Universal service obligations impose specific costs on the universal service provider. The measure of these costs and their financing have been studied along two complementary lines of reasoning: is the uni- versal service obligation sustainable? Who should bear its costs? Most often, a two-step...

The imposition of universal coverage and uniform pricing constraints, as part of the universal service obligations, makes the universal service provider less aggressive in the price game when it competes with a rm that does not cover the whole set of markets (Valletti et al., 2002). In this...