Volume 8, Issue 2

Why regulate natural monopolies? Conventional economic theory points to the price-marginal cost margin and the ensuing deadweight loss. But this hypothesis does a poor job of explaining the way that regulators behave in practice. This paper proposes an alternative hypothesis: that natural monopoly regulation exists to protect the sunk investments made by consumers of the regulated firm. This hypothesis explains many of the practices of regulators which make little or no sense under conventional economic theory, such as the desire to pursue stable prices, the aversion to Ramsey pricing, and the role of incremental cost as a pricing floor.

Time consistency refers to situations where a policy that is optimal ex ante proves not to be optimal ex post, creating the risk of opportunistic policy reversals. While the threat of such reversals has received widespread attention in the theoretical literature, testing whether policy is indeed time consistent is challenging. This paper implements such a test by comparing the depreciation profile established by the Australian telecommunications regulator at the outset of a regulatory period with the actual path of allowed recovery, and finds that the regulator acted in a time-inconsistent manner.

We provide evidence that increasing consumer awareness may have been underlying the rise of debit card use. We find that consumers typically use multiple payment media and that this behavior is closely related to the use of debit cards besides cash. Moreover, it turns out that the use of multiple payment media is directly related to consumer awareness but that not controlling for the endogeneity of awareness can bias its effect downwards. Conditional on the use of multiple payment methods, however, awareness does not distinguish those making debit a primary payment method from those making it secondary to cash.

We investigate the entry of low-cost airlines (LCAs) in the German market. The strong competitive pressure of LCAs forced incumbent air and rail operators to reconsider their pricing strategy. Lufthansa reacted by a drastic cut of all prices for all intra-German origin and destinations (O&Ds). The physical conditions of DB, the incumbent railroad operator, made it harder to react. Being an open system, changing the price system on one O&Ds has substantial opportunity costs on other O&Ds in the same rail network. This imposes constraints on price strategies LCA and Lufthansa do not have to satisfy to the same extent.