Price caps are a popular form of monopoly price regulation. One of its disadvantages is the perverse incentives that regulated firms might have to scamp on cost reducing effort during the last years before a price review. In order to avoid this problem a “rolling cap†contract was...

I study a regulatory process in which both the regulator and the regulated firm propose prices that in case of disagreement are settled through final-offer arbitration – a practice currently used in Chile for setting prices in the water sector. Rather than submitting a single offer, each...

One result of the deregulation of utilities in New Zealand has been the bypass of existing networks. We investigate two cases of bypass in the distribution of natural gas, and compare the welfare properties of regulation vs.\ the `laissez-faire' equilibrium. We demonstrate that installing a...

This paper shows how rules restricting common ownership of multiple media outlets affect both the magnitude and diversity of the ideological content of programming. While in most industries the assumption that firms maximize profits is quite reasonable, we assume that media owners derive utility...

The access pricing problem emerges when a vertically integrated firm (the incumbent) provides an essential service in the upstream market, to an entrant. Both firms produce a final service and compete in the downstream market. The standard treatment of this problem has been to add the access...

We analyse vertical integration when there is upstream competition and compare outcomes to the case where upstream assets are owned by a single agent (i.e., upstream monopoly). In so doing, we make two contributions to the modelling of strategic vertical integration. First, we base industry...

This paper provides a framework that aims at distinguishing the technological economies of vertical integration from the vertical economies resulting from market imperfections. To illustrate our analyze, we use consistent panel data econometric methods to estimate cost functions on a sample of...

This paper reverses the standard order between input supply negotiations and downstream competition and assumes that competition for orders takes place prior to procurement of inputs in a vertical chain. In an environment where procurement negotiations involve no private information and no...

We study how firm boundaries are affected by the reduction in search costs when business-to-business electronic markets are adopted. Our paper analyzes a multi-tier industry in which upstream parts suppliers incur procurement search costs, and downstream manufacturers incur incentive contracting...

This paper studies the effects of product market competition on vertical integration. In a duopoly setting, each retailer is associated with a manufacturer who must decide how to allocate property rights over the retail asset. Choosing delegation of property rights over vertical integration...