This note synthesises several research papers that IDEI has produced together with Royal Mail economists and others since 2000 and summarises their findings on the welfare and pricing implications of opening the postal market to competition, when the national postal operator operates under...

Individuals, differing in productivity and life expectancy, vote over the size and type of a collective annuity. Its type is represented by the fraction of the contributive (Bismarckian) component (based on the workers past earnings) as opposed to the non- contributive (Beveridgean) part (based...

We build an analytical model à la Hotelling describing the process of e-substitution in the market for transactional mail. A generic firm sells a final good to customers, with each unit sold requiring one unit of communication between firm and customer, which can take the form of either letter...

We build a model where two banks compete for the patronage of consumers by offering them, among other services and products, two forms of transactional media: paper statements and electronic substitutes. Both banks and both products are horizontally di¤erentiated and modeled à la...