Telecommunication Policy for the Information Age: From Monopoly to Competition

Book Description

Gerald Brock develops a new theory of decentralized public decisionmaking and uses it to clarify the dramatic changes that have transformed the telecommunication industry from a heavily regulated monopoly to a set of market-oriented firms. He demonstrates how the decentralized decisionmaking process--whose apparent element of chaos has so often invited criticism--has actually made the United States a world leader in reforming telecommunication policy.

Customer Reviews:

Telecommunications Regulation - history, theory, & practice.......2001-01-22

First, note that the rapid change of telecommunications technology and regulations makes it virtually impossible to keep a book fully up-to-date. Brock's book brings us up to 1994, and there have been significant changes since then. This immediately noticeable shortcoming is true with every book in this field, so we will not address it further.

Brock paints a very readable and generally clear idea of telecommunications regulation, starting with a few chapters on theory. The philosophical underpinnings of regulation are of some interest, but we know that regulators do not study philosophy before making decisions. The concept that the U.S. system is set up so that there are many "regulators" often acting at cross purposes is an amazing one, given the incredible success of telecommunications in the U.S. The idea that such a successful system could appear so chaotic is worth noting, and Brock is the first author I have seen that praises the current system.

Brock's presentation of history to about 1980 is just wonderful. You will gain a real feeling for why the U.S. system operates the way it does.

Information after 1980 is not presented as clearly. In part, I think this is because Brock personally remembers what happened then, and has difficulty editing out the less significant events of that period.

Overall, the reader is advised to develop a timeline of events to reduce confusion. Brock should include one, but does not.

Brock also addresses in a very limited fashion how things should work with data traffic greater than voice traffic. It was easier to get away with that in 1994 when data traffic was still much less than voice traffic, but impossible to avoid seven years later in 2001.

Book Description

Business people have always had a strong inclination to avoid competition and regulate the market. In Constructing a Competitive Order, Helen Mercer presents a new interpretation of the evolution of British competition legislation from 1900 to 1964. She uses archival sources to give a detailed analysis of government-industry relations and shows how competition policies have been shaped by the strategies of powerful business interests. Throughout the book, she offers pointers to the likely outcome of business regulation in Britain in the future.

A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation

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A book good for economic researcher's computer simulation
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A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation
Jean-Jacques Laffont , and Jean Tirole
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model
Contract Theory
The Economics of Contracts: A Primer, 2nd Edition
The Theory of Corporate Finance
The Theory of Industrial Organization

ASIN: 0262121743

Book Description

More then just a textbook, A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation will guide economists' research on regulation for years to come. It makes a difficult and large literature of the new regulatory economics accessible to the average graduate student, while offering insights into the theoretical ideas and stratagems not available elsewhere. Based on their pathbreaking work in the application of principal-agent theory to questions of regulation, Laffont and Tirole develop a synthetic approach, with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on the regulation of natural monopolies such as military contractors, utility companies, and transportation authorities.

The book's clear and logical organization begins with an introduction that summarizes regulatory practices, recounts the history of thought that led to the emergence of the new regulatory economics, sets up the basic structure of the model, and previews the economic questions tackled in the next seventeen chapters. The structure of the model developed in the introductory chapter remains the same throughout subsequent chapters, ensuring both stability and consistency. The concluding chapter discusses important areas for future work in regulatory economics.

Each chapter opens with a discussion of the economic issues, an informal description of the applicable model, and an overview of the results and intuition. It then develops the formal analysis, including sufficient explanations for those with little training in information economics or game theory. Bibliographic notes provide a historical perspective of developments in the area and a description of complementary research. Detailed proofs are given of all major conclusions, making the book valuable as a source of modern research techniques. There is a large set of review problems at the end of the book.

Jean-Jacques Laffont is Professor of Economics at Université des Sciences Sociales in Toulouse where Jean Tirole is Scientific Director at the Institut d'Economié Industrielle.

Customer Reviews:

A book good for economic researcher's computer simulation.......2001-09-07

I bought this book for the grand name of "Jean Tirole" and the title. Pretty disappointed. This book only focus on modeling factors, nonetheless, quite through compiled.
If you're interesting about this field, might want to refer to;
1. Willison, the institution of capitalism ( also hierarchy )
2. Olsen, the collective action ( and other books from Olsen )
3. Tirole, the theory of industrial organization
Some books regarding "principle and agent" (no recommendation here )

NON PLUS ULTRA.......2000-05-25

This is a MUST own for scholars teaching advanced microeconomic theory, in particular for courses that emphasize in labor contracts under asymmetric information. It is written in a crisp, approachable style (for advanced undergraduate and graduate level) relying wherever possible with rigorous proofs. This book provides not only an "action packed" and up to date guide to economic theory, it takes you to the knowledge frontier in this field. I recommend it to all serious scholars and economic practitioners.

The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, And the Fourteenth Amendment (Landmark Law Cases and American Society)

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The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, And the Fourteenth Amendment (Landmark Law Cases and American Society)
Ronald M. Labbe , and Jonathan Lurie
Manufacturer: University Press of Kansas
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial
No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights
Marbury v. Madison : The Origins and Legacy of Judicial Review
Griswold V. Connecticut: Birth Control And The Constitutional Right Of Privacy (Landmark Law Cases & American Society)
Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court During the Civil War Era (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War)

ASIN: 0700614095

Book Description

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, sought to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves; but its first important test did not arise until five years later. That test centered on a vitriolic dispute among the white butchers of mid-Reconstruction New Orleans.

The rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth-century New Orleans was a sanitation nightmare, with the city's slaughterhouses dumping animal remains into local backwaters. When Louisiana authorized a monopoly slaughterhouse to bring about sanitation reform, many independent butchers felt disenfranchised. Framing their case as an infringement of rights protected by the new amendment, they flooded the lower courts with nearly 300 suits. The surviving cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court pitted the butchers' right to labor against the state's "police power" to regulate public health. The result was a controversial decision that for the first time addressed the meaning and import of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Speaking for the majority in the Court's 5-4 decision, Justice Samuel F. Miller upheld the state's actions as a fair use of its "police power." He also argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended exclusively as a means of protecting and redressing the suffering of former slaves. The result was a very restricted interpretation of the amendment's "privileges and immunities," "due process," and "equal protection" clauses. In striking contrast, the minority, led by Justices Stephen Field and Joseph Bradley, claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment had been intended to apply to all Americans, not just former slaves, and therefore protected the butchers' right to labor in their chosen profession.

Engagingly written and concisely crafted for students and general readers, this newly abridged edition provides a very accessible guide to one of the Supreme Court's most famous cases.

Book Description

Optimal Regulation addresses the central issue of regulatory economics - how to regulate firms in a way that induces them to produce and price "optimally." It synthesizes the major findings of an extensive theoretical literature on what constitutes optimality in various situations and which regulatory mechanisms can be used to achieve it. It is the first text to provide a unified, modern, and nontechnical treatment of the field.

The book includes models for regulating optimal output, tariffs, and surplus subsidy schemes, and presents all of the material graphically, with clear explanations of often highly technical topics.

Kenneth E. Train is Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Economics and Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Principal of the firm Cambridge Systematics.

Topics include: The cost structure of natural monopoly (economies of scale and scope). Characterization of firstand second-best optimality. Surplus subsidy schemes for attaining first-best optimality. Ramsey prices and the Vogelsang-Finsinger mechanism for attaining them. Time-ofuse (TOU) prices and Riordan's mechanisms for attaining the optimal TOU prices' Multipart and self-selecting tariffs, and Sibley's method for using self-selecting tariffs to achieve optimality. The Averch-Johnson model of how rate-of-return regulation induces inefficiencies. Analysis of regulation based on the firm's return on Output, costs, or sales. Price-cap regulation. Regulatory treatment of uncertainty and its impact on the firm's behavior. Methods of attaining optimality without direct regulation (contestability, auctioning the monopoly franchise.)

Customer Reviews:

Good starter for the field.......2001-02-03

This is one of the very few textbooks on Natural Monopoly Regulation. The level of presentation is undergraduate, which also means virtually no mathematics. It covers the basics quite well and may be considered as a good starter for the field. The book is full of illustrations that facilitate learning. Contrary to volumes written with the old descrirptive approach, this book teaches the student to think in terms of economic modelling.

The Economics of Regulation: Principles and Institutions

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The Economics of Regulation: Principles and Institutions
Alfred E. Kahn
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Understanding Regulation: Theory, Strategy, and Practice
Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, 4th Edition
Regulating Infrastructure: Monopoly, Contracts, and Discretion
Natural Monopoly and Its Regulation
Lessons from Deregulation: Telecommunications and Airlines After the Crunch

ASIN: 0262610523

Book Description

As Chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board in the late 1970s, Alfred E. Kahn presided over the deregulation of the airlines and his book, published earlier in that decade, presented the first comprehensive integration of the economic theory and institutional practice of economic regulation. In his lengthy new introduction to this edition Kahn surveys and analyzes the deregulation revolution that has not only swept the airlines but has transformed American public utilities and private industries generally over the past seventeen years.

While attitudes toward regulation have changed several times in the intervening years and government regulation has waxed and waned, the question of whether to regulate more or to regulate less is a topic of constant debate, one that The Economics of Regulation addresses incisively. It clearly remains the standard work in the field, a starting point and reference tool for anyone working in regulation.

Kahn points out that while dramatic changes have come about in the structurally competitive industries - the airlines, trucking, stock exchange brokerage services, railroads, buses, cable television, oil and natural gas - the consensus about the desirability and necessity for regulated monopoly in public utilities has likewise been dissolving, under the burdens of inflation, fuel crises, and the traumatic experience with nuclear plants. Kahn reviews and assesses the changes in both areas: he is particularly frank in his appraisal of the effect of deregulation on the airlines.

His conclusion today mirrors that of his original, seminal work - that different industries need different mixes of institutional arrangements that cannot be decided on the basis of ideology.

Monopoly's Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1830-1930

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Monopoly's Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1830-1930
Christopher Armstrong , and H. V. Nelles
Manufacturer: University of Toronto Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Natural Monopoly and Its Regulation
Richard A. Posner
Manufacturer: Cato Institute
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1882577817

What's Yours is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism

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What's Yours is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism
Adam Thierer
Manufacturer: Cato Institute
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1930865422

Book Description

This book explores how regimes that respect property rights including the right to exclude rivals better serve consumers and innovation.

The Economics of Regulation and Antitrust

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The Economics of Regulation and Antitrust
Giles H. Burgess
Manufacturer: Addison Wesley
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ASIN: 006501099X

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