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...

A recent literature, dealing with special markets characterized by bilateral network externalities, is summarized and critically assessed. Specific features of these markets, in terms of pricing principles and externalities, are discussed first. Afterwards, several issues related to competition...

This article summarizes the law and economics theory of IPRs, while at the same time suggests hints for further research. The standard literature on IPRs generally relies on the thesis of the incentive to create new ideas. Although this argument remains valid in the general case, in several...

The freight railways sector has three attributes that have proved problematic for recent experiments with vertical separation: a) a relatively high share of network costs in total delivered service costs, b) an apparent persistence of economies of scale at the "competitive" train operations...

In German mobile phone contracts, calls in the provider's home net are usually less expensive than external calls (to the network of a competitor). Thus customers have to compare vectors of prices, and such a comparison can be the source of a fallacy in the presence of network externalities....

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 purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative assessment of the degree of concentration in infrastructure industries at the regional and global levels. We calculate regional and global concentration indexes for electricity generation and distribution, water and sanitation, and fixed and...

We present a review of the regulation of general acceptance payment cards in Mexico. We find that there are distortions that may justify public intervention. The market for payment cards is underdeveloped and the usage of debit cards at POS is restricted. Also, the structure of the interchange...

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...