Telecommunication in the US: From Regulation to Competition (Almost)

Jerry Hausman and William Taylor ()

Review of Industrial Organization, 2013, vol. 42, issue 2, 203-230

Abstract: Alfred E. Kahn was an observer and practitioner of telecommunications regulation as technology changed the industry from a natural monopoly to a platform-based oligopoly among telephone, cable, satellite, and wireless carriers. Regulation and legislation were slow to recognize these changes, and large welfare losses occurred, some of which could have been avoided if regulators, legislators and economists had followed Fred’s economic advice: Prices must be informed by costs; the relevant costs are actual incremental costs; costs and prices are an outcome of a Schumpeterian competitive process, not the starting point; excluding firms from markets is fundamentally anticompetitive; a reliance on imperfect markets subject to antitrust law is preferable to necessarily imperfect regulation; and a regulatory transition to deregulation entails propensities to micromanage the process to generate preferred outcomes, visible competitors, and expedient price reductions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Keywords: Competition; Deregulation; Kahn; Regulation; Telecommunications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11151-012-9366-4 (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:revind:v:42:y:2013:i:2:p:203-230

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... on/journal/11151/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11151-012-9366-4

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Industrial Organization is currently edited by L.J. White

More articles in Review of Industrial Organization from Springer, The Industrial Organization Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().