Browsing by Author "Alger, Dan"

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Open Access
Open Ownership - Not Common Carriage
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 1998) Alger, Dan
We consider regulating natural monopolies with open ownership and competitive rules as a substitute for common carriage regulation and illustrate it with an application for natural gas pipelines. A single set of production assets exhausts any economies of scale or scope while owners compete with each other due to incentives from open ownership rules that promote efficient investment choices primarily by breaking down barriers to entry and competitive rules that promote an efficient secondary market. We argue that regulating a natural monopoly with these rules in a market structure we call a competitive joint venture significantly increases the efficiency of pricing output and capacity choices and may dramatically reduce regulatory costs when compared to regulating with common carriage.
Open Access
The Relative Costs of Local Telephony Across Five Countries
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 1999) Alger, Dan; Leung, Joanne
In this paper we take three steps towards evaluating the relative performanceof the telecommunications markets in these five countries. First weidentify and then limit our examination to only those components of thetelecommunications network that may generate market power concerns. Wedetermine that market power concerns where they exist at all are limited tothose facilities connecting a customer with its neighboring central officecollectively called the local loop. Second we identify regional factors that maysignificantly affect relative costs for the local loop. Using data and a cost modelfrom the US to examine these regional factors we find that customer density is the most significant. Third using this same cost model along with regional data we estimate local loop costs relative to the US for New Zealand Australia the UK and Sweden.