On the Problem of Network Monopoly

Jolian McHardy, Michael Reynolds and Stephen Trotter

No 2009003, Working Papers from The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics

Abstract: We introduce a new regulatory concept: the independent profit-maximising agent, as a model for regulating a network monopoly. The agent sets prices on cross-network goods taking either a complete, or arbitrarily small, share of the associated profit. We examine welfare and profits with and without each agent type under both network monopoly and network duopoly. We show that splitting up the network monopoly (creating network duopoly) may be inferior for both firm(s) and society compared with a network monopoly "regulated" by an agent and that society always prefers any of the four agent regimes over network monopoly and network duopoly.

Keywords: Network; Monopoly; Agent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 L13 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2009-03, Revised 2009-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ene, nep-ind, nep-mic and nep-net
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/09/47/61/SERP2009003.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/09/47/61/SERP2009003.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/content/1/c6/09/47/61/SERP2009003.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: On the problem of network monopoly (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:shf:wpaper:2009003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mike Crabtree ().