It has been a policy proposal since long to vertically separate transport and infrastructure in Germany's railway sector. The proposal received new momentum, when selling the transport subsidiaries of Deutsche Bahn AG to the public was discussed in 2008/2009. While vertical separation is...

What is a good balance between competition and coordination in network industries? Network unbundling aims to promote competition, but this has to be balanced against the downside of unbundling: firm-internal coordination falls away and must be replaced by external market mechanisms. This is a...

This paper analyses the incentives to upgrade input quality in vertically related (network) industries. Upstream investments have a biased effect on the downstream companies and lead to vertical product differentiation. Different vertical structures such as vertical integration, ownership and...

This paper studies access pricing under three regimes: regulated access (VSR), negotiated access with discriminatory pricing (VSD) and negotiated access with non-discriminatory pricing (VSN). We compare each regime along three metrics: network quality, consumer surplus, and social welfare. To do...

The setting of user prices for enterprises with large fixed costs and marginal costs below average costs - "natural monopolies" - raises important policy questions regarding both efficiency and equity. It has become well accepted among economists that, in a variety of settings, welfare may be...

Although many economic and business historians have examined how American railroads colluded to raise rates or limit service, they have paid less attention to the many ways railroads cooperated to exchange cars and freight between companies and build needed interconnections. This article...

This paper explores the access charge for the use of the Italian rail infrastructure. Access problems arise when the provision of a complete service to end users requires the combination of two or more inputs, one of which is non-competitive (OECD, 2004). It is a well-known fact that excessive...

We investigate cooperative investment in a new infrastructure and how it interacts with access obligations and demand uncertainty. Co-investment only increases total coverage if service differentiation and/or cost savings from joint investment, in particular due to high uncertainty, are high....

Naturally monopolistic network industries are subject to regulation of access to market and charging in order to achieve optimal use of infrastructure and avoid the abuse of monopoly power. Relatively little is known what results does such regulation generate and whether it achieves objectives....

This paper investigates the economic rationale in defining an essential facility also considering the evolution of competition policy decisions in US and EU. In particular, we propose a test to distinguish between an abusive refusal to deal by a dominant firm and the application of the essential...