The Shellpot Bridge is a 536-foot swing bridge located on a rail freight bypass route around Wilmington, Delaware. When the bridge failed in 1994, Conrail, then the bridges owner, elected not to repair it due to declining freight volume. The State of Delaware reached agreement with the new rail...

In a fully liberalized postal market, two business models will be possible for a new postal operator: (1) access: where the firm performs the upstream operations and uses the incumbents network for final delivery and (2) bypass where the competing firm controls the entire supply chain and...

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...

This paper covers network investment problems under decentralized control of regulation, infrastructure ownership and management. The model features two countries managing domestic infrastructures, used simultaneously for downstream international service provision. Initially, the welfare losses...

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...

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...

Does the European model of end-to-end competition or the US model of worksharing provide stronger innovation incentives for incumbent postal operators? We answer this question based on a two stage model with price competition and product differentiation. We find that incentives for process...

In Germany, competitive franchising is increasingly being used to procure passenger railway services that were previously provided by a state monopolist. This paper analyzes 77 tenders that differ with respect to network size, service frequency, contract duration and the proximity to other lines...

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...

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...