Competition and Regulation Issues in Telecommunications

Competition and regulation in telecommunications

Paul de Bijl* Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management), regulators (e.g. Opta, and the recently established competition authority NMa), and legislators, in their attempts to achieve efficient outcomes, are facing a complex task. An important lesson from economic theory – a lesson often serving as a practical shortcut – is that ‘effective’ competition, or c...

Platform Competition in Telecommunications

Issues in Multimodal Telecommunications

We have been investigating the applicability of a multimodal user interface to an interpreted telecommunications system. In that interface, not only speech but also other modalities such as keyboard, graphics or handwriting will be prepared. As a first trial of the study, a ‘direction-instructing task’ was chosen as an application filed. The results of the experiments have demonstrated the effe...

Facility based competition in telecommunications

In this paper we study network competition when costs differ among interconnected networks. Such cost differences are observed in the mobile sector as well as in fixed networks. In the paper we find that cost based regulation will not result in first best market shares. The low cost firm will be too small in equilibrium. This is partly due to tariff mediated network externalities. This result i...

Competition in Off-Patent Drug Markets: Issues, Regulation and Evidence

Generic medicines are proven to be chemically and therapeutically equivalent to originator brands, but are in principle significantly cheaper because they are allowed to enter the market after the patent expiry of the originator brand. In this way, generic manufacturers do not incur R&D costs and are able to offer a significant price advantage to the originator brand. As a result, health insura...