriage'. After reviewing the issues in this debate, we present an analysis of the regulation of language in the marketplace. We discuss the considerations that shape how the state regulates language in the marketplace, if it regulates it at all. Using this framework to analyze the issue of same-sex marriage allows us to identify the costs and benefits of different proposals with regard to marriage, and allows us to distinguish issues that are often conflated. Contrary to its opponents, we argue that making marriage available to same-sex couples does not violate the meaning of `marriage' or destroy marriage, because such a change is similar to many other changes in which words and labels are extended to include new `goods'. This alters the meaning, but does not destroy it, and it does not preclude the possibility of further linguistic innovation to maintain a distinction. Contrary to proponents of same-sex marriage, however, we argue that extending marriage to same-sex couples is not cost-free. There are costs and benefits of any policy on this issue — costs and benefits related to information and status, as well as material resources. Hence, while we agree with advocates of same-sex marriage, we argue that their position involves trade-offs and costs that they sometimes fail to recognize.

Stivers [Stivers, Andrew E., 2003. Quality standards with exogenously distributed quality. Economics Letters 80 (1) 130–136.] finds the optimal segmentation of quality when the distribution of quality is exogenous. This paper characterizes the optimal number of standards. As the cost of information falls, both the number of standards and the market coverage of the firm rise.

Analysis of the welfare effect of advertising depends critically upon the effect of advertising on market prices. In many circumstances, advertising that leads to higher (lower) market prices is overproduced (underproduced) from society’s perspective. This paper demonstrates that these predictions may not hold when consumer search costs are important. A model is developed to show how advertising affects equilibrium prices, search costs, and social welfare in monopoly and imperfectly competitive markets. When informative advertising leads to a sufficient reduction in consumer search costs, both consumer and producer welfare may increase even though market prices rise. This conclusion has important implications for policy analysts, because it demonstrates that one cannot test the welfare effect of advertising by determining the impact of advertising on market prices alone. One must investigate the impact of advertising on both market prices and search costs to fully understand the welfare effect of advertising.

This paper finds optimal quality standards under the assumptions of an exogenous quality distribution and costly information. A monopolist sets standards such that each standard is equal to the expected quality between the next highest and next lowest standard.

This paper examines incentives for information disclosure in a oligopolistic market when buyers are unsure of the existence of that information. Previous empirical and theoretical work has shown that mandatory disclosure laws can be binding when buyers do not know whether the information exists. This paper shows that the information unraveling result is strengthened by competition not only because a market with more firms is increasingly likely to have at least one firm with quality high enough to want to disclose it (thus starting the information unraveling result) but also because firms reveal information that makes themselves look bad if they can make their competitors look worse. This results in prisoner's dilemma style incentives to reveal that ensures full disclosure as the number of firms goes to infinity.