EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Market Structure, Investment, and Technical Efficiencies in Mobile Telecommunications

Jonathan T. Elliott, Georges V. Houngbonon, Marc Ivaldi and Paul T. Scott

Journal of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 133, issue 5, 1401 - 1459

Abstract: We develop a model of competition in prices and infrastructure among mobile network operators. Although consolidation increases market power, it can lead to more efficient data transmission due to economies of scale, which we derive from physical principles. After estimating our model with French consumer and infrastructure data, equilibrium simulations reveal that while prices decrease with the number of firms, so do download speeds. Our framework also allows us to quantify the impact of spectrum allocation. The marginal social value of spectrum exceeds firms’ willingness to pay in our model as well as observed prices in spectrum auctions.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/734132 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/734132 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/734132

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-06
Handle: RePEc:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/734132