In this paper we study the implications of service level guarantees (SLGs) in a model of oligopoly competition where providers compete to deliver a service to congestion-sensitive consumers. The SLG is a contractual obligation on the part of the service provider: regardless of how many customers...

This paper studies whether competition may induce firms abandoning deceptive pricing strategies aimed to profit from mistaken choices of consumers. The empirical analysis focuses on the pricing practices of early U.S. cellular firms, both under monopoly and duopoly. Foggy tariff options are...

I study how firms actually compete in nonlinear tariffs by analyzing whether the incumbent and entrant’s decisions to offer a given number of tariff options are interrelated. The goal is to shed some light on those dynamic and strategic aspects of tariff menus that are currently ignored by...

See http://www.netinst.org/NET_Working_Papers.html #46

Local telecommunications competition was an important goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We evaluate the consumer welfare effects of entry into residential local telephone service in New York State using household-level data from September 1999 to March 2003. We address the prevalence of...

In this paper, we evaluate the consumer welfare effects of entry into residential local phone service in New York State. Residential local phone service competition was an important goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We provide a detailed evaluation of its effects on consumer welfare using...

In Cournot's model of complements, the producers of A and B are both monopolists. This paper extends Cournot's model to allow for competition between complements on one side of the market. Consider two complements, A and B, where the A+B bundle is valuable only when purchased together. Good A is...

We examine the effects of mobile termination rate regulation in asymmetric oligopolies. We do this by extending existing models of asymmetric duopoly and symmetric oligopoly where consumer expectations about market shares are passive. We first calibrate product differentiation parameters using...

We analyze how termination charges affect retail prices when taking into account that receivers derive some utility from a call and when firms may charge consumers for receiving calls. A novel feature of our paper is that we consider passive self-fulfilling expectations and do not allow for...

We analyze firms' incentives to bundle and tie in the telecommunications industry. As a first step, we develop a discrete-choice demand model where firms sell products that may combine several services in bundles, and consumers choose assortments of different types of products available from...