Keizo Mizuno

Distorted access regulation with strategic investments: Regulatory non-commitment and spillovers revisited

We reexamine the properties of access regulation and an incumbent’s incentive for infrastructure investment under regulatory non-commitment and spillovers through access. The results show that when the degree of spillover is small, the incumbent’s strategic opportunity to invest in infrastructure distorts the access charge set by a regulator from a welfare perspective. In particular, when the degree of spillover is small and the incumbent’s investment cost is high (low), the incumbent has an incentive to utilize regulatory non-commitment to induce a high (low) access charge by overinvesting (underinvesting) in infrastructure.

Incentive Transfer Schemes with Marketable and Nonmarketable Public Services

We examine an incentive transfer scheme in an executive agency system when there are both marketable and nonmarketable public services. We show that because of the incentive transfer scheme, which contributes to the elimination of a governments budget deficit, social welfare is higher in the executive agency system than in a traditional system when the shadow cost of public funds is large. In addition, the scheme is desirable from a welfare viewpoint when the marketable and nonmarketable public services are complements, or when the production technology exhibits a high degree of cost complementarity.

GRADUAL NETWORK EXPANSION AND UNIVERSAL SERVICE OBLIGATIONS

Universal service obligations are usually not competitively neutral as they modify the way firms compete in the market. In this paper, we consider a continuum of local markets in a dynamic setting with a stochastically growing demand. The incumbent must serve all markets (ubiquity) possibly at a uniform price and an entrant decides on its market coverage before firms compete in prices. Connecting a market involves a sunk cost. We show that the imposition of a uniform price constraint modifies the timing of entry: for low connection cost markets, entry occurs earlier while for high connection cost markets, entry occurs later.

Strategic Location Choice and Network Formation for Entry

In our model, an entrant has two effective strategies for profit maximization: collaboration with incumbents and location choice. We analyze the effect of allowing an entrant the opportunity to collaborate with incumbents on its location choice. First, we show that when collaboration requires mutual consent, the entrant has an incentive to choose a noncentral location to collaborate with incumbents and facilitate its entry. Second, the existing collaboration among incumbents does not always deter entry; rather, this effect depends on the magnitude of the collaboration effect.

Managerial incentives and endogenous coalition formation with externalities

This paper examines the managerial incentives of oligopolistic firms with Cournot competition when they have an opportunity to form a coalition for cost reduction. The analysis shows that the introduction of managerial incentives reduces a firm’s incentive to form a coalition. Moreover, a firm that belongs to a coalition has an increased managerial incentive (i.e., it becomes more sales-oriented) as its coalition becomes larger. However, in equilibrium, because of externalities generated from the coalition structure and product market competition, the managerial incentive of a firm in a large coalition can be greater than that of a firm in a grand coalition, while the managerial incentive of a firm in a small coalition can be less than that of a firm under stand-alone production.

Pre-commitment to an Exclusive Contract under Partial Regulation

Abstract This article examines the welfare implications of an incumbent’s pre‐commitment to an exclusive contract in a partially regulated environment. It shows that the contract offered to customers in a competitive market makes the first‐best allocation infeasible in the partially regulated environment. However, the contract can have a welfare‐enhancing property through the exclusion of inefficient entry or cream skimming in the competitive market, especially when the regulated price ceiling is low and the incumbent’s technology is characterized by a large proportion of common cost in total cost.