This paper studies the relationship between USO and environmental concern in the postal sector. We concentrate on the obligation to deliver mail on a D+1 basis. We examine how the USO should be designed to properly account for the environmental cost in a variety of situations ranging from a...

In the postal sector, the financial burden of the universal service depends on its content, the postal market characteristics and the country’s geographical configuration. These three groups of factors affect both the direct cost of providing the service and the extent of competition on the...

The article analyses the impact of the Lisbon Treaty, entered into force in December 2009, on the provision of postal services and especially on universal services obligations. Through the amendment of the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that if the incumbent were given the freedom to adjust its prices for contestable mail, an entrant would be able to capture only a very limited amount of mail and the monopoly would be shown to have little value. It examines the effect of flexible pricing...

In this paper, we examine the application of SFA method with time-invariant inefficiency and assess its estimation of inefficiency when applied to cross section and panel data. By using simulation methods, we look at the effect of unobserved heterogeneity on the estimates of inefficiency in both...

National postal operators offer a range of mail products to customers. It is likely that demand elasticities for these products differ across both service types and their requirements for sending mail. This paper examines time series data for addressed inland mail in the UK for three broad...

In Australia, interchange fees on shared ATM transactions have been recently removed and replaced by usage fees directly set and received by ATM owners. We develop a model to study how entry of independent ATM deployers (IADs) affects welfare under the “direct charging scheme.” We show that...

This paper considers a simple model where a regulated firm must make sunk investments in long-lived assets in order to produce output, assets exhibit a known but arbitrary pattern of depreciation, there are constant returns to scale within each period, and the replacement cost of assets is...

The payment cards market is a two-sided market. Cost sensitivity of both consumers and merchants for card services influences total demand. Survey data of Dutch merchants shows that costs and cost perception affect acceptance as well as surcharging decisions. Merchants who find payment cards...

We study the early adoption of Twitter in the 111th House of Representatives. Our main objective is to determine whether successes of past adopters have the tendency to speed up Twitter adoption, where past success is defined as the average followers per Tweet — a common measure of “Twitter...