Internet phone services have grown from technical novelty to a competitive threat for traditional circuit-switched telecommunications. Using available telecommunication deployment statistics in the United States and modeling software, this paper presents two scenarios that investigate the...

The following is a transcription of my discussion of the papers (published in this issue) that were presented in the Panel on Competition Policy in Card-Based Payment Systems session of the Antitrust Activity in Card-Based Payment Systems: Causes and Consequences conference.

We examine the impact to date of the Reserve Bank of Australia's decision to reduce interchange fees on credit cards in Australia by almost half. We find that, in the short run, issuers have recovered between 30 and 40 percent of the loss of interchange fees. Merchants have benefited from lower...

Interchange fees and related issues in payment card markets have been the focus of considerable attention recently. The academic community and public officials have begun to scrutinize these markets. Meanwhile, these markets continue to experience dynamic change as card payments account for an...

There is no academic consensus on which electricity market design provides the least distorting investment incentives. Theory suggests that "energy-only market" can allow capacity cost recovery by generators. However, separate payments for capacity or reserve obligations do not need to rely on...

We use a Cournot model with complementary demands to derive sufficient conditions for mergers that increase market concentration and multi-market participation to lower prices, raise industry profits and hence increase economic welfare. Notably, these findings do not depend upon the realization...

This paper reviews the Israeli credit card industry and discusses in detail the ongoing attempts by the Israeli Antitrust Authority (IAA) to promote competition in the industry. Currently, these attempts had only limited success: there is still little competition both on the issuing and the...

The following is a transcription of my discussion of the three papers (published in this issue) that were presented in the "Panel of Country Studies" session of the Antitrust Activity in Card-Based Payment Systems: Causes and Consequences conference.

We study the incentives for a "diagonal" merger between two Internet Service Providers, one a wireless retail only ISP in two origination markets, and the second a vertically integrated wired retailer in one market and an upstream provider in the other. The merger's effects depend on...

This paper provides a simple model of bargaining and integration within a network and considers how intra-network structure is impacted on by competition between networks. Apart from its analytical tractability, our model demonstrates how integration can be used strategically to redistribute...