This paper examines developments since the publication of The Economics of Regulation in the theory of incentive regulation and its application to the regulation of unbundled electricity transmission and distribution networks. Conceptual mechanism design issues that arise when regulators are...

The fundamental tension between the freight railroads' network economics and economic regulation has never been resolved. Lip service has been paid to declining marginal costs and Ramsey pricing, but the actual practice of economic regulation has not coped with the economic dilemma. This paper...

A postal regulator typically faces two issues which make the design of efficient access pricing especially difficult and which complicate the process of liberalizing the industry. First, universal service obligations, together with the presence of fixed costs, require retail prices to depart...

This paper studies the price structure in a postal sector with a monopolistic operator when customers can engage in worksharing. It presents simulation results obtained from an empirical model that is calibrated on data from the French postal sector. The optimal worksharing discount is...

This paper explores the role of the essential facilities doctrine in circumscribing the scope of network sharing obligations in telecommunications. Among other things it argues that a proper application of the doctrine of essential facilities should recognize the prominence of dynamic over...

The U.S. telecom industry has long been evolving from regulated monopoly to competition in various services such as telephony and video. This trend is accelerating with the spread of digital transmission and the Internet. Digital Crossroads provides a timely and sweeping treatment of the entire...

This paper deals with railway deregulation and related reforms by means of a case study of Sweden, studying the 1988 split of railway infrastructure from operations and the subsequent steps of vertical and horizontal disintegration to a market characterized by decentralization and intra-modal...

By focusing on my role in airline deregulation, Philip Weiser's generous characterization of me as a political entrepreneur slights the large part of my career, expounding and then applying the economics of regulation to New York's public utilities. It fails also to convey the gradualness of my...

The Stockholm - Arlanda airport rail link is a public-private partnership opened for traffic in 1999. This paper addresses costs and benefits of giving a private company control over one section of the otherwise public railway network. The project has reduced the pressure on the public sector's...

This paper illustrates the differences in the ordinary commercial distribution of retail outlets and the politically inspired distribution of post offices in Italy and the United States. It compares the distribution of bank branches to the distribution of post offices in Italy and the...