Volume 4, Issue 3

The freight railways sector has three attributes that have proved problematic for recent experiments with vertical separation: a) a relatively high share of network costs in total delivered service costs, b) an apparent persistence of economies of scale at the "competitive" train operations level, and, perhaps most important, c) strong economies of vertical integration that are focused on the interface point of wheel and rail – that is, exactly where vertical separation takes place. The third factor in particular seems a clear illustration of the rationales discussed by Coase and Williamson for the broad vertical scope of a single firm and the disadvantages of relying on market transactions under certain conditions.

In German mobile phone contracts, calls in the provider's home net are usually less expensive than external calls (to the network of a competitor). Thus customers have to compare vectors of prices, and such a comparison can be the source of a fallacy in the presence of network externalities. Even if a provider with a lower market share requires lower prices for calls in the home as well as to other networks, his average price may be higher than that of a larger provider. Not being aware of this fact is called "a fallacy of dominant price vectors". Based on a questionnaire study this fallacy turns out to be a real phenomenon.

Internet phone services have grown from technical novelty to a competitive threat for traditional circuit-switched telecommunications. Using available telecommunication deployment statistics in the United States and modeling software, this paper presents two scenarios that investigate the potential impact of Internet telephony on universal service programs. They test whether the introduction of this technology and the way it could potentially be regulated would sufficiently reduce contributing carriers' revenues to threaten the viability of the Universal Service Program. We conclude that the regulatory policies developed in the past century to support universal service have been obsolesced by the innovation and creative destruction of Internet telephony.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative assessment of the degree of concentration in infrastructure industries at the regional and global levels. We calculate regional and global concentration indexes for electricity generation and distribution, water and sanitation, and fixed and mobile telecommunications. Concentration issues are identified in only about 20% of the cases studied, while a presumption of concentration is found in another 30% of the cases. In more general terms, we find no scope for simple encompassing regional or sectoral statements because concentration is region- and sector-specific.