Rethinking public service regulation after the crisis

Judith Clifton (judith.clifton@unican.es), Daniel Díaz-Fuentes, Marcos FERNÁNDEZ Gutiérrez (marcos.fernandez@unican.es) and Julio Revuelta (julio.revuelta@unican.es)

Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract: Regulatory reform of utilities in the European Union (EU) from the 1980s, including liberalization and privatization, were supposed to bring about greater choice and quality, along with lower prices for consumers. And yet even the reform architects, the European Commission, admitted in 2008 that not all the supposed benefits of reform had borne fruit. One major concern is that citizens – cast as consumers – do not always take full advantage of the new array of services on offer. Behavioural Economics has been brought in by the Commission to help explain this. But how do citizens behave in the “market place” of public services? Analysing consumption patterns and expressions of satisfaction in two major EU countries – Spain and the UK – we show when and how socio-economic factors, including age, gender, place of residence and employment, affect public service consumption. Bottom-up regulatory policies, considering this heterogonous response - could be introduced to improve existing standard top-down models, in order to improve citizens’ decisions vis-à-vis public service consumption, ever more important in times of austerity and crisis.

Keywords: Regulation; infrastructure; consumers; satisfaction; European Union (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 H4 L51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-10-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.demm.unimi.it/files/wp/2010/DEMM-2010_035wp.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to aaa.unimi.it:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known) (http://wp.demm.unimi.it/files/wp/2010/DEMM-2010_035wp.pdf [302 Found]--> http://aaa.unimi.it)

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:mil:wpdepa:2010-35

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano Via Conservatorio 7, I-20122 Milan - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by DEMM Working Papers (dipeco@unimi.it this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).