We study how the migration from an old to a new technology is affected by the access price to the old technology. We show that both the incumbent and the regulator are willing to set a very high access price to accelerate consumers' migration to the new technology. When the quality of the old...

We study optimal procurement in the presence of default risk. Contractors differ in the penalty they suffer in case of default, which is private information. If the loss to the procurer from non-completion is high relative to the cost of completion, the optimal mechanism is to assign the project...

This paper presents a model of competition between an incumbent and an entrant firm in telecommunications. The entrant has the option to enter the market with or without having preliminary invested in its own infrastructure; in case of facility based entry, the entrant has also the option to...

Open source is an example of user-centric innovation initiated by an individual or group of users to satisfy their specific needs; the more a software evolves towards a stable release able to address the requirements of its developers, the more successful the project. In this paper we use a...

Despite a general trend of lower charges for mobile calls, prices for international roaming calls have remained at levels surprisingly high. The apparent reluctance of European mobile network operators to lower roaming tariffs is generating many antitrust concerns. This paper discusses in a two...

The Italian highway industry has undergone an institutional and regulatory reform through the last decade, characterised by changes in ownership and a new price cap framework. To assess the effect of the reforms on firms’ performance, we use information on all the 20 Italian concessionaires...

We analyse the effects of different regulatory schemes (price cap and profit sharing) on a firm's investment of endogenous size. Using a real option approach in continuous time, we show that profit sharing does not delay a firm's start-up investment relative to a pure price cap scheme. Profit...

In this paper we analyse some distributional effects of the reforms of water and energy services in Italy. We first document the new regulation setting in these services, illustrating the dynamics of utility prices and of household expenditure in the period 1998-2005. We then propose a way to...

This paper studies the role of a policy of inducing in combating collusion within organizations, or in regulatory setups. In a mechanism-design problem involving a principal-supervisor-agent we show the role of endogenous selection of supervisory activity by the principal. One simple example is...