Journal Article Economics of Depletable Resources and Price Ceiling Induced Bias Get access Dwight R. Lee Dwight R. Lee Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 47, Issue 5, October 1980, Pages 999–1002, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296929 Published: 01 October 1980 Article history Received: 01 May 1979 Accepted: 01 April 1980 Published: 01 October 1980

Five papers explore the effects of regulation, the causes and consequences of its dramatic growth in the United States, and the prospects for deregulation. Specific topics include the impact of public utilities and transportation regulation on prices, output, investment, health and safety regulation, and environmental regulation; the indirect effects of regulation on competition (e.g., on the cost of new capacity and competitive positions of firms); the causes and consequences of major shifts in business-government relationships; conceptual and practical problems in measuring the costs of regulation; and an analysis of the legislative deregulation of the airline industry, with projections for deregulation in the railroad and trucking industries.

The purpose here is to make explicit the sense in which two dynamic processes, due to Malinvaud and others (whose solutions determine an efficient allocation for a given economy), are related to the gradient projection method known in the nonlinear optimization literature. The connections we establish derive from simple observations on first order characterizations of efficient allocations; they also lead to the formulation of another process, that applies to a classical welfare maximization problem; finally, they provide a common basis for an a priori justification of each of the three processes involved, which supplements the intrinsic properties that they can be shown to have.