Goals of modeling a price mechanism in the housing and communal services
The article covers the problems concerning the financial policy in the housing sector and formation of an optimal mechanism of tariffs. To form the optimal financial policy in the above sector, it is necessary to address some problematic issues. The first and important contradiction in the approaches to price setting for housing and communal services is the contradiction between consumers - households and producers and distributors of services - public utilities. This is a classic market contradiction between a seller and buyer: the seller wants to sell the product as expensive as possible, and the buyer - to buy much cheaper. The study offers the conclusions which can be used for providing solution of problems including tariff policy formulation. Firstly, the system of utility relationships involves three main players: the population (consumer of public utilities), utility companies (manufacturer and seller of public utilities) and state (regulator of public utilities). Their interests and goals often do not coincide and sometimes even contradict each other. Therefore, the ideology of price setting in the housing and communal services should be based on the principle of balance of interests, including Pareto optimality. Secondly, given the fact that the utilities company appears in the role of a producer and seller of public utilities, there are 5 available conflict situations (instead of 3 as offered in the majority of researches) the settling of which has influence on the principles of tariffs setting.