Gabriel Kolko, a left-leaning historian, wrote his Ph.D. thesis to identify the forces that brought railroads under regulation at the end of the 19th century. It was the railroad barons themselves who eventually sought regulation (and thereby brought it about). Kolko recounts the customer...

The paper studies the regulatory design in an industry where the regulated downstream provider of services to final consumers purchases the necessary inputs from an upstream supplier. The model is closely inspired by the UK regulatory mechanism for the railway network. Its philosophy is one of...