1,720,990 research outputs found
Problemi di Cooperazione fra Agenzie di Regolamentazione: il caso del settore idrico
No full textThe regulation of natural monopolies has been widely investigated in economic literature.
Particular emphasis has been placed on the relationship between the regulated
firm and the regulator. The present work tries to deal with problems that may arise
when there is more than one regulator. In this case, if regulators have different objective
functions, inefficiency is likely to arise. The water industry seems to suffer from
these kind of problems, indeed, given the local dimension of the industry, there are different
levels of regulation with possible divergent interests. The analysis is mainly
based on the work of David Baron (1985), who investigated the case of a polluting
firm in the electricity industry, regulated by two authorities. In my work, I use a similar
model to show how non cooperation amongst agencies regulating a firm in the
water industry can lead to inefficient equilibria
Separation of Regulatory Powers when Contracts are Incomplete
No full textThe investment of a regulated firm affects the service/good provided on many dimensions. Should an integrated regulator take care of them all? Or is it better to have separate regulators responsible for them?
We analyze the effect of the separation of regulatory powers on the regulated firm's ex-ante incentive to invest in a "cooperative'' innovation. The effects of the innovation are not verifiable and the cost of investing is sunk, hence, there is a problem of hold-up. We find that when the innovation produces opposite effects the ex-ante firm's incentive to invest is larger in the case of separation than in the case of integrated regulation. We also stress the risk of over-investment that the separation of regulatory powers may induce. We maintain that along with classical incentive regulation --- which mainly provides incentives for the firm to be efficient --- the separation of regulatory powers may play a role in providing an incentive for cooperative innovations
The Impact of Antitrust Fines on the Formation of Collusive Cartels
No full textThe literature on collusive cartels has mainly focused on the impact of antitrust fines on the sustainability of cartels, in infinitely repeated games. This approach, however, does not allow us to study the effect of antitrust fines on the incentives to form cartels in the first place. In this paper, we adopt a coalitional game approach to modeling collusive agreements, showing that antitrust fines may drive firms from partial cartels to a monopolistic cartel. Moreover, by introducing uncertainty on market demand, we show that the socially optimal competition policy can call for a finite or even zero antitrust penalty, even if there are no enforcement costs. We provide a sufficient condition for these results to apply to any coalitional game of cartel formation with symmetric firms. Then, we discuss the extension to asymmetric firms and dynamic collusion
Political institutions behind good governance
No full textThe present paper investigates the role of political institutions — namely, political regimes and electoral rules — in shaping the capacity of the government to implement policies that address citizens’ preferences, i.e., “good governance”. The empirical analysis, conducted on a panel of 80 democratic countries over the period 1996–2011, shows that the performance of the government depends on the interaction between electoral rules and political regimes. In particular, the performance of a government under a presidential regime improves when associated with a majoritarian electoral rule, while it worsens with a proportional electoral rule
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