Introducing Competition in the French Electricity Supply Industry: The Destabilisation of a Public Hierarchy in an Open Institutional Environment

The French electricity supply industry is characterized by a vertically integrated monopoly and public ownership and when the government introduced market rules, it was with the aim of preserving the integration of the public incumbent as a national champion. This had two paradoxical effects in favour of competition development and the building of safeguards for entrants

The 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines: A Suggested Revision (March 26, 2020)

The FTC and DOJ requested comments on their draft Vertical Merger Guidelines in January 2020. This article is a complete alternative set of suggested Vertical Merger Guidelines that reflects and supplements the approach explained in the comments submitted by the author along with Jonathan. Baker, Nancy Rose and Fiona Scott Morton, as well as their other comments, and might be read in conjunction with those comments. This suggested revision of the Agencies’ draft expands the list of potential competition harms and provides illustrative examples. It expands and unifies the discussion and treatment of potential competitive benefits. It deletes the quasi-safe harbor and suggests the circumstances under which competitive harms raise lessened concerns on the one hand and heightened concerns on the other

Towards an open cloud marketplace: vision and first steps

As one of the most promising, emerging concepts in Information Technology (IT), cloud computing is transforming how IT is consumed and managed; yielding improved cost efficiencies, and delivering flexible, on-demand scalability by reducing computing infrastructures, platforms, and services to commodities acquired and paid-for on-demand through a set of cloud providers. Today, the transition of cloud computing from a subject of research and innovation to a critical infrastructure is proceeding at an incredibly fast pace. A potentially dangerous consequence of this speedy transition to practice is the premature adoption, and ossification, of the models, technologies, and standards underlying this critical infrastructure. This state of affairs is exacerbated by the fact that innovative research on production-scale platforms is becoming the purview of a small number of public cloud providers. Specifically, the academic research communities are effectively excluded from the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the evolution not to mention innovation and healthy mutation of cloud computing technologies. As the dependence on our society and economy on cloud computing increases, so does the realization that the academic research community cannot be shut out from contributing to the design and evolution of this critical infrastructure. In this article we provide an alternative vision that of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX) a public cloud marketplace, where many stakeholders, rather than just a single cloud provider, participate in implementing and operating the cloud, thus creating an ecosystem that will bring the innovation of a broader community to bear on a much healthier and more efficient cloud marketplace

Introducing Competition in the French Electricity Supply Industry: The Destabilisation of a Public Hierarchy in an Open Institutional Environment

The French electricity supply industry is characterized by a vertically integrated monopoly and public ownership and when the government introduced market rules, it was with the aim of preserving the integration of the public incumbent as a national champion. This had two paradoxical effects in favour of competition development and the building of safeguards for entrants: 1/ the creation of a credible regulatory governance structure with effective power of control on network access which promoted market-rules, and the creation of a power exchange for balancing the incumbent’s dominant position; 2/ the credibility of the regulatory framework by the self-control of the incumbent in the use of its dominant position and on the capture of the regulator. These two effects result from the influence of the European institutional environment, in particular the intensive scrutiny of the European Commission, which is superposed on the national one.regulation, electricity

AGRICULTURAL MARKETING POLICY

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Amazon and Platform Antitrust

With its decision in Ohio v. American Express, the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time embraced the recently developed, yet increasingly prolific, concept of the two-sided platform. Through advances in technology, platforms, which serve as intermediaries allowing two groups to transact, are increasingly ubiquitous, and many of the biggest tech companies operate in this fashion. Amazon Marketplace, for example, provides a platform for third-party vendors to sell directly to consumers through Amazon’s web and mobile interfaces. At the same time that platforms and their scholarship have evolved, a burgeoning antitrust movement has also developed which focuses on the impact of the dominance of these tech companies and the fear that current antitrust laws are ill-equipped to prevent any potential anticompetitive behavior. Many of those who feel this way worried that American Express, which decided whether a plaintiff alleging anticompetitive behavior by a two- sided platform would have to show harm to both sides of the market to make a prima facie case, would give companies like Amazon even more power. This Note argues that while the case could be interpreted in such a way, because Amazon and similarly situated platforms possess a great degree of control over their users—in some cases competing with them directly—it would be unwise to do so

Deregulation and environmental differentiation in the electric utility industry.

This paper analyzes how economic deregulation impacts firm strategies and environmental quality in the electric utility industry. We find evidence that the deregulation introduced to this historically staid industry has stimulated environmental differentiation. Differentiation is most likely to appear where its point of uniqueness is valued by customers, and we confirm this relationship in our sample. Specifically, utilities that served customers who exhibited higher levels of environmental sensitivity generated more green power. The tendency for firms to differentiate in this way is lessened if they are relatively more dependent on coal-fired generation or relatively more efficient. Thus, there is evidence that firms sort themselves into either differentiation or low-cost strategies as the competitive realities of a deregulated world unfold. Deregulation and the ensuing environmental differentiation illustrate how utilities exploited formerly unmet customer demand for green power. The result has been greater levels of renewable generation and, hence, a cleaner environment.Deregulation; Environmental differentiation; Electric utility; Renewable energy; Productive efficiency;

Disruptive innovation and the higher education ‘eco-system’ post-2012

Disruptive innovations in business sectors are arguably triggered by the arrival of new competitors who disturb, or punctuate, an existing equilibrium. They can be aided by changes to a wider context. The eco-system of professional services has seen major disruptions over the last 10 or 15 years. We extend our review of managerial lessons from a previous essay to present speculative scenarios of pending disruptions in higher education. We present a strategic map of the sector which hints at disruption and differentiation as an ongoing process, albeit with a large, undifferentiated middle. We write not to predict but to, hopefully, provoke thought. The challenges posed by the potential disruptors will, we argue, require many institutions to respond in new and innovative ways. Innovation in higher education which spread well beyond traditional research, knowledge transfer and the curriculum interpretations will be required to a much greater extent than in the past

Local Broadband Access: Primum Non Nocere or Primum Processi - A Property Rights Approach

High-speed or "broadband" Internet access currently is provided, at the local level, chiefly by cable television and telephone companies, often in competition with each other. Wireless and satellite providers have a small but growing share of this business. An influential coalition of economic interests and academics have proposed that local broadband Internet access providers be prohibited from restricting access to their systems by upstream suppliers of Internet services. A recent term for this proposal is "net neutrality." We examine the potential costs and benefits of such a policy from an economic welfare perspective. Using a property rights approach, we ask whether transactions costs in the market for access rights are likely to be significant, and if so, whether owners of physical local broadband platforms are likely to be more or less efficient holders of access rights than Internet content providers. We conclude that transactions costs are likely to be lower if access rights are assigned initially to platform owners rather than content providers. In addition, platform hardware owners are likely to be more efficient holders of these rights because they can internalize demand-side interactions among content products. Further, failure to permit platform owners to control access threatens to result in inadequate incentives to invest in, to maintain, and to upgrade local broadband platforms. Inefficiently denying platform owners the ability to own access rights implies a need for price regulation; otherwise, there will be incentives to use pricing to circumvent the constraint on rights ownership. Price regulation is itself known to induce welfare losses through adaptive behavior of the constrained firm. The impact on welfare might produce a worse result than the initial problem, assuming one existed. Much of the academic interest in net neutrality arises from the belief that the open architecture of the Internet under current standards has been responsible for its remarkable success, and a wish to preserve this openness. We point out that the openness of the Internet was an unintended consequence of its military origins, and that other, less open, architectures might have been even more successful. A policy of denying platform owners the ability to own access rights could freeze the architecture of the Internet, preventing it from adapting to future technological and economic developments. Finally, we examine the net neutrality issue from the perspective of the "essential facility doctrine," a tool of the common law of antitrust. The doctrine establishes conditions under which federal courts will mandate access by competitors to the monopoly platform of a vertically-integrated firm. Because local broadband Internet access is not today a bottleneck monopoly (there are several competitors and the market is at an early stage of development), the essential facilities doctrine would not permit reassignment of access rights from platform owners to competitors. We conclude that "net neutrality" is a welfare-reducing policy proposal.Technology and Industry, Regulatory Reform