Suchergebnisse

4.5 ConclusionAppendix; 5 Access pricing rules for developing countries; 5.1 Introduction; 5.2 About the optimality of the market structure; 5.3 Structural separation and pricing of access to an independently owned infrastructure; Competitive usage; Examples; Market power of users; Additional problems with Ramsey pricing; Regulatory capture; Risk of expropriation; 5.4 One-way access with vertical integration; Competitive users; Example; Example; Case b; A noncompetitive entrant; 5.5 Two-way access; 5.6 Conclusion; 6 Universal service obligationsin LDCs; 6.1 Introduction; 6.2 The basic setting.

Theoretical models based on the assumption that telecommunications is a natural monopoly no longer reflect reality. As a result, policymakers often lack the guidance of economic theorists. Competition in Telecommunications is written in a style accessible to managers, consultants, government officials, and others. Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole analyse regulatory reform and the emergence of competition in network industries using the state-of-the-art theoretical tools of industrial organisation, political economy, and the economics of incentives. The book opens with background information for the reader who is unfamiliar with current issues in the telecommunications industry. The following sections focus on four central aspects of the recent deregulatory movement: the introduction of incentive regulation; one-way access (access given by a local network to the providers of complementary segments, such as long-distance or information services); the special nature of competition in an industry requiring two-way access (whereby competing networks depend on the mutual termination of calls); and universal service, in particular the two leading contenders for the competitively neutral provision of universal service: the use of engineering models to compute subsidies and the design of universal service auctions. The book concludes with a discussion of the Internet and regulatory institutions.

Incentives and Political Economy constructs a normative approach to constitutional design using recent developments in contract theory. It treats political economy as the study of the incentive problems created by the delegation of economic policy to self-interested politicians. Politicians are treated successively as informed supervisors or residual decision-makers. The optimal constitutional responses to the activities of interest groups are characterizedin various circumstances, as well as the optimal trade-off between flexibility of decision-making and discretion to pursue personal agendas when the incompleteness of the constitutional contract is recognized.