Jonathan R. Peters

Evidence of Managerial Response to the Level of Consumer Complicity, Pirate Activity, and Host Country Enforcement of Counterfeit Goods: An Exploratory Study

The major findings of this exploratory research are that a firm’s level of market commitment through future investments will increase in strategically important markets, regardless of high consumer complicity to purchase fake goods; that companies will employ additional anti‐counterfeiting tactics in markets with a high level of pirates and a high degree of enforcement of its intellectual property rights; and that companies employ a standardized approach of anti‐counterfeiting tactics targeted at consumers.

Results Not Guaranteed: A Tale of Road Pricing in New York and London

Pricing of roads has been a mantra in transportation economics for many decades now. The basic economic reasoning is sound: optimal consumption of a road is set where price=marginal cost (P=MC) and the lack of a price or the presence of underpricing will lead to economically inefficient levels of congestion. However, the authors here argue that to be effective in managing congestion, imposition of a road price is only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for obtaining an optimal level of road usage. Pricing regimes in London and New York are compared and contrasted to examine this argument. In London road pricing has been imposed as part of an overall urban congestion management scheme that takes preexisting traffic flows and alternative modes of transport into account. This effort has generally been deemed to be successfulin obtaining its objective of reduced automobile traffic on constrained urban roads. In New York pricing has been imposed on a piecemeal basis, without overall system performance goals in mind. The result there has been high tolls but growing congestion, and now a London-style cordon pricing scheme has been proposed. In general the authors conclude that road pricing is economically sensible in generic terms but that it may often be detrimental, or at least inefficient, in many of its particular manifestations. To reduce congestion, pricing must be specifically designed to do so taking into account local conditions and institutions.

Disaggregate Multimodal Travel Demand Modeling Based on Road Pricing and Access to Transit

In this paper, the conventional disaggregate travel demand model, a probability model for the modeling of multiple modes, generally called random utility maximization (RUM), is expanded to a model of count of mode choice. The extended travel demand model is derived from general economic theory—maximizing instantaneous utility on the time horizon, subject to a budget constraint—and can capture the dynamic behavior of countable travel demand. Because the model is for countable dependent variables, it has a more realistic set of assumptions to explain travel demand than the RUM model. An empirical test of the theoretical model using a toll facility user survey in the New York City area was performed. The results showed that the theoretical model explained more than 50% of the trip frequency behavior observed in New York City toll facility users. Travel demand for toll facility users increased with respect to household employment, household vehicle count, and employer payment of tolls and decreased in terms of travel time, road pricing, travel distance, and mass transit access.

Measuring Toll Burdens: Applying Lorenz Curves to a Detailed Data Set of Users of Metropolitan Transportation Administration Bridges in New York City

This paper uses a unique survey data set of toll revenue collection on New York City bridges administered by the Metropolitan Transportation Authoritys Bridges and Tunnels (MTA Bridges and Tunnels). This data set, which contains detailed information on road user income and location, is analyzed to assess distributional equity of burden across road users of various toll facilities (both value-priced and fixed-rate tolls) in the New York-New Jersey region. The distributional impact is summarized with the use of Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients, a standard economic measure with these and other measures, the authors develop empirical estimates of the social equity conditions on the existing priced facilities. The authors find that burdens are least equitable on facilities where there are few alternative routes and more equitable on those with more alternatives but that, in general, users of MTA Bridges and Tunnels facilities have higher income than the general population surrounding those facilities.

Seasonal Variation in the Environmental Effects of Toll Collection. Evidence from the Garden State Parkway

The toll collection process creates pollution beyond what would be produced by an automobile transiting at normal highway speeds. Research shows that electronic toll collection (ETC) produces less pollution than manual toll collection. However, many toll collection systems are subject to seasonal fluctuations in demand. As a result, the percentage of road users taking advantage of ETC changes throughout the year. Any decrease in the ETC participation rate will increase the amount of pollution created. This article quantifies the pollution effects of this seasonality. The authors use the Garden State Parkway (GSP) in New Jersey as a case study. Because of seasonal changes in ETC participation rates, they find that the quantity of pollution created by toll collection on the GSP increases significantly during the summer months. Unfortunately for the state of New Jersey, that is the time of year when it is historically in noncompliance with the Clean Air Act.

Who Should Pay for Local Streets? Who Does? Survey of New Jersey Municipalities

Many trips, if not most, begin and end on local roads. Thus, there is a system aspect to such roads in the sense that local streets can have spillover benefits and costs for larger trips that use the total road network. Yet curbs and sidewalks and local streets are typically almost entirely provided locally in the United States. There are historical and institutional reasons for this fact and great variation of practice across jurisdictions. But two key planning and policy questions arise. Who pays for sidewalks and local streets? And who should pay? To find some empirical answers to those questions, this paper reports on a 2015 New Jersey Society of Municipal Engineers survey, developed by one of the authors, to collect data on the prevalence of curb and sidewalk installations on municipal streets. The survey explored the management and operational practices that municipal governments use to maintain their local transportation infrastructure. The results indicate that local streets in New Jersey are heavily funded and managed by localities with little focus on any broader network effects that might accrue outside those localities. Analysis of the data suggests a need of more than

For Whom the Consumer Price Index Tolls: Reporting of Road Pricing in the Consumer Expenditure Survey

1.2 billion annually in New Jersey, against a projected state and federal funding of roughly

A bridge too far? the Staten Island/Hudson-Bergen light rail missed connection

100 million annually, a gap in funding that suggests the need to establish a long-term funding mechanism for local streets, curbs, and sidewalks.

An Interindustry Analysis of Economic Value Added as a Proxy for Market Value Added

User fees have long been seen as an efficient financing mechanism because beneficiaries of services pay for the benefits received. This point of view is especially applicable to public services with commercial aspects and in situations for which links between consumption and price are relatively easy to make. However, road pricing, such as tolls, can be very high and important to local price levels. This paper examines the way in which expenditures on tolls are tracked and measured in the United States through the consumer expenditure survey (CES) run by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The paper describes the CES and its methods, both generally and for tolls and road charges specifically, and compares those with estimates of U.S. tolls from other sources and from some micro-data the authors have compiled for the New York metropolitan area. The results suggest that the current CES underestimates consumer toll expenditures. Because the CES is a key background input into the consumer price index, the paper argues that flow-on effects continue through to measurement of U.S. inflation and gross domestic product as well.

Preserving intellectual property rights: Managerial insight into the escalating counterfeit market quandary

Few urban areas are as economically and socially integrated as the New York City borough of Staten Island and the New Jersey communities of Bayonne and Jersey City just across the Hudson River. These strong links are illustrated by travel patterns across a north-south corridor from Staten Island up into Bayonne. Yet transit planning and development policy and implementation has been radically different in the two areas, with slow and, right now, stunted development of transit in Staten Island, New York City, as contrasted with the muscular and systematic approach taken in Bayonne and Jersey City, in New Jersey. This paper analyzes the links between the two areas, describes the different transit policies taken there, assesses the outcomes of these different policies and offers suggestions for ways in which transit and development links could be improved, in particular an extension of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail (HBLR) into Staten Island. The paper also discusses the interim use of buses as a pre-development phase for LRT or BRT, focusing on the relatively new S89 route in Staten Island that now links directly to the HBLR and which immediately attracted strong ridership.