Incitations à l'entrée et incitations aux investissements dans le secteur des télécoms

The ladder of investment is a regulatorymechanism proposed by Cave [2006], which has been widely adopted by national regulatory authorities in Europe in the telecommunications sector to promote entry ofefficient competitors to the incumbent operators. The idea is to propose successively different levels of access to new entrants (the "rungs" of the ladder) and to provideentrants with incentives to climb the ladder by setting an access charge increasing over time or by leaving incumbents free to set the access price (i.e., by withdrawingaccess obligations). The ladder of investment is claimed to introduce complementarities between service-based and facilitybased competition, which were previouslyconsidered alternative forms of competition. Despite the strong interest of regulators for this approach concept, its economic foundations have not been clearly stated.In this paper, we present the positions of European regulators and telecom operators about the ladder of investment. We then propose a critical analysis of this method ofregulation, using a review of the relevant literature. We show the ladder of investment approach is imperfectly founded from an economic point of view.