The need for an access holiday to spur investment arises from the ex ante inability of regulators to commit to access prices that adequately reward investors for all relevant risks. A well designed access holiday can partially overcome the problem of regulatory commitment, and represents a...

A socially optimal structure of application and renewal fees for patents would encourage the maximal number of applications while reducing effective patent length. We find, however, that when patent offices are required to be self-funding, resource constraints can distort this fee structure....

Recent concern has arisen with regard to the potential for introducing competition in previously protected sectors as customer switching costs may make entry (and hence, aggressive price competition) difficult to achieve. An excellent example of this arises telecommunications deregulation with...

There has been considerable public debate over the effect of interchange fees on credit card transactions. Regulators in Australia and Europe have argued that these fees can be set by banks to have an anticompetitive effect. In the US, it has been argued that these fees, together with a rule...

This chapter surveys the economics literature on wireless communications. Wireless communications and the economic goods and services that utilise it have some special characteristics that have motivated specialised studies. First, wireless communications relies on a scarce resource rights for...

This paper develops a model to analyse the Australian health insurance system when individuals differ in their health risk and this risk is private information. The Australian system involves mixed public and private health insurance with private insurance both duplicating and supplementing...

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) moved to reform credit card associations by increasing entry, allowing merchants to surcharge for card payments and regulating the interchange fee. We develop a simple model of payment systems designed to analyse the impact of these reforms. We build on the...