Incentive Regulation and the Cost Structure of the Local Telephone Exchange Network

Farid Gasmi, Jean-Jacques Laffont and William Sharkey

Journal of Regulatory Economics, 1997, vol. 12, issue 1, 5-25

Abstract: This paper combines an engineering process model of the cost of local exchange telecommunications firms with an analytical model of optimal incentive regulation (with ex post cost observability), to study empirically the properties of the optimal regulatory mechanism. Relying on detailed properties of the cost function, we examine three issues: (i) the extent of natural monopoly when informational rents associated with regulation are taken into account; (ii) the extent of incentive correction, which expresses the divergence of pricing under the optimal mechanism from optimal pricing under complete information; (iii) the implementation of optimal regulation through a menu of linear contracts. Our findings are that, for fixed territory, strong economies of scale allow local exchange telecommunications to retain monopoly characteristics even when the (informational) costs of regulation are properly accounted for, the incentive correction term is small in magnitude, and that optimal regulation can be well approximated through relatively simple linear contracts. Copyright 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0922-680X/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:regeco:v:12:y:1997:i:1:p:5-25

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... on/journal/11149/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Regulatory Economics is currently edited by Menaham Spiegel

More articles in Journal of Regulatory Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().