There is a public perception that electricity liberalisation is the major cause of recent electricity blackouts. This is reflected in the newspaper reporting of blackouts. By contrast, it was not listed as a cause in any official investigation reports. In this paper, we examine the common causes...

In recent years, a number of empirical studies and energy regulators have applied benchmarking techniques to measure the efficiency and performance of network utilities. An important issue has been the extent to which such results are influenced by contextual factors. Among these, weather...

Efficiency analysis of electricity distribution networks is often limited to technical or cost efficiency measures. However, some important non-tradable aspects of their service such as quality of service and network energy losses are generally not part of the analysis. A regulatory concern is...

In the Internet information packets are routed through many vertically related hops. However these network hierarchies are not fixed. Two providers can be simultaneously vertically related in a routing process as supplier and retailer, while horizontally competing in another. We study pricing...

We consider different patterns of infinite technological adoption choices by firms in a Bertran duopoly. Every period, technological progress provides a sequence of cost reducing innovations. The equilibrium concept is Markov Perfect Equilibrium. We analyse conditions for which equilibrium...

Network hierarchies in the Internet are often not fixed: two providers can be simultaneously input supplier and retailer in a routing process, while being horizontally competing in another. We introduce a stylised network model capturing these aspects of the Internet to study the impact of...

Recent industry studies found the Internet backbone industry competitive. In our paper we explore a novel route to monitor for market power using prices and quality data from Band-X. First we test the hypothesis that Europe is a connectivity market on its own, unchallenged by the US and then, by...

The paper models the evolution of regional asymmetries, and the associated intra-distribution mobility, as the outcome of adoption decisions taken by firms at different locations. The following equilibria are characterised: Persistent asymmetry where nobody adopts, Leapfrogging where low-quality...