Quality competition, by increasing sunk costs, may produce levels of concentration even higher than expected in its absence. Based on Sutton's model of endogenous sunk costs and quality competition, we show that consumers, under certain conditions, may benefit from higher industry concentration...

Firms that wish to offer wireline, multichannel video programming services in direct competition with cable incumbents are being faced with calls by those incumbents and policymakers to "build-out" to entire communities as a pre-condition of receiving a franchise. This "build-out" requirement is...

The extent to which broadband Internet service providers can engage in reasonable traffic management when faced with potentially congestion-causing applications like BitTorrent or other file-sharing applications is currently the subject of heated debate. This Paper provides a formal economic...

This Policy Bulletin measures the gains to consumer welfare of the new "all distance"/"all you can eat" competition produced by the market-opening provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Analysis reveals that the consumer welfare gain amounts to approximately $10 billion per year, and...

Prior to the invention of the Internet, shopping for goods was relatively simple: a consumer visited a brick-and-mortal retailer and selected a product from what was available or, for some retailers, shopped using a catalog. Today, a simple Internet search may return a bewildering number of...

Traditional phone carriers have announced ambitious multi-billion dollar plans to bulk up their networks with fiber in order to deliver a range of new services, including multi-channel video in competition with video incumbents. This competition promises to benefit consumers through lower...

From the very earliest antitrust cases to the present, courts have struggled with a fundamental conflict involving contracts between buyers and sellers of intermediate goods. Namely, on the one hand, contractual arrangements binding a buyer to a particular seller frequently are necessary to...

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 reduced restrictions oin the cable TV industry, providing completely deregulated rates in March 1999. In this paper, we develop a simple tradeoff between price and quality in order to calculate the welfare tradeoff to consumers of the provision of one...