Abstract
Litigants are generally charged for using court services. The charges involved are usually set to achieve a combination of efficiency, equity and funding goals. This paper presents a simple model, based on regulated monopoly pricing, to address the question of how these charges should be set. We find that fixed fees generally form part of the optimal charging package, despite concerns about their regressive nature. Per-unit fees will also be used though they may be set below cost; in this case, a trade-off emerges and the fixed fee is used to achieve funding goals. Our model is a useful one for developing extensions from the nonlinear pricing literature.
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JEL K40, L50
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Rickman, N., Tzavara, D. Optimal Pricing of Court Services. Eur J Law Econ 20, 31–41 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-005-1013-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-005-1013-1