Institutional barriers to entry were removed to a considerable extent in 1996 in the Dutch retail sector. Three years before that the regulator decided to not take legal actions anymore against entrants violating institutional requirements. In the current analysis we investigate the effects of...

Das vorliegende Papier beschreibt und analysiert die erfolgte Liberalisierung des Telekom-munikationssektors in Deutschland. Zu diesem Zweck werden die erfolgten Liberalisierungs-maßnahmen beschrieben und ihre Auswirkungen auf die verschiedenen Märkte analysiert. Während der Wettbewerb in den...

In the European Union, energy markets are increasingly being liberalized. A case in point is the European natural gas industry. The general expectation is that more competition will lead to lower prices and higher volumes, and hence higher welfare. This paper indicates that this might not happen...

This paper develops a model of successive oligopolies with endogenous market entry, allowing for varying degrees of product differentiation and entry costs in both markets. Our analysis shows that the downstream conditions dominate the overall profitability of the two-tier structure while the...