In 2005, the FCC expanded Lifeline: the primary telephone subsidy program, to include discounts for prepaid wireless service as well as for traditional landline service. This study provides insights into the effects of the subsidy, including its expansion, on household adoption of basic telephone service and conducts cost-benefit analysis using data taken from the National Health Interview Surv...

We analyze the implications of different pricing rules in discrete clock auctions. The two most common pricing rules are highest-rejected bid (HRB) and lowest-accepted bid (LAB). Under HRB, the winners pay the lowest price that clears the market; under LAB, the winners pay the highest price that clears the market. In theory, both the HRB and LAB auctions maximize revenues and are fully efficien...

With the recent diffusion of broadband services, IP telephony is expected to spread significantly in Japan. This paper investigates the demand for IP telephony by using conjoint analysis. Projecting IP telephony demand also contributes to Japanese info-communication policy discussions. Two points are made. First, IP telephony is still currently considered an optional supplement or an add-on ser...

From July 1994 to July 1996, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) conducted nine spectrum auctions, raising about $20 billion for the U.S. Treasury. The auctions assigned thousands of licenses to hundreds of firms. Were the auctions efficient? Did they award the licenses to the firms best able to turn the spectrum into valuable services for consumers? There is substantial evidence that t...

The 2010 German 4G spectrum auction was an unusually large simultaneous ascending multi-band auction. The bidding was competitive, the final assignment was efficient and the revenue was close to expectations. However, our analysis suggests that, theoretically, independent and rational bidders had an opportunity to implicitly coordinate on a low-revenue outcome. Yet, the same analysis suggests t...

For many years electronic communications has been one of the most important areas of policy intervention for the European Union. Liberalisation and privatisation of the telecommunications industry have been very important topics of the policy debate in the two decades starting from 1990 to 2010. In these years the EU developed a sophisticated regulatory framework inspired to the principle of fa...

We developed a deductive database system PACADE for analyzing three dimensional and secondary structures of protein. PACADE is equipped with a function to search for similar structures in proteins. Unlike other approaches based on calculation of the inter-atomic root mean square distance, this function is based on logic programming and source level rule rewriting techniques. We describe herein ...

Network neutrality has been at the center of US telecommunications policy for several years, culminating in a recent FCC order imposing a limited form of net neutrality on US broadband Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The regulatory imposition of nondiscrimination and price regulation (the core of net neutrality) on ISPs has been hotly debated. In this paper, I review the recent economics lit...

This paper examines the price response of wireless carriers to the introduction of number portability. We …nd that wireless prices decreased in response to number portability, but not uniformly across plans. Average prices for the plans with the fewest minutes decreased by only $0.19/month (0.97%), but average prices for mediumand high-volume plans decreased by $3.64/month (4.84%) and $10.29/mo...

This paper models settlement arrangements between international telecommunication carriers. The FCC in the U.S. claims these arrangements cost U.S. consumers billions of dollars annually, largely to subsidize foreign carriers in low-income countries. A model is given which makes sense of this claim, as well as the role of costs, competition, and income disparities in settlement rate determinati...