This paper analyzes the impact of policy reform in basic telecommunications on sectoral performance using a new panel data set for 86 developing countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean over the period 1985 to 1999. We address three questions. First, what impact do specific policy changes – relating to ownership and competition – have on sectoral performan...

Cooperatives have been used by the inhabitants in rural areas to gain access to telecommunications. In Bolivia and Finland, for example, consumer cooperatives have been for many years the only mechanism to provide local telecommunication services to the whole country. This paper studies the effects of the Bolivian market’s structure on the development of competition as well as on universal acce...

We provide a new explanation for the apparent underpricing of initial public o®erings applicable to large, regulated ̄rms like telecommunications companies. Under the assumption that regulation is subject to political pressure by voters we demonstrate that it may be rational for issuers to ration investors in order to insure a broad distribution of shares in the population. At the same time we ...

I suggest explanations for the apparently puzzling bidding in the year 2000 British and German 3G telecom auctions. Relative-performance maximisation may have been important, but the outcome of the British auction seems to have been efficient. This paper bundles my comments on two papers presented at the December 2001 CES Ifo conference on the telecom auctions. (For those readers new to the sub...

The aim of this paper is to study both the private and the social desirability of a mixed bundling strategy that generates a cost savings effect. We confirm that mixed bundling is the dominant strategy for multiproduct firms, although it may give rise to a prisoner’s dilemma. Moreover, we show that mixed bundling may maximise social welfare, provided that cost savings are sufficiently high. Fin...

Consumers are commonly required to subscribe to particular tariff options before uncertainty regarding their future purchases gets resolved. Since the general comparison of welfare performance of different pricing mechanisms is ambiguous, this paper empirically evaluates the expected welfare associated to standard nonlinear pricing and optional tariffs by using information directly linked to th...

When considering the linkage between innovation and productivity, the relationship is often termed as the knowledge production function in the endogenous growth literature. In this article, we approach the issues involved through the aspects of the standard neoclassical production theory. The advantage is that the basic properties required of ordinary production function can be employed to infe...

The paper investigates the robustness of different efficiency measures that can support the implementation of diverse forms of incentive regulation in the context of U.S. telecommunications. Comparisons, in terms of an output orientation, are considered for efficiency scores obtained from Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), distance function (with corrected ordinary least squares and a random effe...

When considering the linkage between innovation and productivity, the relationship is often termed as the knowledge production function in the endogenous growth literature. In this article, we approach the issues involved through the aspects of the standard neoclassical production theory. The advantage is that the basic properties required of ordinary production function can be employed to infe...

This paper explores the role of network effects in the consumer’s choice of mobile phone operator in the UK. For our empirical analysis we use two sources of data: market-level data from OFCOM and micro-level data on consumers’ usage of mobile telephones from the survey Home Online. We estimate two classes of models which illustrate the role of network effects. The first is a model of the compa...