We analyze how termination charges affect retail prices when taking into account that receivers derive some utility from a call and when firms may charge consumers for receiving calls. A novel feature of our paper is that we consider passive self-fulfilling expectations and do not allow for...

The debate on the regulation of Next General Access started in Europe several years ago. It addresses the question of whether or not fibre access networks should be subject to the same regulation as the copper local loop. This debate is often examined as competition vs. investment. The present...

For many years, electronic communications has been one of the most important areas of policy intervention for the European Union. Liberalisation and privatisation of the telecommunications industry were very important topics of the policy debate in the two decades from 1990 to 2010. In these...

The liberalization and regulation of telecommunications markets in Germany is called, despite some adversity as a great success. Consumers enjoy, in contrast to the days of state owned monopoly, affordable and innovative products. In the center of the regulation was for almost one and a half...

Gegenstand der vorliegenden Studie sind die institutionelle und quantitative Entwicklung von Internet und E-Commerce in China sowie die Analyse resultierender ökonomischer Effekte und ihrer Transformationsriemen. In methodischer Hinsicht basieren die Analysen auf drei komplementären Ansätzen....

This paper contributes to the policy debate about the optimal termination charge when penetration rates are explicitly taken into account. Although lowering termination charges towards cost leads to more efficient usage, its impact on consumer surplus is ambiguous since it induces an increase in...

In this paper, we study how access pricing affects network competition when subscription demand is elastic and each network uses non-linear prices and can apply termination-based price discrimination. In the case of a fixed per minute termination charge, we find that a reduction of the...

We re-examine the literature on mobile termination in the presence of network externalities. Externalities arise when firms discriminate between on- and off-net calls or when subscription demand is elastic. This literature predicts that profit decreases and consumer surplus increases in...

This paper analyses when EU intervention is needed to achieve this internal market for electronic communications. It sets legal and economic criteria to determine the appropriate scope of the EU intervention. It applies these criteria to several case studies and concludes that sometimes the EU...

For many years electronic communications has been one of the most important areas of policy intervention for the European Union. Liberalisation and privatisation of the telecommunications industry have been very important topics of the policy debate in the two decades starting from 1990 to 2010....