Federal Reports

This paper provides a documented overview of P2P digital commerce. It includes an examination of specific market facilitators that may be familiar names (eBay, Craigslist, etsy, and others) as well as newer P2P service facilitators such as Airbnb, Getaround, and TaskRabbit. Common attributes of facilitators are discussed, along with how payment processing and various customer service issues may be handled. The paper also identifies gaps and problems in today’s marketplace and discusses Postal Service products and services that exist today or may be developed in the future to facilitate this market.

As a follow-up to its paper, A Primer on Postal Costing Issues, the OIG asked Professor Michael D. Bradley of the Economics Department of George Washington University, an expert in postal economics, to co-author a paper on pricing and short-run costs. This paper defines what is meant by short-run and long-run costs, explores the issues associated with using short-run costs when developing prices, outlines what information is needed to measure short-run costs, and develops a multistep algorithm for estimating short-run costs that is consistent with the existing Postal Service cost system.

e-Government has developed over the past 20 years in response to the changing needs of an increasingly digital society. Nevertheless, there are still lingering gaps in security, access, and ease of use that have hindered full, public adoption of existing e-Government services, as well as the development of new services. This paper discusses the opportunity for the Postal Service to establish a one-stop, shared, multi-channel service platform to help all levels of government fill these gaps, while addressing massive duplicative costs across agencies.