Challenges facing the European postal industry are greater then ever before. The approaching full market opening in 2011 and 2013 will be the central factor driving commercial developments, where new market entrants - without the burden of the universal service obligation and additional social...

Postal and Delivery Services: Pricing, Productivity, Regulation and Strategy offers current insight to problems in postal and delivery economics. Issues addressed include international postal policy, the universal service obligation, regulation, competition, entry, the role of scale and scope...

Although largely absent from modern accounts of the Industrial Revolution, watches were the first mass produced consumer durable, and were Adam Smith's pre-eminent example of technological progress. In fact, Smith makes the notable claim that watch prices may have fallen by up to 95 per cent...

A fully unbundled, regulated network firm of unknown efficiency level can untertake unobservable effort to increase the likelihood of low downstream prices, e.g. by facilitating downstream competition. To incentivize such effort, the regulator can use an incentive scheme paying transfers to the...

We analyze various regulatory regimes for electricity transmission investment in the context of a transformation of the power system towards renewable energy. We study distinctive developments of the generation mix with different implications on network congestion, assuming that a shift from...

Regulatory authorities in the European electricity sector use benchmarking techniques to determine the cost-efficient production level for an incentive regulation of distribution system operators (DSOs). With nearly 900 DSOs operating in the German electricity sector, of which 200 subject to...