Supporting Postal Services Through Location-Based Fees

Timothy Brennan

A chapter in Postal Strategies, 2023, pp 239-252 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In Brennan (The postal and delivery contribution in hard times. Springer, New York, 2022), I found that the US Postal Rate Commission’s (PRC) preferred method for adjusting postage for falling demand implied that the cost of postal service is a simple linear function of volume and the number of locations. Among the implications of this result is that adjusting postage for changes in volumes would be unnecessary. Based on this result, US postal data indicates a fee of about $100 per year per location. However, the marginal cost per location likely differs between urban and rural areas, home delivery and neighborhood boxes and business and residential service. Location costs would have to be refined considerably before United States Postal Service (USPS) or any other postal operator could adopt location fees to address volume reductions. These difficulties suggest that the PRC’s method of adjusting postage rates based on volumes per location needs to be reconsidered.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:topchp:978-3-031-25362-1_18

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031253621

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-25362-1_18

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().