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Purpose - The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of industry specialization on the absorption and competitive pricing (or lack thereof) of audits of large Andersen clients (S&P 1500 companies) who switched to the remaining Big 4 international accounting firms in 2002 due to the demise of Arthur Andersen LLP (Andersen). Did the audit clients pay a premium or discount in audit fees to their new auditor who specialized in their industry?Design methodology approach - Ordinary least squares regression is used to test hypothesis of a positive association between industry specialization and audit fees charged to former Andersen's audit clients in 2002 following Andersen's demise. This study provides more control over size effects by design. Test variables are constructed based on national market share of audit fees within an industry. Logistic regression is used to examine the likelihood of choosing new auditor that is an industry specialist.Findings - Results support hypothesis, consistent with auditor differentiation explanation. Proportion of clients that had engaged an industry specialist in 2001 increased from 38 percent (84 clients) to 48 percent (105 clients) in 2002. No evidence of price-gouging in 2002 although clients who aligned with industry specialist paid a 23.2 percent premium in audit fees. Large clients lost bargaining power to negotiate lower fees. Findings are robust to the inclusion of additional alternative measures of company size.Research limitations implications - Results of logistic regression analysis imply that large audit clients with former auditor of tarnished reputation, long auditor tenure and high leverage are more likely to switch to an industry specialist to possibly signal audit financial reporting quality. Large sample companies may limit the ability to generalize findings to smaller companies.Practical implications - Mandatory audit firm rotation (currently being debated in the profession) will have costly effect on the pricing of Big 4 audits for companies wanting to signal audit and financial reporting quality to affect market perception, and large companies would likely lose their ability to bargain for lower audit fees.Originality value - The paper focus on the alignment of Andersen clients and impact on audit fees with Big 4 industry specialists resulting from the sudden increase in audit market concentration. Prior to Andersen's collapse, evidence on the association of audit fees premium and industry specialists was mixed, and little attention has been given to the influence of auditor industry specialization on both audit fees and alignment of former Andersen clients with a Big 4 specialist. This paper fills that void.

Multiple authorities have introduced an anti-price-gouging law to prevent sellers from raising prices higher than what is considered reasonable. Effectiveness of the law has been heatedly debated in various disciplines such as economics, ethics and politics. In this article, we investigate its effectiveness by developing a model that simulates a post-earthquake situation and apply the model to San Francisco, CA, USA. The model accounts for various competing forces, i.e. post-disaster increase in production cost and demands, assets damage, donation and hoarding. Thereby, it returns multiple decision metrics, i.e. unfulfilled needs in basic goods, repair periods and well-being loss caused by insufficient supplies and increased prices. The result shows that the optimal level of a price cap depends on a decision metric and local conditions. This indicates that the problem does not have a single optimal decision, but rather a compromise needs to be made between conflicting decision metrics. Generalising this observation, we propose a narrative numeric (NN) method as a new social discourse method. The objective of the NN method does not lie in concluding the most truthful argument, but rather in identifying a decision scenario that yields an agreeable compromise to (hopefully) all stakeholder groups.

The destruction of a regular black hole event horizon might provide us the possibility to access regions inside black hole event horizon. This paper investigates the possibility of overcharging a charged Taub-NUT regular black hole via the scattering of a charged field and the absorption of a charged particle. For the charged scalar field scattering, both the near-extremal and extremal charged Taub-NUT regular black holes cannot be overcharged. For the test charged particle absorption, the result shows that the event horizon of the extremal charged Taub-NUT regular black hole still exists while the event horizon of the near-extremal one can be destroyed. However, if the charge and energy cross the event horizon in a continuous path, the near-extremal charged Taub-NUT regular black hole might not be overcharged.

The pull-to-center effect is a systematically observed suboptimal behavior in newsvendor experiments. Various explanations have been forward for this phenomenon, some of which are based on structural properties of the task while others are based upon the inventory context of the problem. To help distinguish between these two types of explanations, we compare behavior in a newsvendor game to behavior in a new, mathematically isomorphic, price gouging game. Our laboratory experiments replicate the standard results for newsvendors and yield the equivalent pattern in the price gouging game. This suggests previously observed newsvendor behavior is driven by structural aspects of the task consistent with models like prospect theory and impulse balance rather than context specific explanations pertaining to inventory management.

[...]it has been estimated that bots make up a whopping 40% or so of all activity taking place on primary ticketing platforms.8 Likewise, they assuredly make up nearly all of the activity taking place on the secondary ticketing platforms. More vexing to fans was secondary ticket sites almost immediately inundated with the tickets they sought priced at gallingly high figures (some listed for a dizzying $30k).9 Though the stratospheric heights of such resale prices are uniquely off the charts as a result of Swift's singularly rabid fan base, they nonetheless help lay bare the ubiquitous price gouging that occurs for nearly every sought-after concert. [...]it is estimated that the global secondary ticket market will reach nearly $15bn dollars by 2025, most of which stands to be pocketed by scalpers.10 Tellingly, consumers aren't the only ones fed up with obscenely high secondary market ticket prices. Earlier this year, for instance, Bruce Springsteen explained that a portion of tickets to his highly anticipated 2023 U.S. tour hit the primary market at shockingly high prices (upwards of $5k per ticket in some cases), as \"...[t]he ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money,\" and Springsteen thus contending, \"...why shouldn't that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?\".11 Springsteen further expounded that his team were compelled to greenlight the exorbitant ticket prices as a result of \"...ticket buying [getting] very confusing, not just for the fans, but for the artists also...Those tickets...are going to go for that [higher] price somewhere anyway\".12 Whereas Springsteen doesn't exactly require sympathy, espousing these views shortly after his music catalog was purchased for a figure north of $500mm,13 the point he makes certainly has merit.

Vice President Kamala Harris has tried to strike a balance between Biden administration policies and her own proposals ahead of the 2024 election.

Despite long-standing criticisms, restrictions on price increases during emergencies remain widespread in the US. Criticisms most often cite the social costs of the shortages, but, we have found another, as yet unknown, cost: price-gouging regulations increased social contact during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, thirty-four US states declared emergencies, which activated their preexisting price-gouging regulations, and eight others introduced new regulation along with their emergency declarations. Because these states border eight others that also declared emergencies, but had no price-gouging regulations, this created a unique natural experiment. Exploiting the pandemic-induced variation in regulation, and cellphone mobility data, we find that price controls increased visits to, and social contact in, commercial spaces, presumably because the regulation-induced shortages forced consumers to visit more stores and come in contact with more people as they struggled to find what they needed. This, of course, undermines social distancing efforts.