Price Caps And Incentive Regulation In Telecommunications

Michael A. Einhorn In continuing to deregulate telecommunications companies, regulators have begun to consider alternative approaches to traditional cost-based price regulation as a means of encouraging monopoly efficiency, promulgating technological innova tion, protecting consumers, and reducing administrative costs. Under cost-based regulatory procedures that had been used, prices were designed to recover the regulated company's costs plus an allowed rate of return on its rate base; this strategy was costly to administer, provided no consistent incentives to cost-ef ficiency and technological improvement, afforded many opportunities for strategic misrepresentation of reported costs, and may have encouraged both uneconomic expansion of the utility's rate base and cross-subsidization of its competitive services. A category of alternative regulatory approaches can be classified broadly as social contracts. Under the general strategy of social contract regulation, regulators first delimit a group of regulated core services that they continue to regulate and then stipulate a list of constraints that the utility must agree to meet in the future; in exchange, regulators agree to detariff or deregulate entirely other competitive or nonessential services that the utility may offer. As long as no stipulated constraints are violated, the utility may price freely any service; if it reduces costs, it may keep a share of its profits. According to the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA, 1987), social contract agreements of one form or another have been considered or implemented in a majority of American states.

This book applies new advances in economic theory regarding the asymmetry of information between firms and their regulators to the design of improved telecommunications regulation.

'Due to their economic characteristics and also to their consequences on many aspects of collective life, information networks have always been at the edge of regulatory innovations and at the center of policy debates. The contributors of this volume combine long term visions of the factors determining regulatory policies with up-to-date analyses of technicalities to be dealt with, to provide the reader with an extended understanding of the issues and constraints shaping the future of digital networks.' Eric Brousseau, Université Paris-Dauphine, France and the European University Institute, Italy Digital markets worldwide are in rapid flux. The Internet and World Wide Web have traditionally evolved in a largely deregulated environment, but recently governments have shown great interest in this rapidly developing sector and are imposing regulations for a variety of reasons that are changing the shape of these industries. This book explores why the industrial organization of broadband ISPs, Internet backbone providers and content/application providers are in such turmoil. The expert contributors straddle the turbulent past of the telecoms sector and also contribute to its exciting though unpredictable future via positive analysis of past communications policies, which is then utilized to deduce lessons to guide future policy making decisions. It is illustrated that broadband ISPs no longer simply provide a conduit for service delivery; they are also involved in producing content and transaction services themselves, in competition with content and delivery providers. The blurring of the traditional lines between these three sectors, as each enters into the others' markets, is highlighted. The conclusion is that we are witnessing the emergence of powerful, competing platforms, linked in complex ways that challenge traditional economic analyses. Exploring governance issues, regulation and investment, next-generation service markets and wireless communication, this book will prove a fascinating and illuminating read for scholars, researchers, post-graduate students and policymakers with an interest in ICT, technology and innovation, economics and industrial organization.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 envisioned a competitive free-for-all in the U.S. telecommunications industry with removal of barriers to entry in local telecommunications markets and the lifting of the artificial restrictions that kept the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) out of the interLATA long-distance market. After close to 5 years, only one RBOC has been granted permission (controversially) to enter the interLATA market, and local competition has yet to provide most consumers with meaningful choices. In addition, the wave of mergers across the industry has raised the specter of putting the former Bell System back together again. Policymakers now openly question whether the Act can deliver what it promised. Three principal themes are developed in this book. First, there has been a coordination failure between Congress and the FCC in translating the principles embodied in the Act into practice. The authors provide evidence for this by analyzing stock market reactions to legislative and regulatory actions. This coordination failure was largely predictable, given the ambiguity in the Act, as well as conflicting jurisdictions between the FCC and the states. Second, the Act calls for wholesale prices to be `based on cost.' Regulators adopted a costing standard (TELRIC) that provides a means to subsidize competitive entry in local telephone service markets. The ready adoption of the TELRIC standard by regulators is shown to be tied to the third theme: price cap regulation provides regulators with `insurance' against the adverse effects of competition in local telephone markets. Statistical analysis reveals that regulators in price cap states set uniformly lower unbundled network element prices (lower barriers to entry) in comparison with regulators in rate-of-return and earnings sharing states. The result is a triumph of regulatory processes over market processes - the antithesis of the purpose of the Act.

This report addresses the regulation of access to telecommunication networks. Development of competition and the success of liberalisation often depend on the access terms and conditions chosen, and public policy interest in getting these terms and conditions right is important.

This book is based on two seminars held at Rutgers on October 22, 1993, and May 6, 1994 entitled `Incentive Regulation for Public Utilities'. These contributions by leading scholars and practitioners represent some of the best new research in public utility economics and include topics such as the theory of incentive regulation, dynamic pricing, transfer pricing, issues in law and economics, pricing priority service, and energy utility resource planning.

The rapid pace of technological change is placing the world's telephone companies in a very difficult position. Fiber optics cables, wireless telephones, digital signal compression, and sophisticated new switching equipment are lowering the cost of providing service and opening the gates to new competition. At the same time, these new technologies are providing the telephone companies with a wide array of new market opportunities. Unfortunately, their status as regulated carriers makes it difficult to exploit these new opportunities and to fend off competitive assaults on their traditional telephone business. As long as they are regulated, they can be accused of using their monopoly services to cross-subsidize new competitive ventures. But partial deregulation and open entry would be a catastrophe for them unless they were allowed to revise their rate structure. There is a widespread misconception that the U.S. telecommunications industry has been "deregulated" and that Canadian authorities are following the U.S. lead. In fact, most services remain regulated, even though some markets, such as long-distance services, equipment sales and rentals, and local services, have been opened up. This book reviews the recent changes in the structure of U.S. and Canadian telecommunications industries and the changes in regulatory policy on both sides of the border. The authors analyze the effects of these changes in regulation on telephone rates in both the local and long-distance markets with particular emphasis on the impacts of regulatory reforms and competition on long-distance rates. They use their results to suggest how regulation should be structured to allow competition to replace monopoly on the road to the information superhighway. The authors contend that for decades misguided regulation of the telephone sector in both Canada and the U.S. denied consumers the benefits of competition, distorted local and long-distance telephone rates, and blocked en