Author: Leland L. Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Price regulation
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description

Author: Robert W. Crandall
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815719701
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The rapid pace of technological change is placing the world's telephone companies in a very difficult position. Fiber optics cables, wireless telephones, digital signal compression, and sophisticated new switching equipment are lowering the cost of providing service and opening the gates to new competition. At the same time, these new technologies are providing the telephone companies with a wide array of new market opportunities. Unfortunately, their status as regulated carriers makes it difficult to exploit these new opportunities and to fend off competitive assaults on their traditional telephone business. As long as they are regulated, they can be accused of using their monopoly services to cross-subsidize new competitive ventures. But partial deregulation and open entry would be a catastrophe for them unless they were allowed to revise their rate structure. There is a widespread misconception that the U.S. telecommunications industry has been "deregulated" and that Canadian authorities are following the U.S. lead. In fact, most services remain regulated, even though some markets, such as long-distance services, equipment sales and rentals, and local services, have been opened up. This book reviews the recent changes in the structure of U.S. and Canadian telecommunications industries and the changes in regulatory policy on both sides of the border. The authors analyze the effects of these changes in regulation on telephone rates in both the local and long-distance markets with particular emphasis on the impacts of regulatory reforms and competition on long-distance rates. They use their results to suggest how regulation should be structured to allow competition to replace monopoly on the road to the information superhighway. The authors contend that for decades misguided regulation of the telephone sector in both Canada and the U.S. denied consumers the benefits of competition, distorted local and long-distance telephone rates, and blocked en

Author: Michael A. Einhorn
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461539765
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Michael A. Einhorn In continuing to deregulate telecommunications companies, regulators have begun to consider alternative approaches to traditional cost-based price regulation as a means of encouraging monopoly efficiency, promulgating technological innova tion, protecting consumers, and reducing administrative costs. Under cost-based regulatory procedures that had been used, prices were designed to recover the regulated company's costs plus an allowed rate of return on its rate base; this strategy was costly to administer, provided no consistent incentives to cost-ef ficiency and technological improvement, afforded many opportunities for strategic misrepresentation of reported costs, and may have encouraged both uneconomic expansion of the utility's rate base and cross-subsidization of its competitive services. A category of alternative regulatory approaches can be classified broadly as social contracts. Under the general strategy of social contract regulation, regulators first delimit a group of regulated core services that they continue to regulate and then stipulate a list of constraints that the utility must agree to meet in the future; in exchange, regulators agree to detariff or deregulate entirely other competitive or nonessential services that the utility may offer. As long as no stipulated constraints are violated, the utility may price freely any service; if it reduces costs, it may keep a share of its profits. According to the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA, 1987), social contract agreements of one form or another have been considered or implemented in a majority of American states.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Focuses on the distortions in pricing resulting from regulation. Assesses the impact of competition.

Author: David E. Sappington
Publisher: American Enterprise Institute
ISBN: 9780844740591
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This book applies new advances in economic theory regarding the asymmetry of information between firms and their regulators to the design of improved telecommunications regulation.

Author: Dale E. Lehman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792379577
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 envisioned a competitive free-for-all in the U.S. telecommunications industry with removal of barriers to entry in local telecommunications markets and the lifting of the artificial restrictions that kept the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) out of the interLATA long-distance market. After close to 5 years, only one RBOC has been granted permission (controversially) to enter the interLATA market, and local competition has yet to provide most consumers with meaningful choices. In addition, the wave of mergers across the industry has raised the specter of putting the former Bell System back together again. Policymakers now openly question whether the Act can deliver what it promised. Three principal themes are developed in this book. First, there has been a coordination failure between Congress and the FCC in translating the principles embodied in the Act into practice. The authors provide evidence for this by analyzing stock market reactions to legislative and regulatory actions. This coordination failure was largely predictable, given the ambiguity in the Act, as well as conflicting jurisdictions between the FCC and the states. Second, the Act calls for wholesale prices to be `based on cost.' Regulators adopted a costing standard (TELRIC) that provides a means to subsidize competitive entry in local telephone service markets. The ready adoption of the TELRIC standard by regulators is shown to be tied to the third theme: price cap regulation provides regulators with `insurance' against the adverse effects of competition in local telephone markets. Statistical analysis reveals that regulators in price cap states set uniformly lower unbundled network element prices (lower barriers to entry) in comparison with regulators in rate-of-return and earnings sharing states. The result is a triumph of regulatory processes over market processes - the antithesis of the purpose of the Act.

Author: Donald L. Alexander
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In this timely collection of essays, leading economic and communication scholars examine major policy issues confronting federal and state regulators in the telecommunications industry. The essays describe how past regulatory decisions have contributed to a growing tension between emerging competition and the preservation of specific social objectives like the continuance of universal service, and thus provide a unique perspective on the current public policy debates. Although each author discusses a different policy issue, the common theme in this volume is the compelling argument that past regulatory decisions, which were often motivated by political compromises rather than sound economic analysis, are the primary source of inefficiency that exists in the telecommunications industry today. This insight points to potential harm that legislators may create from ignoring economic forces when deregulating an industry. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is an example in which deregulation has created more, not less, regulatory barriers affecting competitors. The authors challenge policy makers to consider no regulation to insure that competitive forces determine prices, quantities, and quality of service for the vast array of telecommunication services available in today's marketplace.

Author: Ingo Vogelsang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Price regulation
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description

Author: William H. Melody
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Teknologisk udvikling
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
Analiza: El propósito y la experiencia de la regulación; Nuevas tecnologías, redes y mercados; Gestión de recursos públicos; Eficiencia, equidad y protección del consumidor; Herramientas básicas de regulación; Aspectos especiales que afectan a los países en vías de desarrollo; Cuestiones futuras sobre redes inteligentes y comercio electrónico.

Author: Damien Geradin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199242436
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Controlling market power is a crucial issue in liberalised telecommunications markets. By comparatively analysing five countries, this book explores how the regulatory framework should be designed.