The "local cap" uses minimal information to establish an optimal price for a monopolized input in a vertically integrated firm. Under it only upstream costs need be known. No demand information is required. It is comparatively welfare efficient and has a small regulatory footprint. Profits are...

Assets with a value of over $130billion are regulated in Australia. We define regulatory risk as being regulation that increases the cost of servicing this capital and analyse the sources of this risk. We show that unbiased and symmetric errors will generally create asymmetric risk for the firm,...

Time consistency refers to situations where a policy that is optimal ex ante proves not to be optimal ex post, creating the risk of opportunistic policy reversals. While the threat of such reversals has received widespread attention in the theoretical literature, testing whether policy is indeed...

This paper examines the difficulties inherent in regulation as a solution to market failure and, especially, to natural monopoly. It highlights the way regulation itself introduces new risks into the supply of natural monopoly services, including the risk of regulatory opportunism, and argues...

The following is a transcription of my discussion of the papers (published in this issue) that were presented in the Panel on Competition Policy in Card-Based Payment Systems session of the Antitrust Activity in Card-Based Payment Systems: Causes and Consequences conference.

In the authors' shared opinion, the economic evidence does not support the regulations proposed in the Commission's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Regarding Preserving the Open Internet and Broadband Industry Practices (the “NPRM”). To the contrary, the economic evidence provides no support...