Question

Suppose a natural gas distribution company has capital investments of $8 million and a capital cost r of 10%. The firm’s operating, billing, and maintenance costs are $200,000. The firm buys natural gas at the city gate price of $5/MCF to sell to its customers. The firm distributes gas to those customers through its existing pipeline network at close to zero marginal cost.

The firm faces the following (inverse) demand by customer type (recall that these are average demand per customer, so at any given price you have to multiply quantity by the number of customers to get total quantity demanded in that customer group):

Residential (10,000 customers): P = 50 − 5*q

Commercial (1,000 customers): P = 50 − q

Industrial (100 customers): P = 20 − 1/100 * q

Propose a two-part tariff that varies across the customer types and make an economic argument in support of your proposal.

Answer 1

Now we know the two part tariff . It is mainly valid for monopolistic market.