This book brings together contributions of a distinguished panel of regulators as well as lawyers and economists from both academia and industry to present their insights on the digital convergence phenomenon in the telecommunications industry. The contributions cover a great deal of the...

The deregulation of the German energy sector changes transaction relations, trading processes and contract design. We report on the findings of a field research survey conductet in the deregulated German wholsale trading market between April and June 2000.

Recent changes in the German energy policy initiated a deregulation process from a monopolistic to a competitive market, fundamentally changing the market structure, transaction relationships and trading processes. While the mutual exchange of electric energy has been a business activity between...

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...

Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model....

With the advent of digital convergence, incumbent telephone and cable companies have begun to offer their services, such as voice telephony, Internet and TV in so-called triple play packages. While carefully recognizing the technological, legal and economic framework of the fixed-line...

Cost cap tariffs are pay-per-use tariffs for which costs cannot exceed a predefined cost limit. They were recently introduced to telecommunications markets, but were previously also applied in the insurance industry as deductibles or in the rental industry as day rates. This paper develops and...