Tommaso M. Valletti

Minimum Quality Standards Under Cournot Competition

I study the consequences of imposing a minimum quality standard on an industry in which firms first incur fixed quality development costs and subsequently compete over quantity. I find that a mildly restrictive minimum quality standard unambiguously reduces total welfare, in contrast to previous findings derived in the literature where it is assumed that firms compete over prices.

Universal Service and Entry: The Role of Uniform Pricing and Coverage Constraints

Universal service objectives are pervasive in telecommunications, and have gained new relevance after the introduction of competition in many markets. Despite their policy relevance, little work has been done allowing for a thorough discussion of instruments designed to achieve universal service objectives under competition. We intend to fill this gap, and disaggregate the problem into interacting forms of regulatory intervention such as uniform pricing and coverage constraints. It is shown that these are not competitively neutral and may have far-reaching strategic effects. Under uniform pricing, equilibrium coverage of both incumbent and entrant may be lower than without regulation. These effects depend on which measures are imposed at the same time, thus no single measure can be evaluated in isolation. We also point out that different groups of consumers are affected in different ways, making welfare comparisons difficult.

Network Competition and Entry Deterrence

We develop a model of logit demand that extends to a multi-firm industry the traditional duopoly framework of network competition with access charges. Firstly, we show that, when incumbents do not face the threat of entry and compete in prices, they inefficiently establish the reciprocal access charge below cost. This inefficiency disappears if incumbents compete in utilities instead of prices. Secondly, we study how incumbents change their choices under the threat of entry when they determine an industry-wide (non-discriminatory) access charge. We show how incumbents may accommodate all possible entrants, only a group of them, or may completely deter entry. When entry deterrence is the preferred option, incumbents distort upwards the access charges.

Telecommunication Reforms, Access Regulation, and Internet Adoption in Latin America

The authors review the stylized facts on regulatory reform in telecommunications and its effects on telecommunications development and Internet penetration in Latin America. Relying on data from the International Telecommunication Union, the Information for Development Program (InfoDev), and the World Bank for 1990-99, the authors then test econometrically the determinants of the differences in Internet penetration rates across Latin America. The results show that effective implementation of the reform agenda in telecommunications regulation could accelerate adoption of the Internet in Latin America-even though it is only part of the solution (income levels, income distribution, and access to primary infrastructure are the main determinants of growth in Internet connections and use). Regulation will work by cutting costs. Cost cutting will require that regulators in the region take a much closer look at the design of interconnection rules and at the tradeoffs that emerge from the complex issues involved. It will also require a commitment to developing analytical instruments, such as cost models, to sort out many of the problems. Appropriate cost models will generate benchmarks that are much more consistent with the local issues and with the local cost of capital than international benchmarks will ever be for countries in unstable macroeconomic situations. Cost cutting will require an equally strong commitment to imposing regulatory accounting systems that reduce the information asymmetrics that incumbents use to reduce the risks of entry. All these changes will ultimately require a stronger commitment by competition agencies, since in many countries a failure to negotiate interconnection agreements will raise competition issues just as often as it will raise regulatory questions.

Unbundling the Incumbent: Evidence from UK Broadband

We consider the impact of a regulatory process forcing an incumbent telecom operator to make its local broadband network available to other companies (local loop unbundling, or LLU). Entrants are then able to upgrade their individual lines and offer Internet services directly to customers. Employing a very detailed data set covering the whole of the United Kingdom, we find that, over the course of time, many entrants have begun to take advantage of unbundling. LLU entry only had a positive effect on broadband penetration in the early years, and no longer in the recent years as the market reached maturity. In contrast, LLU entry continues to have a positive impact on the quality of the service provided, as entrants differentiate their products upwards compared to the incumbent. We also assess the impact of competition from an alternative form of technology (cable) which is not subject to regulation, and what we discover is that inter-platform competition has a positive impact on both penetration and quality.

Equality of Opportunity and Equality of Outcome: Open Leagues, Closed Leagues and Competitive Balance

This chapter compares conventional static measures of competitive balance with measures that take account of the mobility of teams into the upper ranks of professional leagues, which we call dynamic competitive balance. We use this measure to compare the open soccer leagues that permit entry by the process of promotion and relegation, to the closed leagues of North America where there is no automatic right of entry. We also identify the theoretical distribution of entrants to the top k ranks assuming that all teams have equal probabilities of winning. We find that the open leagues (OL) we study are less balanced, dynamically, than closed leagues (CL), and also that OL lie much further away from the theoretical distribution than CL.

The Theory of Access Pricing: an Overview for Infrastructure Regulators

The paper provides policymakers and regulators with an overview of the more relevant theoretical issues related to the pricing of access to ensure that the political debate around practical concerns is solidly grounded. The paper discusses in detail the importance of access pricing in the context of: 1) a liberalized and vertically separated industry, 2) liberalized but vertically integrated industries, 3) unregulated access (private negotiations).

Input Price Discrimination with Downstream Cournot Competitors

This Paper addresses the question of third-degree price discrimination in input markets. I propose a solution that relies on a method that decomposes the upstream monopolist’s profit into two parts, one that depends on average input prices, and one that depends on their distribution. I am able to obtain rather general results, and, in the linear demand case, I obtain a full characterization of the equilibria in the two regimes of price discrimination and price uniformity, generalizing the findings of Yoshida (2000). Under reasonable assumptions, input price discrimination negatively affects both consumer surplus and total welfare.

Information Exchange and Competition in Communications Networks

We develop a model of information exchange between calling parties. We characterize the equilibrium when two interconnected networks compete by charging both for outgoing and incoming calls. We show that networks have reduced incentives to use off-net price discrimination to induce a connectivity breakdown when calls originated and received are complements in the information exchange. This breakdown disappears if operators are allowed to negotiate reciprocal access charges. We also study the relationship between sending and receiving retail charges as a function of the level of access charges. We identify circumstances where private negotiations over access charges induce first-best retail prices.

Network Competition with Price Discrimination: Bill-and-Keep is not so bad after all

Abstract We study the impact of access charges on the incentives to invest in competing telecommunications networks of different quality. High access charges soften competition in the investment stage and can be used to sustain higher profits under competition with two-part tariffs and termination-based price discrimination. Below-cost charges (such as “bill-and-keep” arrangements) have a positive impact on investments.