This paper discusses industries such as telecommunications where firms each have their own customers and must interconnect with other firms to provide a comprehensive service. Two scenarios are considered: (1) the case of a symmetric, unregulated industry and (2) the case of an industry with a...

This paper surveys the theory of access pricing and interconnection in telecommunicatons. One-way access pricing, competition bottlenects and two-way access pricing are discussed.

This note discusses the impact of collection sales (i.e., the bundling of several journals for sale by publishers to libraries) on journals. The advent of electronic journal distribution implies that bundling is an efficient sales strategy, and can act to extend the reach of a journal. Current...

This essay discusses the merits of public intervention in the provision of television broadcasting services. I argue that intervention was justified in the past, when there were just a few channels and when advertising was the sole source of commercial funds. However, the advent of subscription...

We model firms as supplying utility directly to consumers. The equilibrium outcome of competition in utility space depends on the relationship pi(u) between profit and average utility per consumer. Public policy constraints on the "deals" firms may offer affect equilibrium outcomes via their...

Should a multiproduct monopolist whose "average price" is capped by regulation be allowed to engage in (third-degree) price discrimination? If the cap applies to a price index with weights proportional to demands at uniform prices, then price discrimination benefits consumers as well as the...

This paper discusses the scope for competition in the telecommunications industry, taking into account the features of natural monopoly, network externalities, and customer inertia. Recent policy towards competition in the industry in the UK is surveyed, with an emphasis on access pricing and...

An incumbent postal service provider faces two issues which make the design of efficient access pricing especially difficult. First, universal service obligations, together with the presence of significant fixed costs, require retail prices to be out of line with underlying marginal costs....

We examine the impact of multiproduct nonlinear pricing on profit, consumer surplus and welfare in a duopoly. When consumers buy all their products from one firm (the one-stop shopping model), nonlinear pricing leads to higher profit and welfare, but often lower consumer surplus, than linear...