This paper shows that generators exercised increasing market power in the England and Wales wholesale electricity market in the second half of the 1990s despite declining market concentration. It examines whether this was consistent with static, non-cooperative oligopoly models, which are widely...

Privatisation of utilities is about ownership rather than control. Liberalisation can induce greather improvements in performance than privatisation alone. Regulation id inevitably inefficient, and adequately competitive network services may improve efficiency. History indicates that regulated...

The paper surveys the literature and publicly available information on market power monitoring in electricity wholesale markets. After briefly reviewing definitions, strategies and methods of mitigating market power we examine the various methods of detecting market power that have been employed...

This paper addresses the effects of multimarket contact on firms’ ability to collude. Real world imperfections tend to makes firms’ objective function strictly concave and market supergames ‘interdependent’: firms’ payoffs in each market depend on how they are doing in others. Then,...

Does local democracy help or hinder the solution of collective action problems? We study this question in the context of public spending on health-related urban amenities in a panel of 75 municipal boroughs in England and Wales in 1868, 1871 and 1886. We .nd evidence of a U-shaped relationship...

Concern over mobile termination charges under Calling Party Pays (CPP) has led to severe price controls on termination charges. These are of limited effectiveness in aligning termination charges with costs, net welfare gains from controls are small and costs of setting controls are high....

In the Internet information packets are routed through many vertically related hops. However these network hierarchies are not fixed. Two providers can be simultaneously vertically related in a routing process as supplier and retailer, while horizontally competing in another. We study pricing...

Network hierarchies in the Internet are often not fixed: two providers can be simultaneously input supplier and retailer in a routing process, while being horizontally competing in another. We introduce a stylised network model capturing these aspects of the Internet to study the impact of...

Recent industry studies found the Internet backbone industry competitive. In our paper we explore a novel route to monitor for market power using prices and quality data from Band-X. First we test the hypothesis that Europe is a connectivity market on its own, unchallenged by the US and then, by...

This paper uses a bi-level game to model markets for delivery of electrical power on looped transmission networks. It analyzes the effectiveness of an independent system operator (ISO) when generators (and, in some cases, retailers) with market power bid a single parameter of their linear supply...