Allocating and Funding Universal Service Obligations in a Competitive Network Market
نویسندگان
چکیده
We examine, in a network market open to competition, various mechanisms of allocating and funding ”universal service obligations” among agents (rival operators and consumers). The obligations we consider are geographic ubiquity and non discrimination. We analyze from efficiency and equity point of view the respective advantages of a ”restricted-entry” system (where the entrant is not allowed to serve high cost consumers) and the ”pay or play” system at work for instance in Australia. We show that the pay or play regulation always dominates the restricted-entry regulation under ubiquity constraint alone. This result no longer holds when the regulator imposes also the non discrimination constraint. JEL classification: H57; L43; L51; L52
منابع مشابه
Competitively neutral universal service obligations
Universal service obligations impose specific costs on the universal service provider and the latter may call for an appropriate compensation. Most often, a two-step procedure is put forward to finance the universal service in a competitive environment. Firstly, the cost of the universal service is assessed; secondly, the provider must be compensated for this cost. We argue that this procedure ...
متن کاملMorality and Values in Support of Universal Healthcare Must be Enshrined in Law; Comment on “Morality and Markets in the NHS”
This is a commentary on Gilbert and colleagues’ (1) paper on morality and markets in the National Health Service (NHS). Morality and values are not ephemeral qualities and universal healthcare is not simply an aspiration; it has to be enshrined in law. The creation of the UK NHS in 1948 was underpinned by core legal duties which required a system of public funding and delivery to follow. The mo...
متن کاملGradual 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. Conn...
متن کاملUniversal Service Financing in Competitive Postal Markets: One Size Does Not Fit All
In the postal sector, the net cost of universal service depends on the content of the service, the postal market characteristics and the country’s geographical configuration. These three groups of factors affect both the direct cost of providing the service and the extent of competition on the market. In this paper, we consider countries with different geographical characteristics and we show t...
متن کاملPricing, resource allocation and quality of service in multi-class networks with competitive market model
This study considers a multi-class network resource in a competitive market where each user endowed with an initial budget will purchase bandwidth from each class of the network resource to maximise its utility function. The authors use revenue as the utility function for the service provider, and enhance Kelly’s utility function by including delay as the quality of service (QoS) parameter for ...
متن کامل