A few recent contributions have claimed that in high-tech industries—where innovation is often cumulative and products include many components which are protected by patents in the hands of many different patent holders—the cost of obtaining all necessary licenses is too high. Some have even...

This book suggests that the scope and breadth of regulatory reforms since the mid-1980s and particularly during the 1990s, are so striking that they necessitate a reappraisal of current approaches to the study of the politics of regulation. The authors call for the adoption of different and...

This compilation of original essays by an international cast of top scholars addresses some of the major issues now facing postal and delivery services throughout the world. The European Commission and member states wrestle with the problem of how to implement the scheduled liberalization of...

This volume, the result of the 21st Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics (Ireland, 2013), describes the continuing problem of the decline of the postal sector in the face of electronic competition and offers strategies for the survival of mail services in a digital age.

This compilation of original essays by an international cast of economists, regulators and industry practitioners analyzes some of the major issues now facing postal and delivery services throughout the world as competition from information and communication technologies has increased.

RAND commitments - i.e., promises to license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms - play a key role in standard setting processes. However, the usefulness of those commitments has recently been questioned. The problem allegedly lies in the absence of a generally agreed test to determine...

Some scholars have questioned the process by which cooperative standards are typically set, worrying about the potential for anticompetitive market power to come hand in hand with pro-competitive interoperability.